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He had just reached the door when a broad-shouldered warlock with tan skin rounded the corner. “Cassel—” He froze, taking in the people lying dead on the floor, their necks grotesquely twisted. Finn’s throat bobbed. “What did you do?”
“You’re going to fix this.” Darien’s voice was so calm, so smooth, he almost didn’t recognize it. “You’re going to erase any record that I was here, and you’re going to blame these deaths on someone else. Got it?”
Finn was staring wide-eyed at the wreckage behind him.
Darien repeated, “Got it?”
When Finn’s eyes flicked to his, Darien knew he understood what he was saying. He owed him—big time. For the shit he and his Devils had been put through, Finn owed them so much more than what he was asking for. But this was a good start.
“Got it.” The look on Finn’s face suggested the words tasted like ashes to him, but he said nothing more.
He sidled out of Darien’s way.
Darien took a step. And then another. This night felt like a dream. A living nightmare.
He wished he would wake up.
Finn’s voice floated down the hallway. “Take a left, two rights, then another left.”
Darien turned around.
Finn’s back was facing him. He stayed that way the whole time as he spoke. “It’s the safest way out,” Finn muttered. “No one will be looking for you there.”
Darien didn’t say anything. He left, not knowing if he would see Finn again after tonight, but also not caring.
As he walked out into the streets of a broken and corrupt Angelthene, he wondered if he would ever make it back.
Not to the precinct, but to the person he was before.
77
“Her heartbeat is getting stronger.”
Darien didn’t turn to the sound of Doctor Atlas’s statement. He was slumped in the chair beside Loren’s bed in Angelthene General, booted feet kicked out before him.
Two days. Two days had passed since that night Loren had fallen into a coma, and Darien had stayed here the whole time. Not sleeping. Not drinking. Not eating. Barely breathing. After leaving the precinct, he’d stopped at Hell’s Gate to shower and get a hold on his rage. Once he’d managed to muzzle it, he’d come straight here.
“What does that mean?” Darien said. He kept his tired eyes on Loren’s face. She was so beautiful, even now. “Will she wake up soon?”
There was a hesitation. And then, “It means she’s fighting.”
Fighting. Loren was fighting, but that didn’t mean she was winning.
Darien had managed to keep his emotions in check since coming here, but now, there was a burning in his chest. His throat. The space behind his eyes was scalding, and his lungs were constricted, as if someone had punched a fist through his chest and grabbed hold of them, squeezing them tight, pulverizing them.
He drew a shaky breath that did nothing to ease the burning. “Is there anything I can do?”
The rustle of papers that drifted through the room suggested Doctor Atlas was carrying a clipboard. “She needs to find her way back on her own,” she said softly.
“If there’s something that I can do to help her come back, I need you to tell me. There is no limit to what I would give for her.”
The atmosphere in the room shifted with empathy. Darien knew Doctor Atlas meant well, but the shift only made it even harder for him to breathe. “I understand, Darien,” she said. “I’ll keep you informed.”
He rose to his feet. Walked to the side of the bed. The heartrate monitor was beeping, indicating life, but this wasn’t living.
It wasn’t living.
Darien brushed a careful hand across her brow, moving stray tendrils of golden hair aside, and pressed a kiss to Loren’s forehead.
