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Those blue eyes swung up and clung to her own. Then his blood-speckled lips turned gray. He had very little breath left, very little life left.
Nate softly whispered his last words: “You’re so beautiful… that I hate looking at you.”
She sucked in a bolt of shock. But there was no following that up. His eyes rolled back in their sockets, and he dragged in a deep inhale that wasn’t followed by any coughing. It wasn’t followed by… anything.
Her tears fell onto his bloody cheeks, and she now wasn’t breathing either. “Nate…?”
The stillness in him brought the world to a screeching halt, the lack of movement in his chest the kind of thing that stopped her heart, too.
“Nate.”Like she was so powerful, she could call him back from the Fade? “I’m so sorry…”
Gathering him up, she shifted his heavy torso into her lap anddraped herself around him. As she squeezed her eyes closed, she replayed those final words and wanted to scream. What he’d spoken was a starting place, an out-of-the-blue confession that could have changed everything.
Hatred struck a chord, deep inside of her. The war had always seemed far away, even as it had touched so much of her life.
It was breathing down the back of her neck now. Especially as she endlessly replayed the way she’d tried to kick that gun, her foot missing, always missing. She might as well have shot him herself—
“What thefuckis going on here.”
Nalla jerked her head up. Her father stood over her, tall, strong, dressed in black leather and black blades, with an expression on his scarred face like he was prepared to kill the entire Lessening Society with one hand behind his back: Zsadist was as he had always been, and maybe because of that, and definitely because of what had just happened when she’d failed to redirect that gun, Nalla became the young she had not been for a very, very long time.
Her voice was small and soft, a child’s. “He’s dead, Daddy. Oh, my God, he’s dead and it’s my fault—”
“What are you doing out here?” Then Zsadist pointed to the asphalt with the phone he had in his hand. “Are thoselesserashes on the pavement? And what are you doing withthat?”
Nalla’s brain was lagging so badly, she couldn’t connect his words to any coherent meaning. Although she had a feeling he might have just referred to Nate as an inanimate object.
“I don’t understand—”
“Get up.” Her sire grabbed her arm and tried to drag her to her feet, even though Nate was still in her lap. “I want you to dematerialize right now—”
She pulled against his hold, refusing to budge. “Nate is dead—”
“We should be so lucky.”
Like a rubber band snapping back from a stretch, her mind caught up with the conversation—and so did her anger.
Nalla ripped her arm free. “What did you say.”
“You heard me.” Zsadist started texting on his phone. “Now get out of here, and let me handle cleanup—”
“No.”
Her father froze and looked up from the screen. “Excuse me.”
“I’m not leaving him.” She tightened her hold on Nate’s shoulders, the red stains on his white t-shirt like something she heard instead of saw: Screams woven into the cheap fabric. “I’mnotleaving here.”
Off in the distance, she heard the din of traffic, the laughter of humans out on Market Street, a car alarm going off. But none of that mattered. She could only smell the fresh blood and feel the heat of her fury in her face. And even as her sire’s eyes went from the yellow they usually were to a black that seemed as evil as anything in the Lessening Society, she wasn’t fazed.
“Go home.”
Shaking her head slowly, she said in a voice that broke, “This was why I didn’t call you.”
“Well, Manny was about to operate when you interrupted him with this bullshit. Now, will you be part of the solution instead of the problem, and get thefuckout of this alley—”
“I don’t have to listen to you anymore. And I’m not leaving him.”
Those evil eyes shifted to Nate and then returned to her face. “Who is he to you.”
