A door opens.
Then another.
I watch the war move across Carnage's face, the refusal, the pride, the gut-deep instinct to plant himself between me and whatever is coming through that door. And then the thing underneath all of it. The thing that is just him, just Carn, the most loyal person I have ever had beside me.
He trusts me.
“Twenty-four hours,” he says. His voice scrapes out raw. “I don't hear from you in twenty-four hours and I come back with everything we have. Including The Butcher.”
A shiver trails down my spine at the mention of his boss. “Deal.”
“I mean it, darlin.”
“I know you do.” I grip his hand once. Hard. Then let go. “Now go before he gets through the door.”
Vatican is already moving, getting an arm under Carn's shoulders. Omen takes the other side. Carnage doesn't fight them and the fact he doesn't fight tells me more about how bad the wound is than any of Halo's careful non-answers have.
Pope appears in the doorway. “Medic is seven minutes out.”
“Change of plan.” I look at him. “Carnage needs them at the east fence, not here. Go.”
He goes.
Halo pauses and looks back at me. “I cracked the burner, the moment we get Carn help, I’m calling the last number in his phone then we'll know exactly who has been helping him.” I nod “Twenty-four hours, Toren. No contact and we’ll be coming for you, believe me when I say your boyfriend doesn’t want to meetAlex. Carnage cares for no one and the fact my twin cares for you will mean something to Alex. He’ll burn this town to the ground for Carnage.”
“I care about your brother too, Halo.”
“I know, which is why I’m asking you not to die. We don’t see eye-to-eye, never have, but I see the way he feels about you and I won’t have my twin suffering because he lost you. It won’t just be The Butcher slaughtering your boyfriend and his men, it will be us as well.”
I pray he can get the information we need because Xaden is coming, no one can stop him. He knows what I did. He knows what I was planning and he heard it all.
Harper appears at my elbow. Her face is chalk white but her chin is up. That's my girl. “What do I do?”
“Go with them. Stay with Carn until the medic comes. Don't call me, I'll call you.”
She looks at me for a long moment. Something passes between us, all the things we don't have time to say.
One of the biggest questions I want answers to is, who is your devil, Harp?
She nods and follows the others.
I hear the back door open and close.
The house goes quiet.
And then the front door opens.
He doesn't kick it in. That's not his style. It simply opens, because he has always known how to make an entrance that costs nothing and communicates everything.
Xaden fills the doorway.
Six men at his back, fanning out through the house like they've practiced the layout, because they have. Because Halo's face when he pieced it all together told me they've had weeks to memorize every room and every exit. They move fast and quietand I hear furniture hit the wall in the hallway, hear the sounds of the house being cleared.
His eyes find mine before his men have even finished moving.
They always find me. That has always been the problem.
I don't run. Running is for the girl I was before all of this, before Walter House and Kellan and Kenna Dee and Emery. I hold my ground in the middle of the empty bedroom with my spine straight and my hands loose at my sides. I look at Xaden Devlin across the wreckage of the room and I feel, under all of the rage and the grief and the hot sick knowledge of everything he's taken, that pull. That terrible, magnetic, unforgivable pull that I have spent months pretending I could out run.
