And there it is. The real wall. Not a lie he can take back. Not a bad man I can hate clean. A man who’d choose to stand between me and what I might need to do, and call it caring.
“You have no right to make my decisions for me.”
“That’s not what this is.”
“It’s the only thing it is.” I step back toward the door, and my body fights me the whole way. Every step, something under my ribs drags the other direction, hard, and the wolf in me throws herself against the inside of my skin. She doesn’t care what he did; she cares that he’s there and I’m going, and she wants to turn me around by force.
My eyes burn. My hand finds the door, and my wolf doesn’t want it.
I don’t care. A pull isn’t proof of anything except that I let him all the way in.
Look what he did with it.
“Grace.” He crosses the room, and his hand comes up to my arm, my face, trying to find the part of me that was his last night. “Don’t do this like this. Stay. Or don’t stay, but don’t decide anything tonight. We’ll talk in the morning with clearer heads and I’ll—”
“Sure.” I go still under his hand. Every muscle. I let the fight run out of me where he can see it go, let my voice come down flat and quiet and reasonable. “In the morning.”
His hand eases on my arm. I feel the relief come into him, feel him read the calm as the storm passing, as me cooling down, as sense coming back. He wants it so badly he takes it.
“Okay,” he says, softer. “Okay. Get some sleep, sweetheart. It looks worse tonight than it’s going to look tomorrow.”
“I know.” I even let him walk me to the door. “Goodnight, Decker.”
I don’t look at his face. If I look at his face, I don’t trust the calm to hold.
Marek falls in behind me, and the yard is colder now, or I’m finally feeling it, and I keep my hands loose and my chin level and my pace easy the whole way back. A woman who’s had a hard night and is going to bed. I hear Decker’s door close behind me, slow, reluctant. Believing me.
In my room I sit on the bed in my jacket in the dark, and I wait for the crying. It doesn’t come. That’s done. What’s left where it was is quiet and cold and very clear.
They want my blood. Serenity is running out of hers. Those two facts fit together and won’t come apart, and every person in this building who could have shown me spent these last days keeping it hidden. So I’ll do what I’ve always done. I’ll carry it alone.
I unzip the inside pocket and take out the phone. The screen wakes under my thumb, light in a dark room, her question still sitting in the thread where I left it.
You want to know what’s happening to Serenity?
I know exactly what I’m going to do about it.
I start to type.
Chapter 38
Decker
I don’t sleep. I sit on the edge of the bed where she sat last night and go through the fight again, line by line, both sides of it.
She came in past shouting and left calm. I hold on to the calm, because it’s what I’ve got. She said morning. She let me walk her to the door. I’ve watched her handle anger—in the den, in Viktor’s office, on the mountain—the storm hits, the storm passes, and the mind underneath goes back to work. By morning she’ll still be furious. Furious I can work with. Furious means she’s still standing in the same room as me.
Seven o’clock.
I’ll put everything on the table. Not the edited version. All of it. The towers, the corridor, what Vanya’s finding, Viktor’s plans. No more schedule. The timing is what she’s angry about. That I didn’t tell her Serenity is running out of it. I’ll give her every detail so she can choose what to do with it, and if the answer’s ugly I’ll stand there and take it.
I had that choice on the mountain. I could have laid it all down then. I didn’t. I need to sit down and own that, because I’ve earned it.
The bear won’t let me sit long.
It started when she walked out, and it hasn’t eased since. Not the sharp surge from the briefing room, the kind I can plant against a wall and hold. This is lower, and it doesn’t stop—a drag under the ribs, an ache built into the bone.
Pacing doesn’t burn it off. The cold yard doesn’t either. I stand at the fence with my breath smoking and my whole body turned in her direction. Minutes drag as I try to clear my thoughts.
