“I cannot.”
“You damn well can.”
“If she sees this, she will come. She will help. She will put herself here.”
“She already loves you, idiot. She’s here whether you invite her or not.”
The word love hits hard enough to stagger me, but the rage is bigger now. Bigger even than fear.
Darlene sees it.
Her anger fades into alarm. “Kauss.”
I stand.
The alley seems to shrink around me.
Nara climbs from the skiff and freezes when she sees my face. “Oh, hell.”
“I am going to Lenrog,” I say.
Darlene steps in front of me as if her small human body can stop mine. “You listen to me. If you go there like that, you may not come back.”
“I know.”
“Evie deserves better than you dying in a crime lord’s restaurant.”
“Then Lenrog should have kept his son contained.”
“You don’t know it was Lenrog.”
“I will learn.”
“And if it was Ron?”
“Then I will end him.”
Darlene’s eyes narrow. “Kauss.”
I meet her gaze.
Whatever she sees there makes her go pale.
Not fear for herself.
Fear for me.
“Don’t make Evie grieve you because you’re too full of ghosts to stop walking toward a grave,” she says.
For one moment, Evie’s face rises in my mind. Tear-streaked. Angry. Loving me. Asking me to stay.
The old soldier crushes that memory beneath the image of Al underwater.
If I think of her now, I stop.
If I stop, more people drown.
That is what the old part of me says, and I let it speak because grief has broken the locks.
