The evidence is on Julian’s drives. The evidence is in the vehicles. The evidence is in forty-seven people who are about to arrive at a compound that will have to become something it has never been before.
I sit in the command center. The footage still running. I watch until the mark on my chest flares and I can feel her getting closer. Then closer. Then close enough that the screens don’t matter.
I look down at the table. The grip left marks in the wood. Two crescents pressed into the grain where my fingers held during the growth charts.
I run my thumb across one of the indentations.
Forty-seven people are in vehicles heading north. One cot was empty.
I sit with it.
Chapter
Twenty
Irun the last forty miles alone.
Julian’s in one of the vans with the survivors. Alexei in another, the wolves riding with them. Seraphina in the lead vehicle. Six vehicles taking the highway at a pace the passengers can handle. I left them at the facility and ran because my body needed a use for what’s inside it and the only option was distance.
Pine canopy overhead. Red clay underfoot. The highway a distant ribbon of light to my right. My hands are still tacky with blood. The vest is stiff with it. I can smell it on my skin, layered under sweat and adrenaline, the iron tang of guards I killed mixed with the antiseptic I carried out of those rooms on my clothes.
Forty-seven people. Every one of them.
The compound lights come through the trees. I slow at the gate. Marcellus is at the south entrance with two of his rotation,staged for the convoy’s arrival. He looks at the blood on my vest. Nods once. Steps aside.
I come in through the north entrance.
Maximus is in the hallway.
The same corridor where he checked my gear. The same wall where my back hit and his mouth found mine and he said the words I carried into that building like a promise stitched into the lining of my vest.
This is what you need to come back to.
I came back.
He crosses the distance in three steps. His hands find my shoulders, my arms, my face. Checking. Not the gear. Me. His eyes moving over the blood on my vest, my neck, my jaw. His thumb brushes a streak of dried blood from my cheekbone and his hand stays there.
“I’m not hurt,” I say.
He doesn’t answer. He pulls me into him. Both arms. His chin on the top of my head. One hand on the back of my neck, his fingers pressing into the muscle there with a grip that’s holding on, not holding back.
I let him. I close my eyes and press my face into his chest and breathe him in and for ten seconds the corridor is the whole world. His heartbeat against my ear. Mine answering it. The two pulses filling the space between us the way they always do.
He smells like whiskey and the faint mineral scent of stone that the compound walls carry.
I pull back enough to look at him. His jaw is tight. His eyes are red-rimmed in a way I’ve never seen on a vampire.
“I saw the growth charts.” Quiet. “Children, Celeste.”
There’s no answer for that word. He watched it on a screen. I walked through it. We stand like that. His thumb on my cheekbone. My hands fisted in his shirt. The corridor is empty.The whole place is holding its breath for what’s coming through the south gate.
“The convoy’s behind me,” I say. “Forty-seven. Elena’s ready?”
“She’s been ready for hours.” His thumb traces my jaw. His hand drops. “Dalton’s with her. Isabelle has beds and supplies ready for sixty.”
The lord is back. I can hear it in his voice. The shift from the man who pulled me into his arms to the commander managing an operation. Both real. Both him. The transition so practiced I’d miss it if I didn’t know every register he carries.
“I need to shower and change,” I say. Looking down at the blood on my vest. On my hands. On everything.
