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For a second, I genuinely wondered if I had misheard. If my own panic had twisted the word into something it wasn’t. But then the other man gave a low chuckle and said, “They’ve got too comfortable. Sitting over there like they own the fucking town.”

My heart dropped. I glanced back at my mother, but she looked just as pale as I felt.

“How soon are we hitting?” the first man asked.

There was a pause.

Then, “Soon enough. We’ll wait until they’re not expecting it.”

The floor seemed to tilt slightly beneath me.

I could hear the blood rushing in my ears now, feel my pulse hammering at the base of my throat so hard it made me light-headed. I strained to catch more, but their voices dipped lower after that, too far from the door now to make out anything useful. A second later, footsteps shifted, moving away down the corridor, and then they were gone.

I stayed exactly where I was for several seconds after the silence returned, as though moving too quickly might somehow make it all real. But it was real. Horribly, immediately real.

I turned slowly back to face my mother, and from the look on her face, I knew she had understood enough.

“What did they say?” She asked.

I swallowed hard, trying to force some order into the panic clawing its way up my throat. “They’re planning something,” I said quietly. “Against the Devils.”

Her hand tightened around her mug so suddenly I thought it might crack.

“No,” she whispered.

But it wasn’t disbelief. It was dread. We both remembered the carnage of going up against the Devils. In recent years, we’d had two wars with them. The first under Crash’s instructions. The Riders had murdered his best friend, Zach, and beheaded him, impaling his head on a stick and delivering it outside their clubhouse.

They had retaliated in the dead of the night, and entire houses had gone up in flames. I remembered all too well the stench, the screams of children, the wails of mothers. I remembered watching Dante rip the heart out of the chest of one of the Riders and stomped it into the ground.

That was the night my father was killed.

The second attack had been on their compound. I didn’t like to remember that too closely. I had been there, supporting my brother as he sought vengeance for our dad. Crash had lost his life that night, Rachel had murdered my brother, and I’d come face to face with Vienna as he begged me to save her life.

And that’s when Nico arrived.

My eyes moved automatically to the window, to the dark beyond it, and all I could think was that if they were planning to move soon, if the Riders were already talking like this openly in the hallway, then he needed to know. He needed to know now. And I had absolutely no idea how I was supposed to get that warning to him without drawing blood in the process.

I stood there in the kitchen, arms wrapped around myself so tightly they hurt and felt something cold and sharp begin to settle beneath my skin.

Because this wasn’t just fear anymore.

This was the beginning of something.

I could feel it.

Chapter 31

Gabriella

Now

I should have turned back three streets ago.

The thought had followed me the entire way here, dogging every step I took through the darkness, growing louder each time I ignored it. It had been there when I climbed over the wall at the edge of the compound, when I kept low beneath the trees, when I crossed into Devil territory with my heart pounding so hard I was convinced the sound of it alone would give me away.

Every instinct I had spent years honing had screamed at me to stop, to think, to turn around before I did something I couldn’t take back. But instinct had long since become a complicated thing inside me, tangled up with fear and grief and memory until I no longer knew whether it was trying to protect me or simply keep me trapped.

Because something had been building in me for weeks now. A restlessness I could no longer smother beneath obedience, a raw and ugly frustration that had started as a flicker and slowly grown into something far more dangerous.