Page 61 of Darkest Kiss

The room is wrong. It takes me thirty seconds to land on why, which is that I can't hear it. No sound at all, just a high thin whine, the ringing scream of not-hearing, like the inside of my skull's been scraped clean and left humming.

I touch my ear and my hand comes away red.

A bomb. A bomb went off. I stand there with my bloody fingers in front of my face and try to make the pieces line up. There is a chunk of wall missing directly in front of me. Water streams from the ceiling. All the furniture is missing or badly jumbled, like someone shook the room like a giant snowglobe.

And all of it happened while I was gone, under. I'm still dragging myself out of the dark where Beast took me, and the climb back is agonizingly slow.

Did we plant bombs? Hale sets charges. Hale always sets charges. But not while I'm inside. Never while I'm inside.

Either the plan changed while I was gone, or something went wrong. And I can't remember which, because I wasn't here for it.

This. This is why I don't let him out.

I lost time. Whole minutes of it, gone somewhere I can't follow. A man came apart in my hands while I was away. A woman too, maybe. That's the part that turns my stomach, and it isn't the blood.

Noemi.

It comes back all at once and takes my legs out from under me worse than the blast did. Noemi. Noemi on the floor.

I turn, my heart hammering. There she is, pressed into the angle of the wall where she rolled, her arms over her head. Small and alive and looking up at me with a face gone white. Her mouth moves. I can't hear a word. I don't need to.

I get to her the way a man crosses a frozen lake. There’s no thought for anything but the next step. I’m almost on her when the air changes again. Some animal piece of me understands what it means a half-second before it happens.

I cover her. I get my body over the whole of her, her face tucked under my jaw, both of us in the corner. And I make myself as large as I have ever been. Her jaw works, but I can’t hear her.

The charge goes.

The blast takes me across the back like a wave of something solid. I feel my body try to come apart. I hold myself together over her by refusing, simple as that. The same way I hold the door, except this time it's her I'm keeping the dark off of and not the other way around.

Heat. A long pour of grit and plaster. Her hands fist in my shirt underneath me, holding on.

She's under me. She's breathing. I can feel it against my chest, fast and real.

Then the world tips and the floor isn't where I left it. I'm down, sprawled, the not-hearing still like a flatline, one long unbroken tone.

I close my eyes. I'm so tired.

Get up. Beast's voice, far away, losing ground. Get up. You let me out and now look. She's waiting. Get up. Get UP.

I try.

Chapter Fourteen

Noemi

Hands drag me out of the rubble. Hale's, I think. The world is muffled and tilting and gray with dust, and my ears won't stop ringing from the blast.

They pull Rian out next.

He doesn't move. His face is slack on one side, burned and wrong, and there's so much blood that I can't tell what's his and what belonged to the room. His chest doesn't rise. I stare at it and will it to rise and it doesn't, and a sound comes out of me that I don't recognize as mine.

He looks dead. He looks exactly like a dead man.

"No." I crawl to him over broken concrete I can't feel. "No, no, get up. You promised. You promised me, you can't⁠—"

Hale drops to his knees beside us. He puts two fingers to Rian's throat, then lowers his ruined ear to Rian's mouth and goes very still. The longest few seconds of my life pass while he listens.

"He's breathing." Hale's voice is a low rasp. "Barely. But it's there. He's got a chance."