Page 70 of Wrong Squad, Right Mess

I crooked my finger to draw her closer, and when she came as though pulled by some invisible force, I took the kiss I needed so badly.

And she offered me everything like she always did, returning the kiss with the same fervor that I felt. It was one hell of a last kiss, I had to say, one that made me wish we had time for one last fuck. I wanted to feel her heat again, her tightness, but I knew better.

No time, but fuck, I missed it.

She broke the kiss, staring up at me with a feeling in those eyes of hers that I never thought anyone would give me—love.

It hit hard, like a physical blow, one that made my knees weak and my balls hurt.

Wait…my balls?

It took a moment for me to bend forward and realize that she’d kneed me in the groin, and my scrambled brain didn’t work it out before she rushed past me, crossing the few short feet between us and the heart.

I didn’t get the chance to even call out before she whispered, “Sorry,” and set her hand on the heart.

Chapter Forty

Yun

The pain filled me so fast it made me want to gasp, but I couldn’t draw in the air.

Accept it, I told myself, refusing to let a moment go by without seeing my men. It would be over soon, so I didn’t want to miss a single glimpse of it. I wanted to tattoo it on my mind, to ensure that wherever I went after this, whatever afterlife existed, I carried that—and them—with me.

Carter reached for me, but Shear’s voice stopped him, sharp and steady. “Don’t! She’s already connected to the heart. If you touch her, you might kill her.”

Carter froze, hand still hanging out in the air, fingers inches from me. He curled his hand into a fist and pulled it back. “What do we do?” Hearing him plead hurt—not as much as the power coursing through me, but it still hurt. Carter was always certain, always ready with a plan for anything that happened, but now?

He looked lost, confused, unsure.

“Nothing,” Shear said. “There’s nothing to do. If we try to break the connection, it will likely fracture her mind.”

“What if we do the whole group thing?” Ingram asked. “That was the plan before, to split the damage between us all. If we did that now—”

“That was with four espers, not a guide. We were going to destroy it, but her? She’s connected to the power of the dungeon right now. It’s different.”

“Last time it threw her out of the dungeon,” Kenyon said. “Could it do that again?”

Shear pressed his lips together as though he didn’t know but also didn’t expect it to be anything good. “I doubt it. That was a fluke, and possibly partly a reaction to her wanting to leave the dungeon. She knows what to expect and won’t let it happen again.”

Carter turned his gaze toward me, eyes flashing with anger, the purple bright as though he lacked the ability to hide it. “Stop this, Yun.”

“No.” The fact that I could even speak amazed me. It was as though when I accepted the pain, when I didn’t fight it, it wasn’t so bad. It still hurt, of course, but it became manageable. It still burned, no doubt damaging me, but I could breathe a little easier, could speak. “This is the way it was always going to go.”

“It doesn’t have to. Damn it, Yun, you don’t have to do this.”

“Of course I do. It’s pointless to let four die to save one when we could do it the other way around. Besides, don’t you think closing a stable dungeon for the first time will earn you some credit? You deserve that, to have people see you like you really are. You were never failures, and I want them to know that.”

“I don’t care what they knew,” Ingram spat. “I don’t fucking care what other people see me as, what they think, they don’t fucking matter. You matter!”

My legs grew weak, but I didn’t remove my hand. I kept the grip there, fingers digging into the obsidian, the cracks in the heart proof I’d done this before. “You told me to take off—now you should do that.”

“Fuck that,” Carter said, stepping forward until he was just across from me, the heart between us. “However this ends, I’m not moving a damn foot. I know exactly where I belong.”

Ingram followed suit, then Kenyon and Shear did the same. It left all five of us there, in a tight circle, close but not touching.

This was everything I’d wanted, the family I’d craved since I’d lost my parents, since the world had changed around me, since I’d survived so much alone. All I’d really wanted were people who would stand by me, and I finally had it.

Sure, it would have been nice to not have it just before I was going to die, but finding it was worth everything else.