Page 28 of Sting of Sin

Hex looked at me a long moment. Then something eased in his face, the ghost of the kid I grew up with under all that grown hard quiet.

"Okay," he said. "Go on. I’ll go see Warden."

I went to find her.

Whatever it cost me, and I had a feeling it was going to cost me everything, because telling her all of it meant telling her the rest of it too, someday soon, the men and what me and her brother did in the dark four years ago, I was done leaving her in the dark to keep her comfortable. She'd lived in the dark long enough. If there was a monster circling this gate, then the woman it wanted was going to look at it in the full light of day standing next to me, knowing everything I knew, armed with her own two eyes and that alarm of hers that had never, not once, been wrong.

I just had to go put the truth in her hands and pray she still wanted mine after she'd held it.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

THE CLUBHOUSE FINALLY went quiet a little after midnight.

It had been a long, loud day of the right kind, Warden’s table, the whole thing laid out in the daylight at last, Hex’s findings going around the room and every man in it going still and certain the way men like us do when a thing stops being a feeling and starts being a target. Scyth and Wreck took the first watch on the rise. Rex set up to follow the ghost the second he left that lot. The machine was running.

For the first time since she pointed up that road, I wasn’t carrying it alone in the dark.

Neither was she.

The difference in the air was something you could almost put your hand on.

By midnight, the bar had emptied. Voices faded one by one behind closed doors. The old pipes knocked in the walls, the floorboards settled, and somewhere out back the wind worried at a loose piece of tin with a low, irregular scrape. The whole building seemed to breathe itself down into sleep.

I was sitting on the edge of my bed unlacing my boots when she came out of the bathroom and shut the door behind her.

The sound of the door closing sounded louder than it should have.

She stood there soft and so damn pretty, wearing one of my old shirts that swallowed her whole, the hem brushing her knees. Her feet were bare. Her white-blond hair was loose except for one crooked pin barely holding on near the back, and she stood there a second with her spine against the door, looking at me.

Not frightened.

Not exactly.

But holding herself very still, the way she did when something mattered enough to make every movement deliberate.

“Hey,” I said.

Careful, because I was always careful with her.

“You okay?”

“No.”

She shook her head, and the pin gave up. A pale strand slipped down over her shoulder.

“I just—”

She stopped. Gathered herself. Made the words come, the way she always had to make them come when they reached too close to the bone.

“I want to be with you.”

Her fingers tightened briefly against the wood behind her.

“I want you.”

I don’t have the words for what that did to me.

This woman—this woman I had loved silent for years, this woman I had trained myself not to look at too long, not to stand too close to, not to imagine in any room that had a locked door and a bed in it, had walked into my room with nothing hunting her, no crisis in her hands, no blood on her clothes, and said I want you like it was a simple thing.