Page 59 of Pucked Around and Found Out

Tonight I am neither of those things.

Tonight I am the girl who sat in a warehouse and watched Xaden Devlin take people apart without looking away. The girl who offered herself up as a sacrifice and meant it. The girl who slapped the devil across the face for calling their baby a mistake and walked away and didn't cry until she was out of earshot.

After showering and ridding myself of the sand in places it shouldn’t be, I slip his hoodie back on.

I look at the crest in the mirror.

Stormsend Ravens.

I should take it off. I know I should take it off. I am walking into that apartment in a matter of minutes to plan a war with the man who owns this hoodie and standing across from him wearing his clothes is not the power move that it should be, it is something else entirely, something that lives in the territory between surrender and statement, and I genuinely cannot decide which one it is.

I leave it on.

Because he took my shirt and the night is cold and the hoodie is warm, and those are the only three facts I'm willing to hold right now.

I look at myself one more time and say, very quietly, the way I used to say it at Walter House when the walls felt close.

“To teach is to learn. To learn is to excel. To excel is to thrive. To thrive is to live.”

My reflection looks back at me.

She doesn't look broken.

She looks like someone who has been through the kind of night that either ends you or builds you and has decided, not for the first time, that being built is the only acceptable option.

I turn off the bathroom light and go to find Carnage.

He's waiting in the hallway with his jacket on and the car keys in his hand, and when I come out of the bathroom he looks at me once and nods.

“Don’t let someone who did you wrong make you think there’s something wrong with you. Don’t devalue yourself because they didn’t value you. Know your worth even if they don’t.”

I have no words. All I can do is stare at my friend and nod.

We walk out into the cold together.

Toward the war.

Toward him.

Toward whatever comes next.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

XADEN

There is a particular kind of damage that doesn't announce itself.

It doesn't arrive with noise. Doesn't come in through the door at full speed the way grief did when they put my sister in the ground, loud, obliterating and impossible to outrun. It comes in quiet. It settles into the space between one decision and the next and it waits there, patient as anything, until you try to move forward and find you can't.

I watch the tail lights of Carnage's car disappear around the bend at the end of the coastal road.

I stand in the parking lot until there's nothing to watch anymore.

Then I stand there a little longer.

The cold doesn't bother me. It never has. I grew up in Stormsend where the wind comes off the water like it has a personal grievance with everything it touches and you either learn to let it move through you or it breaks you. I learned. I was eight years old when my father stood me on the end of the jetty in February and told me that a Devlin doesn't feel the cold, he uses it. I stood there until I couldn't feel my hands and I told myself he was right.

He wasn't. I was just eight years old and desperate for my father to be proud of me and get his approval.