Page 65 of Pucked Around and Found Out

“I care about her,” he says. Simple. Direct. “I know you don't want to hear that. I know what she is to you and what her name means and what her family did. I'm not dismissing any of it.” He holds my gaze. “But I've known Toren for years, and I've watched her in the last few months, and I'm telling you as your best friend and the only person in this city who will say this to your face—" He pauses. “She isn't your enemy anymore. She might have been once. She isn't now.”

The silence stretches between us.

“She has Kellar blood,” I say.

“So does your kid.” His voice is quiet and completely without apology. “You going to hate it for that too?”

I stand up.

Not to go anywhere. Just because sitting still with that sentence inside the room is not something I'm capable of.

I walk to the window. Look out at the town in the dark. My town. My streets. The weight of everything I've built and everything I've destroyed to build it pressing down on the city like a hand.

“The baby is real,” I say. I don't know why I say it out loud. It arrives from somewhere unguarded and I let it come because I'm tired. Because the cemetery and the parking lot and the beach, then the scalpel on the warehouse floor have all accumulated into something I don't have the energy to hold shut. “I know it's real. I've known since she said it at the rink. I knew when I looked at the ultrasound. I've known every second since and I've been treating it like not knowing was still an option.” I watch my own reflection in the glass. “It's not.”

Cas says nothing behind me.

“That doesn't mean anything changes,” I continue. Because I need that to be true. Because if it doesn't mean anything changes then I can still control the shape of this… Still decide who I am in it. “It means I have to stop lying to myself about whether or not it exists. That's all.”

“Okay,” Cas says.

“Okay,” I repeat.

Neither of us believes the other but we both let it stand.

The buzzer sounds.

I turn from the window and look at the door.

Twenty minutes. She said twenty minutes and it's been eighteen.

She came early.

Something happens in my chest that I am going to call nothing and move on from immediately.

I cross to the buzzer and press it without speaking.

I hear the door open downstairs. The particular sound of her footsteps in the stairwell that I have memorized without meaning to, slightly uneven from the shoes she puts back on wet, always slightly too fast, always like she's moving toward something rather than toward somewhere.

The knock.

I open the door.

She's still wearing my hoodie.

I don't say anything about that. She doesn't either. Her hair is still damp, there's sand on her shoes and she's holding a USB drive in one hand, looking at me with those blue eyes that have always seen too much and she is the most dangerous thing I have ever let through a door.

“Devlin,” she says.

“Tink.” I step back, letting her in. “We have a war to plan.”

She walks past me into the apartment and I attempt to close the door behind her but a boot lands on it, I glare at the sight of fucking Carnage De Santis.

CHAPTER TWENTY

XADEN

The bastard follows her inside my apartment!