Page 9 of Freed By Wrath

I nurse my drink and follow her path through the party at a distance that keeps me invisible, and somewhere around the tenth minute I start to wonder if this was a mistake. Coming here. Watching her. Letting myself confirm what I already knew and doing nothing about it.

In the meantime, she goes back inside.

I follow.

It’s instinct. The one they drill into you at the academy until it lives in your body instead of your head—when something feels wrong, you move toward it, not away. Fabien calls it a curse. Isaac says it’s a gift. I’ve never been able to tell the difference, since for me, being a cop is both.

The house swallows the garden noise the second I step through the door. Inside, everything is clean lines and cold surfaces, concrete and glass and the kind of art that costs more than most people’s cars. Serena’s decorators have dressed it for Halloween in the only language they know, and trust me, it looks nothing like Halloween.

It looks exactly like Serena.

The corridor off the main hallway is quiet, and I hang back at the far end, watching her check rooms anxiously. She’s… looking for him. And I know—I know before she reaches it—that the half-closed door at the end of the hall is the one she’s going to open.

The air around me changes, and I prepare myself for the worst. Instinct or premonition, I don’t care, but I don’t like this, and my inner voice is screaming inside my head to pick her up and take her from here.

It takes me too long to act.

As soon as I take a step forward, she’s already there, hand on the doorframe, and body frigid.

Her whole demeanor changes, and I swear I can hear her heart crack.

She doesn’t move for a long time. Just stands there.

Fuck. What the fuck is she watching?

Then, quietly, she pulls the door closed, turns around, walks back through the corridor with her spine straight and her chin up and her face so carefully blank it looks like something she assembled on the spot, piece by piece, just to get herself from that doorway to the main hall without falling apart in front of anyone.

She passes me without seeing me, and I crave her touch but contain the impulse.

I stay where I am for ten seconds. Twenty. Then I follow.

She moves through the party differently now. No more drifting, no more careful navigation. She cuts. Straight lines through clusters of people, past conversations she doesn’t hear, past the velvet banners and the obsidian bottles and all that gold lettering glittering in the candlelight like a bad joke.

Wrath.

Her hand closes around an open wine bottle at the edge of the display table, and I go still.

What’s she doing?

She turns around, and my eyes follow her again, focusing where she’s heading, only to stop at a couple… well, not a couple. Wait what?

Daniel and Serena have come out of the corridor side by side, not quite touching but close enough that anyone paying attention would know. Daniel sees her first. His face does that thing—the careful rearrangement of a man who’s been caught and has decided his best play is composed surprise. Serena’s face does something else entirely. Her chin lifts a fraction and her eyes settle on… Valerie.

She looks like someone who’s been waiting for this.

Oh shit.

Everything else happens too quickly for my liking.

Valerie looks at the two of them, and every last piece of that careful blankness falls away.

What replaces it isn’t what I expected.

I’ve seen grief. I’ve seen shock. I’ve seen the gutted, crumbling devastation of someone whose world just restructured itself without their permission. I know what that looks like and I know how it moves through a person.

This isn’t that. This is the face of betrayal. Disappointment and rage at its finest. And fuck, I was a goner with her laugh, but now? Consider me whatever might come after a goner, because Valerie is burning, and I’m dying just to be able to touch her flames.

She starts talking, and the first word cracks through the party noise like something thrown hard against glass. Not screaming. Not yet. But loud enough that the conversations closest to her stutter and stop, heads turning, the party contracting around this one point without anyone deciding to.