Page 2 of Saint’s Revenge

Like maybe she knows I'm thinking about the night I did leave, the night I packed a bag and disappeared without telling either of them because telling her would have meant staying.

Because if I'd told Riley I was leaving, she would have asked me to stay, and I would have stayed. Would have stayed and watched myself become complicit in whatever my brother was turning into. Would have stayed and lost myself entirely.

I left to save myself. Left her behind in the process.

And I've never forgiven myself for it.

"Riley—" My voice comes out rougher than I intend. "You shouldn't have had to carry this alone."

She makes a sound that might be a laugh or might be a sob. "You left, Lucas. You left, and I stayed, and that was my choice. I don't… I don't get to blame you for the consequences of my own decisions."

"I should have told you I was going."

Silence. Long enough that I think maybe she's hung up.

Then, so quiet I almost miss it: "Yeah. You should have."

It's not forgiveness. It's not absolution. It's just the truth, laid bare between us after five years of silence.

"I'm sorry," I say, and I mean it more than I've meant anything in years.

"I know." Another pause. "Are you coming?"

"Yeah. Soon as I tell Phoenix."

"Are you going to be the one who…"

She can't finish the sentence. Can't ask outright if I'm planning to kill her best friend, my brother, the third piece of the unit that raised us both.

I think about the warehouse. About watching Daniel put a bullet in someone's head and feeling nothing but cold satisfaction. About the moment I realized my brother was gone and something else was wearing his face.

"Yeah," I say. "If I get the chance."

I expect her to argue. To tell me not to. To ask me to bring him in alive, to give him one more chance, to remember who he used to be before everything went to hell.

Instead she says, "Okay."

Just that. Okay. Like she's giving me permission. Like she knows it's the only way this ends and she's accepted it.

Like maybe she's been carrying the weight of that knowledge alone for longer than either of us want to admit.

"Riley—" I start, but I don't know how to finish. Don't know what I'm trying to say. There's too much between us, five years of silence and a lifetime before that, love I never said out loud and choices I can't take back.

"Please, Lucas. Just be careful."

"I will."

"I mean it. I can't—" She stops. Breathes. "I can't lose both of you in one night."

After everything, after five years apart, after all the ways we've failed each other, she still doesn't want me dead.

"You won't," I tell her, and I make it a promise. "I'm coming back, Riley."

"Okay." She sounds like she's trying to believe it. "Okay. I have to go. I'm back at the warehouse now. I can't stay out here any longer."

The warehouse. She's going back inside. Back to my brother and fifteen armed men who would kill her in a heartbeat if they knew what she just did.

"Riley, listen to me." My voice comes out harder than I intend, sharp with urgency. "When the fight starts, and it will start, you hide. You find somewhere safe and you stay there until it's over. You understand me?"