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“No, we don’t, but he doesn’t know us either. And he just made it personal.”

She doesn’t take her eyes off Brawley as they talk. “But what if he hurts Vero?”

I chuckle, and she pins me with a glare. “Vero is dangerous—you’ve experienced that firsthand. And now he has Cave with him, which I still can’t wrap my head around.”

“Do you think they will kill him?” she whispers.

“To be honest, when Vero is like this, it’s hard to predict what he’ll do,” I tell her.

“So we just wait for him?”

“We have alerts out so everyone on the island knows to call in a sighting of him or Cave. And now that we know what direction they went in, we will keep looking.”

“I want to help,” she insists.

“No,” I say, and she pins me with a glare.

“It wasn’t a question, Clay. I am helping.”

“I didn’t say it was a question, but you are not going anywhere.”

She glances at Ares and Brawley, but neither helps her. She pulls her hands from mine and stands. “We can start on the maintenance road.”

“Kayla,” I warn, but she ignores me.

“I can cover ground faster than you think. I’m fine, even Banks said I was.”

“You were buried a-fucking-live earlier today,” I snap. I know I shouldn’t raise my voice, but doesn’t she understand that she could have died? It would have destroyed us all. She stops and spins around, glaring at me as I continue. “You have not really slept. You are running on adrenaline that will cut out really soon, and when it does, you will crash hard. I need you on your feet when Vero comes back.”

She opens her mouth to argue, but I cut her off before she gets the chance. “He is going to need you. You will be the first thing he wants when he walks in that door.”

I glance over at Brawley and his jaw is set tight. He has never really had to share Vero after an episode, and the first time he didn’t like it, but he seems okay for now.

“Clay’s right,” Brawley mutters. “Vero’s going to need you to be okay, or everything he thinks he is doing for you right now will have been for nothing.”

She blinks. “You think he is doing this for me?”

“We know he is.” Ares breaks the silence. “Aaron is probably going to be fish food by the time Vero waltzes back through that door.”

“Fine,” she concedes. “But I want to be the first to know when he comes back.”

I cross the room and she doesn’t fight me when I put a hand on her back to steer her toward the stairs. Once we get to the top, she stops at the door to Ares’s room and turns around.

“Promise you will wake me up. That you won’t let me sleep.”

“I promise. Now rest.”

She holds my gaze for a second, then turns and opens the door. I wait until she is in the room before I go back downstairs.

Neither Brawley nor Ares has moved, so I drop into a lounge chair. No one speaks for a second; we just sit in silence.

“He’s going to kill him,” Brawley says, stating the obvious.

“I have no doubt about that,” I reply.

Brawley stares at the floor. “But that isn’t what worries me.”

Both Ares and I look at him.