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“I’m so sorry. This wasn’t supposed to happen,” Alice mumbled.
“Babe.” Parker’s giant hands swallowed Alice’s face as he cupped it. “Stop apologizing.”
“You know what my job is,” she blurted, voice tight. “You know why I’m here. I said I would do it. If I have to kill him to stop him, I will.”
“I know.” Parker sighed and rested his forehead on Alice’s.
“What happened to Griffin?” Daisy asked.
“The gaps between his blackouts are shortening,” Parker said. “We can’t trust him anymore.”
“He deliberately wounded a civilian,” Alice said with a wince. “I had no choice but to take him down.”
Daisy’s brows winged up. “You managed to take Griffin down on your own?”
Alice’s eyes turned hard and she lifted her chin. “I have contingency plans to take down each and every one of you.” She paused and kept her eyes on Daisy. “Especially you.”
“It will never come to that,” she promised.
Somehow, Daisy’s words bolstered them. It was as though she’d stepped back in time and sang a song to cheer them up. The lifting of their spirits was a tangible shift in her gut—a fizzing flutter—and it invigorated her.
“So, you’re just going to leave him in there?” Axel asked.
“There’s nothing else we can do. He’s unstable without his mate.”
Daisy could virtually see the cogs turning in Axel’s mind. He’d taken in a lot of information while working as a Faithful. Toward the end of his time there, Julius had brought him in as a close contact. Daisy had been stewing over the possibility that he knew he was her mate, but he might have already figured it out.
Wyatt faced Daisy. “Do you have any news?”
From the eager look in his tired eyes, and the flutter of hope that tickled her belly, she guessed he meant news about the location of his missing mate. She shook her head and his shoulders slumped. In all her time knowing and researching this angry brother of hers, she’d never seen him admit defeat like this. His despair wrapped steel fingers around her heart and squeezed.
“We might have a lead on Julius, though,” she said.
Wyatt looked up. His hope surged so swiftly that Daisy almost swooned.
Axel explained to them about the Faithful attack and how he and Daisy hadn’t initially been recognized as defectors. Still reeling from Wyatt’s hope, she watched Axel talk to her family. They listened with wary respect. She wasn’t ready for him to know what his role was in her life. She wanted to keep that separate for a little longer. But the more she thought about it, the more she realized it was a stupid resistance. The sooner Axel learned he was her mate, the better for the fate of the world.
What Daisy wanted had never mattered. She should know that by now.
“We’re going to intercept a meeting tomorrow,” Axel explained. “Then we’re hoping to trace them back to Julius. We’ll find out where your family is.”
Wyatt nodded. His downcast eyes shifted to the elevator leading up to the apartments and he started walking. Two steps in, he looked over his shoulder and said, “I’m going to check on my daughter. Keep me posted.”
Parker and Alice were the only ones left.
“That blood from the Faithful?” Parker asked, looking at her stained face.
She touched her skin and then glanced down at the baseball bat in her hand. She’d forgotten about the spatter.
“She whaled on them,” Axel said. “She saved my sister’s life.”
Parker heard it all with a steady expression. Then he nodded toward the door. “You heading out?”
“If we’re going to fit in with the Faithful again,” she said. “There are a few things I need to pick up from my old apartment.”
“At Syndicate Tower,” he confirmed.
She nodded. Alice stepped forward. “The Sinners are there keeping an eye on the site where the replicates were digging. I’ll tell them to let you in.”
“Thank you.”
With a renewed sense of purpose, she went to the glass cabinet housing her Deadly Seven uniform. She was the eighth member. It didn’t make sense that Parker gave her a suit. There could be only seven. But she took the white face scarf off the dummy and pocketed it. Then she gestured for Axel to follow her.
“Let’s go.”
