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“So, we don’t go,” Wilder said. “This is insanity. She’s told you point blank she wants to kill you, and you’re just going to go right into her waiting arms? That’s lunacy.”
“She’s said she wants to kill everyone in this room,” I snapped back. “We can’t sit here waiting to see which one of us she tries to pick off first. It’s time to finish what she started, and if that means I go where she tells me to go, so be it. At least I’ll know she’ll be there.”
“Oh, we’re going to finish this all right,” Secret said. “But you’re not going in there alone.”
“I wasn’t planning on it.”
She pulled a gun out of the holster on her shoulder, the shiny metal of the Sig P226 glinting under the restored light from the lamp, and she pulled back the chamber.
“I know you said bullets won’t killer her, Gene, but I’m going to be honest with you, I’ve found there are very few things that don’t die if you pump enough silver into their skulls.”
I smiled at her.
“You never change.”
Chapter Thirty-four
I spent the entire drive to the memorial park trying to remember how I’d killed Timothy Deerling.
Channeling my rage had worked, but it wasn’t just something you could turn on and off like a light switch. I wasn’t particularly angry right then, not even with the specter of Mercy’s threat lingering over us. Sure, she’d told me she wanted to kill everyone near and dear to me just to make my sister suffer, but it was such a ludicrous threat it didn’t make me mad.
Which posed something of a problem.
We parked in a pay lot across the street from the park and made our way in a grim pack towards the main gate. While the memorial museum had been long closed for the night, the park itself remained open twenty-four hours a day. Even though it was November and the promise of winter was in the air like a frosty kiss, the fountain in the middle of the park remained on, at least for a few days more, before the weather got too cold.
Over the gate was a sign that read “Lucas Rain Memorial Park” and on the walls at the back of the garden were the names of all those who had died in the assault on the city. Lucas’s name, of course, was among them, but no larger than any of the others.
“The walls were made from what was left of the hotel,” Secret said quietly. “I came here when they cut the ribbon on this place. It felt like we were standing on your grave.”
Lucas nodded and said nothing. I wasn’t sure what he could say right then. I had a million questions I wanted to ask him about that night, about what had happened after he’d gone through the floor, but I suspected those answers would never be shared, and I had to be okay with that.
“The memorial building is the old lobby,” Secret told us. “When they cleared away the rubble they found that the floors had all stayed intact somehow, so they built it up around them. Kind of morbid if you ask me.”
“They were really expensive floors,” Lucas countered.
The building Secret was referring to was a three-story museum. I’d read about it after it had opened, and watched some of the coverage on the news, but I’d never seen it in person before. It felt weird to be standing here, and honestly the last thing I wanted to do was to go inside.
A light on the top floor came on, as if inviting us to enter.
We all knew who was waiting.
“You don’t have to do this,” Wilder told me.
“I do.”
“She’s dangerous.”
“So are we,” I reminded him.
He grabbed me by the shoulders and turned me to face him directly, and before I could ask what he was doing, he bent low and planted a kiss on my lips. It wasn’t a delicate or gentle kiss, it was the kind that flared down into your toes and seeped like molten hot need through your veins. My whole body felt undone and remade in an instant under the pressure of his mouth, and I forgot myself just long enough to sag into his embrace.
When he released me, I sighed against his lips.
“You are coming out of this thing alive, you hear me?”
“I never planned on dying, you idiot.” I kissed him back, holding his face in my palms. His stubble was rough against my skin and I swore that no matter what happened tonight, when he and I got home we would let ourselves hide away from the world, at least for one weekend.
We deserved that much, didn’t we?
