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Because of her. Because the more time I spent in her presence, the more I cared, beyond anything I’d thought I was capable of. More than I’d ever cared about anyone, even my brothers-in-arms.
Was this… love? This desperate need to stand by her and watch over her in every way I could? I hadn’t ever expected to feel anything that intense, but I couldn’t deny that something powerful gripped me whenever I thought about her, whenever I looked at her.
I wasn’t sure I liked it. She deserved that much feeling—she more than deserved whatever loyalty and admiration I could offer her. But the pang of emotion that resonated through my heart seemed like a weakness. Was I going to be able to fight to my full ability when I needed to if I couldn’t shut away all those impulses and give myself over to cold, unshakeable focus?
But if that was the trade-off, I couldn’t think of anyone worthy of making it for other than her.
Dess’s hand jerked to her pocket. She pulled out her phone, which I guessed had given a vibrating alert. As she peered at the screen, her expression stiffened. I stepped forward, automatically going into protective mode from that reaction alone.
“What’s the matter?” Julius demanded with equally fierce concern.
“It’s my mother,” Dess said quietly. “She texted me—she knows Damien and the others are dead. She says… she says she knows what we did. Turn on the TV. Channel 6.”
Garrison was closest to the TV. He leapt for the remote and switched it on before the rest of us could do more than turn around. Then we all stood there staring at the footage playing on the screen.
Blaze managed to speak first, with a weak sort-of chuckle. “Looks like the clean-up crew didn’t get there in time.”
“There” was the Maliks’ country home. We’d only spent an hour on the property at most, but I instantly recognized the pale building with its broad porch and the barn in the background, where Garrison had been tied up. In front of those structures, police officers milled around while figures carried black-bagged bodies to a coroner’s van.
A news reporter came into frame, blatant horror etched across her carefully made-up face. She cleared her throat and launched back into what must have been a continuing spiel.
“The police haven’t yet released a definitive statement about the official number of victims or their identities, but there’s evidence of a much more devastating crime at play here. We have reason to believe that a group targeting children for horrific ends was operating out of this property. There is speculation that Damien Malik is among the deceased, and that perhaps this was a revenge killing for his role in that group. Clearly, we still need more answers. Tune back in at the top of the hour for the latest information on this case.”
Dess’s lips had parted with shock. “There wasn’t any evidence about the child killings when we were there,” she said. “Nothing that was obvious enough that it should have come to light this quickly.”
Julius’s expression darkened. “The Blood Hunter is playing more games. He wanted his revenge on the Maliks for his daughter, right? Having Damien’s daughter murder them wasn’t enough. He wanted to ruin their entire legacy. He must have sent people in right after we left to plant the evidence.”
Garrison sucked a breath through his teeth. “Or maybe they were already there.Someonegrabbed me and left me there as bait, and I think we can assume now that it wasn’t anyone operating under the Maliks’ orders. The Blood Hunter used me to lure you out there for the final showdown.”
My eyebrows shot up, but the moment he said it, I could see how much sense that made.
“You’re right,” Julius said, his voice even tauter than before. “And he must have called in the cops too, to make sure they found everything he wanted them to before our clean-up guys got there.”
“Fuck.” Dess’s fingers tightened around her phone. She stared down at the message for several seconds longer and then shoved the phone into her pocket without replying. I certainly couldn’t have offered any suggestions about how to tackle this subject with her sparse remaining family.
“There’s nothing I can tell them that would make any difference,” she said stiffly, and wandered down the hall to the stairs.
That might have been true, but the fact obviously unnerved her. I didn’t like seeing her shaken. How could she not be when her life had been ripped apart and then the pieces shredded into even smaller pieces?
As I moved to follow her, Blaze straightened up too. Seeing me, he held himself back and offered me a respectful nod. Maybe he figured that I spoke little enough that he should give me room to when I was going out of my way to talk.
I found Dess in the bedroom she’d claimed as her own, sprawled on top of the covers, her hands folded over her abdomen. She was staring at the ceiling as if deep in thought, not stirring when I entered, though it was hard to believe she’d missed my entrance. That suspicion was confirmed when I reached the edge of the bed and she spoke, still gazing upward.
“Is this what people mean when they say that life sucks?”
I couldn’t stop the corner of my mouth from twitching into a smile. Sinking down onto the bed next to her, I rested my hand on her shin in what I hoped was at least a vaguely comforting gesture. “You’re still upset about what you had to do.”
“No—yes—I don’t know.” She scowled at the ceiling. “I don’t feel like I had a whole lot of choice. And they weresick. Child-murdering psychopaths, any way you slice it. How can I feel bad about ridding the world of them?”
The hint of roughness in her voice suggested that some small part of her did anyway.
I rubbed my fingers gently up to her knee and down to her ankle. “You know I’ve been there. Killing my parental figures. And they’d actually raised me—and they weren’t going around torturing kids.”
“But they’d torturedyou,” Dess muttered, her eyes flashing as she must have remembered the story I’d told her during the drive to the country house.
“One is less than many,” I said. “But… After I did it, I felt a little guilty. Maybe for a day or two. And then that faded away beneath the knowledge that it’d been for the best, and… that might be the last moment I really felt anything in a long time.”
Finally, Dess tipped her head to the side to look at me. “It sounds like not feeling anything would be easier.”
I shrugged. “It might be. But given what I know about normal human behavior, somehow I think it’s better for you to have your feelings and work through them rather than losing them like I did. It just means you’re a better person than your family was, because you do care. You didn’t want to hurt them. You did what you had to do, and you should know that you didn’t do a single thing wrong, but it makes sense that it was hard.”
“Well, I guess if even you think that…” she grumbled, but she sat up and scooted closer to me. When she leaned into me, accepting the slide of my arm around her waist and tucking her head against my shoulder, so much emotion swelled in my chest that it was difficult to imagine I’d really spent years feeling nothing at all.
“Thank you,” she murmured. “We’ll get through this. Because none of us are alone.”
My arm tightened around her as if I could imprint into her body how true that statement was. No matter the cost—no matter the consequences—I’d protect her from the forces working to control her life all over again. I’d see that she got all the justice she deserved for the crimes committed against her.
