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“Antony’s sorted,” Noah says. “We’ll come back and fill in the grave later. We need to get back to the house.”
Eli staggers to his feet and throws me over his shoulder. I can feel his hands on me, but they’re like bricks, they don’t feel like hands at all. I get a weird, upside-down view of Noah climbing out of the grave, his forearms streaked with blood. He shoves past Eli, raising a rifle in his hands.
I bob along the tunnel, the only sound Noah’s heavy footfalls and Eli’s ragged breath.
And Gabriel, humming the melody to his song.
We’ve sharpened our steel. We’ve made our sacrifices. We’re unleashing war.
We emerge into the drawing room. Noah’s already at the window, his rifle aimed outside as he peers across the grounds. Eli drops me into Gabriel’s arms and picks up his own weapon.
“She can’t hardly move or talk,” Eli says to Gabe. “I need you to keep her awake.”
Gabriel places a kiss on my shuddering eyelids. His rich, pagan scent reaches my nostrils, dragging me back from the brink of sleep. “Stay with me, beautiful. We’re here for you. We went to the docks because Noah had this feeling something would go wrong, and we saw Nero’s men and figured it was a distraction. We came straight here for you.”
He sings in a low voice, his lips pressed against my ear, the same lyrics running on repeat in my head. The song reaches deep into my bones, burrowing into the marrow and forging me anew.
They’re here.
After everything I did, they came back for me.
“Mackenzie’s outside, opening the gates.” Noah frowns at the window, his finger drumming on the trigger. “If it weren’t for that fucking garish fountain, I’d have a clear shot.”
“Why is she opening the gates?”
“A car’s driving up. It’s Nero. He’s got men behind him. They’re surrounding the place. We can’t take all of them. Fuck, fuck.”
“We could go over the back fence?” Eli suggests. “They don’t know the paths through the trees like I do. But we’ll have to go fast, or they’ll see us.”
Noah’s mouth twists into a frown. His shoulders hunch. He wants to fight. But even he has to know we can’t shoot our way out the front gate. “Claudia wouldn’t want us to leave the house. She’d stay and fight.”
And you know what? He’s right. I’ve lived and died a thousand times for this house. It’s the hill I would die on, the place we’d make our final stand.
But that’s the old me.
Now I know that none of this shit matters without love.
They came back for me.
My three princes could have walked away from all of this. They could have left Emerald Beach and the Triumvirate behind and gone on with their lives as they should have been. But they came back for me.
And I’ll never, ever let them go again.
I manage to pry my lips open. I push the air from my heavy lungs. I form a single, shaky word. “Run.”
Let Mackenzie have the house, the empire. It’s only fair. I stole her life – she can have it back, curses and all. The four of us can make something different. Something better.
Gabriel brushes my face with soft kisses. “That’s the sweetest word I’ve ever heard from these perfect lips.”
Noah hauls himself away from the window. “They’ve stopped to talk. No one’s seen us. We’d better go now.”
Noah darts into the hallway, looking both ways. His weapon swings through the air as he checks for Nero’s men. Gabriel jogs after him, cradling me against his body, still singing those beautiful, haunting melodies even though I’m now so fully awake and alive that not even the drugs could pull me back.
My boys are in danger.
Eli takes up the rear, backing down the hallway as he keeps his gun trained on every closed door, every bulletproof window. We pass by the drawing room, the dining room, Howard Malloy’s office—
The treasure.
