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The hairs on the back of Octavius’s neck lifted. If Storm turned on him, he was done for.
He couldn’t fight them both. But he’d try.
Storm raised his hand. “Get out of here, Octavius.”
Wait, Storm was letting them go?
“Storm, stop them!” Mikalis ordered.
Storm drew in a deep breath, filling his broad chest, and sighed hard. “No.”
A glimmer of something passed between them—a knowing, and a resignation. Octavius wasn’t about to wait around for Storm to change his mind, or Mikalis to convince him otherwise. He dashed for Jayden and snapped his ropes. He and Jayden scooped up Saint, then carried him out of the building and bundled him into the back of the chopper. Jayden climbed in beside him.
Octavius fired up the chopper and got them into the air. He couldn’t be sure if he’d done enough to stop Mikalis for good. He’d issued the demands, but whether they’d stick or not was anyone’s guess.
He flew the chopper northeast, toward Chicago. There were safe houses around the Great Lakes they could rest up in. If Saint survived that long.
“How is he?” Octavius called. When Jayden didn’t answer, he glanced into the back. Jayden had laid Saint over his lap and was stroking his hair. Saint’s skin had turned ashen-grey and begun to shrink around his bones. The venom was killing him.
Mikalis wasn’t a nyktelios. There was no way of knowing what his venom would do, or how fast it would burn through Saint. He seemed to be fighting it and wasn’t yet dust, so that gave them time.
But no nyk, Brotherhood or not, ever came back from Mikalis’s bite.
Saint had known the bite would be fatal. And he’d taken it for Octavius.
“He’s going to live,” Octavius told Jayden. The feeder looked up. Tears stained his face. “He’s not dying, Jayden.” The thought of losing Saint tugged at Octavius’s heart, almost choking him. In just a few days, they’d been through so much, shared so much, that it felt like more. Like a lifetime.
He couldn’t damn well lose him.
“Live, you sonofabitch,”he sent to Saint. “Live,”he sent again, over and over. So Saint knew he wasn’t alone.
CHAPTER22
Zaine
He still fumedafter returning to New York and heading into the back of the coffee shop. It had been a long time since he’d been weak, but Saint and Octavius had made him feel feeble, like a newly turned nyktelios.
They’d locked him in a fucking kiln. For a while there, he’d feared they’d meant to light it.
He plucked his phone from his pocket and dialed Eric’s number. He was at work, but he always picked up.
“Hey, you good?” Eric asked, probably sensing Zaine wasnotgood, despite the miles between them. Their connection had been getting more intense, more powerful. It was more than love now. Somehow they made each other stronger. Eric felt it too. His human blood waschanging.
“Yeah, I’m good, except for getting my ass handed to me by two ex-Brotherhood nyks. You around anytime soon?” He didn’t say it, but he needed Eric close, needed to breathe him in and feel as though the world was just the two of them.
“I can be. I get off in an hour. Meet you for coffee?”
“Yeah.” Zaine sighed, the relief like a balm to his frayed nerves. “I just need to do some housekeeping and I’ll be out.”
Zaine hung up and entered the Brotherhood’s temporary base, expecting to find Raiden next to his laptop. But the laptop sat open and abandoned on the main table.
He’d just take a look. He owed it to the memory of Octavius to at least follow through and do some digging on Raiden.
He stepped around the table and pulled the laptop toward him. Some kind of program ran on-screen. The progress bar read85%. He pressed his thumb to the built-in fingerprint reader:Denied.
That wasn’t right.
He tried again:Denied.
