It’s madness. And I certainly feel like I’m going mad, one carefully-counted heartbeat at a time.
Slowly, I grasp hold of one of the footmen and step down from the carriage; the second my red-soled heel touches that white carpet, I’m hit in the face with a couple dozen camera flashes. Glancing about, I can see Lonan looking a little worse the wear after last night, Rebel scowling at the crowds, and the rest of the team spaced at intervals along the walkway. Even in the Vegas heat, they wear dark suits, cut so the holstered guns don’t print, but I know they’re under there. Earpieces, too. The PFC guys should be a source of reassurance, but not by much, because there are people everywhere, reporters everywhere, photographers everywhere.
Because I’m here, because I came this far, I paste on a pleasant smile and strike a pose, holding my sparkling silver clutch and standing in just that way that’ll be in all the magazines tomorrow. The way women in those pictures always stand to show off their dress and their figure and their giant, pink wedding ring.
“I notice that you and Xaine aren’t walking the carpet together,” says some nard from one of the entertainment programs. “Trouble in paradise already?”
Waving one hand at the pumpkin carriage, I offer up the charming nothingness of any professional celebrity. “He’s all about the roleplay.” Then I lean in like I’m imparting a secret. “Very disappointed that I wouldn’t wear the glass slippers.”
There’s a collective bark of laughter from the people closest to me. A glance down the carpet offers up Xaine’s slightly irritated face, his dark brows drawn together, those sky-blue eyes fixed on me for one burning second before we both look away. He’s halfway down the gauntlet now, ignoring the clamors for his autograph, to turn this way and look over here and can we get a smile? Charging through it all like an angry bull, which probably isn’t so far from the truth.
Another reporter shoves a mic under my chin, recapturing my attention. “This is a fairly large event for a single song debut. What do you think about this whole red carpet roll-out?”
“Well, I think the carpet is white,” I say, eliciting another round of chuckles from the throng. “And you know Xaine…” My eyes find him once again, but this time I only catch the tense line of his shoulders. “Nothing by halves.”
You’re either in, or you’re out.
“Rumor has it that the two of you are planning on adopting a baby from China,” another reporter says.
All I can do is stare blankly, because I don’t know what the hell to say to that. “Um, if you’ll excuse me…”
“Hey!” The voice over my shoulder is accompanied by the lightest touch at my waist. It’s enough to make me jump out of my skin, then jump again when I twist around to find Noah Carmichael grinning down at me.
Holy shit.
The first time I met Xaine, there wasn’t really an opportunity for my shy to kick in full-force; circumstances and other things got in the way. But here and now, looking up at the other guy whose posters I had pinned to my bedroom wall?
Holy. Fucking. Starstruck.
I swear I gape at Noah’s face until he hits me with a low chuckle that has playboy written all over it. Granted, he’s had time to get used to all of this, but the moment it becomes apparent that my mouth is still open and no words are coming out, he looks almost sympathetic.
“You don’t remember me?” he asks.
“Remember you, no,” I tell him. “But I’d have to be living under a rock not to know you. I mean, not know you, know you, but I… uh… er…”
Noah’s face goes a little inscrutable. “You don’t remember any of it, do you? You have no idea—”
“Oh,” I say, quick to stop him, lifting my left hand to show him the giant, pink diamond. “I have some idea.”
“But the wedding? The reception?”
“There was a reception?” The words tumble out of me before I realize that five microphones are hovering not a foot away. Lowering my voice, I lean in and hiss, “Why on earth didn’t you stop it?”
He looks puzzled. “The reception?”
“No, the wedding!”
Noah’s laugh startles me slightly, and I wonder who else heard it.
Everyone, Lore, every-fucking-body.
Even Xaine. He’s looking back and frowning, his gaze bouncing between me and Noah, whose current expression is entirely contemplative.
“I did ask you,” he says. “Right before I walked you down the aisle. Told you I’d toss you in a limo and take you wherever you wanted to go. You pointed right at Xaine and said that was where you wanted to go.”
“Because bleary-drunk is the best state of mind for making life-altering decisions?” I fix him with a stern look.
Noah pauses, exhaling through his nose like he’s thinking. “Look, I’ve known Xaine a while, and I’ve seen him a lot of ways: careless, angry, manic, mean. Hell, I’ve even seen him sad. I’ve never seen him like this.” His dark eyes twinkle when he adds, “Couple months back, he nearly put my face through the back of my skull. A few weeks later, he ran Reille Reece through a wall. But honestly, I think he’d cut off all his fingers one by one and lay them out in the sun to fry before he’d hurt a hair on your head.” Then, as if it excuses everything, Noah adds, “And he seemed sure. About all of it, but especially about you.”
I know what I want, even if you don’t.
With a sigh, I track Xaine’s progress down the white carpet. I’ve felt everything from smitten to exasperated with him, but I’ve never felt unsafe. Even when he was out of his head and tearing Benicio limb from limb, I never once considered he might turn on me. He’s dangerous in every possible way, but of all the things that might have happened last night, I guess it could have been far worse than standing me up before God and Elvis.
“So, you seriously don’t remember the karaoke bar?” Noah says, drawing my attention back.
“No?”
Hello, not-a-question question. It’s been a while.
He grins again in the sort of way that tells me I’m not going to like where this is headed. “You have zero recollection of getting up to sing ‘Cry, Heaven’?” At my empty stare, he continues, “Just a big ol’ duet-shaped blank spot, huh?”
“I sang a duet?”
“We,” he clarifies. “We sang a duet. And it’s already huge. You’re like, viral video magic.”
My brain stutters to a complete and utter halt. “Are you telling me that I sang ‘Cry, Heaven’ with Noah Carmichael and I don’t remember it?” The words come out louder—oh, my god, so much louder—than anticipated. The flush that hits my face a second later is hot, hotter, hottest, and I can feel it traveling across my bare shoulders and down my chest.
Noah can’t begin to comprehend my complete and total mortification in this moment, because his eyes crinkle at me like I told him the best joke he’s heard this week. “You want to do a dramatic reenactment? We could totally Shatner the thing. Except, drunk as we were, I’m not really sure that’s possible.” He clears his throat, giving me the look that says I dare you.
“No.” Emphatic, firm, I am not doing this.
“C’mon, it’ll be like old times!” he taunts.
Wry as anything I say, “It was last night.”
Noah grins, waggles his eyebrows a bit, then opens up and let’s loose. “So, cry heaven, and don’t go. I need your grace to get me home…”
Top of his lungs, clear as day, and there’s a sudden shift in the decibel level coming from the spectators cordoned off behind metal barriers. Listening to him, they go absolutely berserk, screaming and crying, waving pieces of paper around like flags of surrender.
I can’t blame them really.
Noah stops singing, smirking at me like an asshole. “What? Haven’t seen the YouTube videos of it yet?” I give him the glare to end all glares, but he just leans in close, turning me around until I’m facing the crowd of rabid groupies. “I bet they have.”
Cheek-to-cheek with Noah, I watch the teenagers jumping
up and down with Sharpie markers in their hands. These are the fans… and not just Noah’s fans, but Xaine’s fans. My fans. The people who heard the song, liked the song, bought the song, and now they’re standing in the Vegas heat clutching pictures and pens and excitement to their chests like armor.
“Lourdes!” someone shouts. I turn my head to look; it’s an instinctive action. “Over here!”
“You should go say hello to the adoring public,” Noah tells me, then plants an impulsive kiss on the side of my face. “I’ll catch you later.” A wink and a smile. “Try to remember me next time. It’s Noah Carmichael…Carmichael spelled with a C.”
“Right, and I’m Lourdes with an O, as in ‘oh, for fuck’s sake,’” I toss back, swatting at him with my clutch as he laughs and dances away. Suddenly, I’m as alone as someone can be with a hundred people screaming my name and freaking out for reasons unknown.
Okay, I can do this.
Except I only make it one step before a hand catches hold of my elbow.
“You shouldn’t,” Lonan says, his eyes scanning the crowd. “We didn’t have time to vet everyone.”
I consider the bank of people a few feet away, frowning a bit. “They’re just kids, Lonan. It’ll be fine.”
He hesitates, then mutters something into the mouthpiece at his collar and nods. Giving him a reassuring pat, I walk toward the risers. Me, in my belated wedding dress. Me, with all my blushing and stuttering. Me, with butterflies in my stomach, an ache in my chest, and a polite smile plastered across my face. This, I can do. Take a paper, sign a name, shake a hand, give someone a hug. It’s simple. It’s gratifying, because they’re here for me, for Xaine, for the two of us. There are so many well-wishes that I start to believe that this fool’s errand of a wedding might not be so bad. The fans squeal and cry. They tell me their stories and how they came to be here. It’s a veritable tornado, hundreds of names and voices, all belonging to people who don’t know me, underscored by—
The soft jingle of metal on metal, like a wind chime.
“’Allo, Lo.”
Dread lands hard and heavy in my gut, and I shift until I’m staring at that too-familiar face. Same as he was in the warehouse, with pale skin, mirror-eyes, and those odd chains hung with metal teeth strung from ears to nose. He’s wearing that gray hood and smiles like we’ve shared a joke.
Like we’ve shared a past.
“You left before we could catch up on old times, so I came to finish what I started.” Tiberius looks regretful, but genuinely so. “There’ll be no comin’ back from this one, I’m afraid. It seems you’re destined to be my little raven, sending messages from the land of the dead to the land of the living.”
His hand flashes out faster than I can flee, catching me by the arm and dragging me close to the barrier. A rushing sound starts in my ears, the sound of the sea in a shell. My vision narrows, tunnels, goes black at the edges. From a distance, I hear the high-pitched noise of someone’s scream.
Not mine. I’m going to die without making a single sound to save myself. I’ve stopped breathing, mind telling me to move, body keeping me still. I never understood what it’s like to be frozen with fear, until now. The whole world stops spinning, leaving you and your worst nightmare to stand alone, together.
“You can’t escape them, Lo.” Tiberius grips me right above the elbow, and it feels like he’s pulling at me, at my insides. Slicing me into a million pieces and extracting them one by one via that bruising touch. “Mercifully, you won’t feel a thing. The most important parts of you will be long gone by then.”
Stop.
I want to fight, but I can’t. The blackness gets darker, the tunnel gets smaller, and sounds fade further away. I can’t feel my body anymore, can’t move my arms to swing, can’t move my feet to run, can’t move my tongue to speak the defiance brewing in the heart that I can no longer feel beating. There’s anger there, but it’s dim and distant. I know this feeling; I’ve felt it before. Back at CasDec, during those days when I could look at myself from half a room away. Apart. Detached. Separated from my body.
I don’t want to go there again.
I won’t.
And just like that, I slam back into myself with an audible gasp. Everything refocuses, and the first thing I see is the shock on my captor’s face. Beyond him, it’s business as usual. Interviewers continue to shout, fans reach for the next closest celebrity.
Tiberius’s eyes narrow. “What the hell?”
I find the strength to struggle then, but he drags me closer, until his body and mine are touching from chest to ankle with only the hip-height metal barrier between us.
“What are you?” He breathes the question right into my mouth. As his eyes scour my face, their color shifts from clear to blue and back again. There’s a moment when he seems to waver with indecision, but then his expression hardens and he shifts his weight. “Doesn’t matter. Was hoping I could do this nice and quiet, but I’m not averse to a little screaming. Sorry, sunshine, but this is your stop.”
Sharp and blinding, pain slides between my ribs on the edge of a blade that I can’t see. My mouth opens on a cry, but nothing comes out. Nothing happens at all but the tears. Big, fat drops run down my face in hot-to-cold rivulets. I can feel them hit my chest, soaking into the fabric of my gown. For an impossibly long moment, Tiberius and I stand like that, caught in the danse macabre with people from all walks of life living all around us. I stare into his eyes, memorizing every single feature, and I promise myself that in my next life—
I’ll remember your face.
Tiberius jerks his hand, the quickest flick of a wrist. I listen as the blade tears through more tissue and organ, unidentifiable bits of me popping as the razor-sharp anelace catches on them and then cuts through. I can’t breathe; there’s no more air. There’s only a raw and unexpected sort of disbelief.
“I’m sorry, love,” he says by way of apology. “If it’s any consolation, this is going to hurt them far more than it hurts you.”
Them. Xaine. Them. Cas. Them. Jax. All of them.
Destined to be my little raven, sending messages from the land of the dead—
“Hey!” Lonan’s voice, I think, or maybe Rebel’s.
Tiberius tilts his head at the shout, then he pulls away, fading into the crowd as the hot seep of blood soaks through pristine white fabric. For the first time, I look down to my hand, pressed against the tiny, destructive wound. Pulling my palm away, I stare at it and muse on the unexpectedly red color of my blood. Redder than I would have guessed. So red, it’s almost black, a perfect sanguine stream spilling out and soaking the gown.
Blood on snow.
My last thought is for Xaine, and suddenly I regret all of it and none of it, because for what it’s worth, he made me forget for a while. I turn my head, seek him out, find the hard line of his back twenty, maybe thirty feet away. A scream rends the air, a real scream this time. That sharp shriek draws his attention, and the first thing he does is look for me.
To make sure I’m near. To make sure I’m safe.
I open my mouth to say the words I should have said when I woke up this morning. His probing stare catches on my face, recognizes my distress. His gaze wanders downward and those spectacularly vampire-blue eyes go wide. He takes one step, two, then he’s plowing through people like that night at O’Reilly’s, hands outstretched to catch me.
A blur passes by me, a shadowed streak that I dimly recognize as Lonan. The crowd ripples as one man takes off after my assailant and another comes to my rescue. Rebel’s there at my side, hands closing over my bare shoulders as I begin to wilt, but I slide from his grasp before his mind even registers that I’m about to fall.
And I will fall.
Already have.
“Lore!” When Xaine catches me and touches the wound, I suck in a hissing breath. Everything snaps into place, going from slow motion to fast forward in a blink.
Not enough time.
“Xaine…”
Then, f
inally, as if all it was waiting for was his permission, the world slips out from under me.
And I let it go.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Xaine
Deus meus, ex toto corde paenitet me omnium meorum peccatorum,
eaque detestor, quia peccando…
The steady thwip-thwip-thwip of the helicopter’s blades is the only noise I process. I can’t hear the medics yelling at each other as they run blunt-nosed scissors through the red and the white to reveal the worst of the damage. There sure as shit isn’t any noise when a heavy gold coin falls out of Lore’s bra and hits the metal floor. It spins on its edge, and I stare as it skitters across the steel, bouncing off of every upraised rivet.
I do hear the ping when it flattens and goes still, though. Bending down to retrieve it, I don’t bother looking at it again, keeping it clutched it in my palm for the entire ride to LA. I squeeze it once they get the IV set up, pumping my blood into Lore. I know it won’t turn her, but I remember what she said about being able to use vampire blood to heal, and I’m hoping like hell it will keep her alive from here to CasDec.
It’s the only safe place for her right now.
Non solum poenas a te iuste statutas promeritus sum,
sed praesertim quia offendi te…
She’s so full of morphine and so far beyond my reach that she doesn’t even register the burn of the transfusion. The medics work on her without faltering, and I bear witness; the first time they hurt her, I am going to throw them out the door of the helicopter. But so far, they’ve done the smart thing and tried to save her. Stymied the bleeding from the gut wound. Assessed the damage done to her internal organs.
“What kind of knife was used in the attack?” one of them shouts at me.
“I don’t know,” I say, on autopilot. “I didn’t see it happen.”
Summum bonum, ac dignum qui super omnia diligaris.
Ideo firmiter propono…
No, I was halfway down that carpet, sulking like an asshole and wrapped up in a thick layer of wounded pride. Full-blown sanctimonious dipshit-mode, wiped away the second I turned and saw the look on her face. The red blooming across the front of that dress.
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