I caught Lore as she fell, landing hard on my knees with only a layer of velvet and satin between me and the carpeted concrete. Her eyes were already closed, her body slack, blood pumping out of her with every steady contraction of the heart I’d done my best to break. While I cradled her to my chest and pressed both hands against the wound, the security team went straight to Evacuation Plan 1, which involved landing a helicopter on the Strip.
And even though I know there’s no heaven to be had, I’d prayed, and continue to pray, the same act of contrition spoken at every service I ever attended as a child.
Ideo firmiter propono, adiuvante gratia tua, de cetero me non peccaturum peccandique occasiones proximas fugiturum…
Amen
I’m not all that worried about offending God, but I do detest my sins, and the greatest one was leaving her side for a moment. My need to urge and prod and goad and shove everything one step too far pushed me down that aisle and straight into my own personal hell.
I swear I can do better. Be better. Be what you need.
With Lore’s hands clasped in mine and my forehead pressed against her fingertips, I make every promise there is. To give her the time and space and whatever else she needs to make this right. To find the dead-man-walking that did this to her and end him. The security teams are already scouring the footage of the walkway; there’s no way he evaded every camera in the place. The fans have rallied, lining up to give their statements and download the pictures off their phones.
His image is captured somewhere.
And then he’s fucking mine.
But these thoughts are scattershot. There’s no room for rage or plans or anything beyond Lore’s next shallow inhalation. There’s so much blood, it’s scary. I’ve had orgies that ended with far more arterial spray, but this is different. My blood, her blood, blood seeping from the wound, soaking the bandages, dripping from IVs, pearling in each pore as her body processes me out.
Just like Elizabeth.
I’m back in that nightmare. Another fatal wedding, different only in that my last words to Lore were taunting, bitter. The kind of last words you regret for eternity, because you don’t have the chance to take them back. I’m looking down the barrel of killing the second woman I’ve ever loved, even if I didn’t shove that knife into her myself.
“How much longer?” I shout. “Are we close?”
Lore’s lips are blue, her skin is cold, and I have no idea if my blood is doing anything at all. For all I know, she’s already gone. She might only be a few internal bits that haven’t stopped working, a few brain synapses that haven’t stopped firing. To the medics, she’s meat. Literally, meat. According to the license they pulled out of her clutch, she’s an organ donor, so right now they’re going through the motions. Keeping the blood flowing, keeping the heart pumping, keeping everything fresh long enough to take it.
“We’re coming up on the helipad now,” the pilot yells over his shoulder.
Not ten more seconds later, we touch down and the medics get the door open. Two figures are on the roof, both of them wind-whipped and grim-faced. I was expecting Cas. Prepared to take a UV bullet the second I set foot on his building, in fact.
I wasn’t as prepared to see Jackson Trace standing alongside him like a sentinel.
Guess I’m really in the shit now.
I grit my teeth, because it’s going to get ugly the second they try to separate me from Lore. The medics hop off the transport and lift the rolling gurney down. I follow it, eyes trained on the two men standing at the edge of the chopper’s blades. I brought Lore here because it’s the best place for her, the safest place. The humans can’t protect her from a bunch of immortals.
But Caspian Declan can. Can and will, so long as she makes it through this.
As the medics roll closer, I keep my grip on Lore’s hand, on the coin, and what’s left of my reality, because shit’s gotten awfully surreal. The IV lines snake between us, the rubber tubing still pumping fresh blood into her. Two sets of eyes track me, but only Jax approaches. Someone did him the favor of punching him in the nose very recently, but the moment he draws alongside Lore’s gurney, he reaches out as if he plans to lay hands on my wife. My first instinct is to sling him halfway across the roof. Luckily, I remember what he did to my hand way back when at O’Reilly’s, and in that moment of hesitation, Jax’s fingers cup Lore’s face, right under her jaw.
“She’s in bad shape,” he mutters, and though I wasn’t banking on him to make it better, my stomach drops about a foot. “You said you’d keep her safe! What the fuck happened to ‘I’ve got this’?”
My own words, tossed right back in my face, and I can’t say a damn thing in my own defense.
He’s not waiting for my excuses, anyway. “We need to get her inside. The OR is prepped, and the surgeons need to start putting her back together. Unplug the IV, Xaine, and let her go.”
“No!” Panic surges through me, hot and sharp, carving into my guts. Then my mouth clogs up with all the things I can’t say beyond, “I… can’t.”
If she dies in there, I don’t want Jax Trace to be the one holding her hand when it happens…
“Xaine.” Jax reaches across the gurney to rest a hand on my bare shoulder, right next to my bloodied undershirt. For a second, I wonder where the rest of my clothes went, then I remember I shucked the bloody tux jacket and button-down right about the time I suggested plugging myself into Lore. I meet Jax’s gaze and wait. He doesn’t speak, but in the place of hollow reassurances, there’s the sense that all the sharp edges are suddenly sanded down and rounded off. My raw nerve endings are completely settled by the time he says, “You’re not going to miss anything, because she’s not going to die.”
“Fuck off, Trace.” Except there’s no real heat behind the words, because I believe him. I mean, I know what he is. I have to believe him.
If anyone could help…
“I’ll stay with her,” Jax tells me, giving me a sage nod like he knows what I’m thinking. Like he just knows.
Relief eases through every taut muscle in my body. Slowly, so slowly, I reach down and unpeel the piece of tape holding the needle in my arm.
“It’s going to be fine,” Jax gives me one of those asinine, reassuring smiles of his. “Trust me.”
So I do. I pull the needle out. Take a step back to let them wheel Lore away. My eyes follow her, locked on the trailing white fabric of what’s left of her gown until a set of automatic doors slides open and swallows her up. It’s not until a few moments later that my anxiety surges back to crush me, fear and concern mixed with seething fury.
“What the hell?” I don’t know what he did, I don’t know how he did it, but when I get my hands on Jackson Trace and his magical fairy dust, I’m going to rip his pretty head off and wallow in the ensuing fountain of blood. I take one step, then another one, but then a hand closes around my arm. It draws me back, spins me around, and I come up swinging.
My fist connects with Cas’s jaw so hard that his teeth click together upon impact, his face twisting to the side with a force that cracks the bones in his neck. And I hope he hits me back. I hope he plows into me so hard that he knocks me out because if he doesn’t, I might be inclined to keep digging my knuckles into his face until I rearrange every single feature.
His voice is soft, but his eyes are feral-gold. “If you ever tire of breaking your fingers on my jaw, I could suggest a few softer spots. I know you’re hellbent on hitting me one way or another, but you really ought to learn a little discipline—”
“Fuck you and your discipline. Was it disciplined to leave Lore twisting in the wind? Because I don’t know how much you knew, but you sure as hell knew the Legacy was after her.” There’s a flash of something, the tiniest flicker of surprise and maybe even admiration. Apparently, I’ve shocked him. “That’s right, I know about them.”
Cas hits back harder with three words than he ever could with a fist. “She was dead,” he says softly, “and she was supposed
to stay that way.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” I twist my bloody hand in his pretty pastel tie, twisting the fabric around my fingers and reeling him in until I’m snarling into his face.
“She was dead to everyone who knew about her, Xaine,” he says. The helicopter’s long gone by now, leaving the two of us, the wind, and all the secrets in Cas’s arsenal. “Anyone who might have looked for her, anyone at all who might have wanted to kill her, believed they already had.”
Eyes narrowed, I pull tighter at the length of fabric in my hand like it’ll make a difference, but Cas merely stares back, stoic and cool, those calculating cat eyes tearing me apart.
“Leave it to you to sniff her out,” he says, “and leave it to you to shove her into the spotlight. Every camera in Hollywood focused on her. Her face splashed across every television screen and on the cover of every gossip rag in print. That was you. You were the one who caught their attention. You put her blood in the water and expected the sharks not to bite.”
“You left her alone,” I tell him.
“I left her with Jackson, and Jess, and a hundred other people who were put in place specifically to protect her,” Cas shoots right back.
“Then the joke is on you, isn’t it? If they couldn’t even protect her from me, how were they supposed to go up against a bunch of immortals? The Legacy, for fuck’s sake!”
“They weren’t supposed to have to protect her from those men,” he gives me a faint, cruel smile.
“What are they after, Cas?” I shove him away from me, wanting to see him as off-balance as I feel. Wanting him to stagger and try to recover, so he knows what it’s like. “What do they want from you so badly that they’re willing to go through Lore and Jess and Reille to get it?”
Cas does stumble, but it’s far less gratifying than I hoped, with just a few skidding steps backward before he brings himself upright. I crowd him toward the railing, but he doesn’t answer. Doesn’t do anything but stand there, ramrod straight and jaw clenched.
“Are you with them?”
“I’m not,” he says curtly. “You know that. You wouldn’t have brought Lore here otherwise.”
“You’re involved in something.” Because I know he is, one way or another. “Lore remembers you. One of the few memories she held onto was of your face.”
Another flicker, those same tiger eyes of his narrowing. “She remembers me?”
Yet again Cas manages to shut me up with three little words. He seems surprised, even a little pleased that Lore might remember him, even as the enemy. I find myself trying to put it all together into a picture that makes sense, but I come up empty-handed. And I suddenly understand what it must have been like for her all these months: all of the questions, none of the answers, and just a single flash of memory to start the dominos falling. “Yeah, she remembers you. The medcenter. Being brought here.”
A single nod of acknowledgment. “Yes.”
I ball up my fists, because it’s a game of Twenty Questions, and I’m the idiot asshole who decided to play with the Junior Grand Master of Secrets. “So you brought her here to do what, exactly?”
“An autopsy,” he says. “I tried to get her out when she was alive, but the PFC team only managed to extract Reille. After that, the Legacy kept Lore locked up, hooked up to machines, and heavily guarded. There was no opportunity.”
“But then she died.” A question and a statement all in one. It’s all so farfetched, so hard to believe. “They hucked her body into a corner somewhere. And then you… what?”
“I paid someone to smuggle it out, then doctor the records to confirm that she’d gone into the incinerator with the rest of the bodies.” Cas rattles it off like it’s his grocery list: peas, carrots, bribery, grave robbery.
“And then Doctor Magic Hands fixed everything up? Resurrected her like Zombie Jesus?”
Cas straightens his tie, adjusting the perfect Windsor knot like we’re not discussing a dead-girl-walking here. “It didn’t have anything to do with the doctor. It was the vampire blood they used. It didn’t change her, but it didn’t kill her either. In fact, it did quite the opposite.” Those amber irises fix on my face. “But you’d figured that part out as well, or you wouldn’t have stepped off that helicopter with a tube linking your arm to hers.”
“It was a lucky guess,” I admit bitterly.
“Well, you always did have the devil’s own luck, Xaine.” Cas’s smile is about as friendly as the rest of him. “Except in matters of the heart, it seems.”
The urge to land him another facer rises pretty quick. Cas is that guy. That guy I always want to take down a peg because he’s so damn sanctimonious. That guy who pushes every last one of my buttons. That guy—maybe the only guy—who can take my anger. My grief. I know he’ll take all my punches, too, because despite all the years and bullshit between us, we’re still bound by blood. Brothers of a sort, and Caspian Declan is nothing if not dutiful.
Even if I am the one brother he’d drop off a cliff with great pleasure.
“Speaking of heart matters, how’s Reille doing these days?” I hear myself saying because that old rivalry is all I have by way of ammunition. “And by that, I mean have you figured out who she’s doing, besides you?”
The muscle in Cas’s jaw jumps. “Taunt me all you like, but it doesn’t change the fact that if Lourdes dies today, it’ll be because of your negligence.”
He’s right, but I don’t need that kind of reality. Not right now. “Why is Trace here? What’s his part in this whole thing?”
“You know why, Xaine.” Cas takes a step into the bubble of my personal space and raises his voice above the wind to quote, “‘For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways.’”
I slump back, because it’s the confirmation I needed and absolutely the last thing I wanted to hear. “Don’t quote the bible at me.”
And yet. And yet. Jax is here with Lore, and that’s the best thing for her right now, right? Because it’s sure as shit not me. I’m the last thing she needs. One more demon chasing the sunshine. My impulsivity and petulance snuffing out one more ray of light.
Whatever, she’s still mine.
“Are you going to invite me inside, or are we going to stand out here like assholes?” I finally mutter.
That seems to surprise Cas for a second, because it takes a certain kind of balls to punch someone in the face and then invite himself in. He gives me an assessing look, weighing his options, like he might leave me out here to rot.
“By all means, do come in. Lord knows you’ve done all the damage you can do, for the moment.” With a polite inclination of the head—fucking British, no matter how many years he’s spent in the upstart Colonies—he waves me toward the door.
It’s not until we hit the elevator that I start to shake. Panic and determination and whatever voodoo Jax Trace hit me with on the roof fade into the background, and Cas just watches me, letting me hit rock bottom
“I need to be with her.”
“You need a shower and probably some food,” is the placid comeback.
“I don’t want any more blood.” The thought of trying to eat right now makes my stomach clench. The images of Lore on the white carpet, Lore in my arms, Lore bleeding out and me unable to stop it cycle through my head on a never-ending loop.
My every sin come back to haunt me.
“She’s going to want to see you when she wakes up.” Coming from anyone else, the words would have been an attempt to soothe; from Cas, they contain equal parts remonstration and disapproval. “Do you really want to look like something out of a horror film?”
“Of all the shitty things you’ve ever said to me, I think that might be the worst.” The elevator doors glide open, and I’m confronted with miles of spotless white corridor.
“Pretty lies do no one justice, Xaine.” He sets off at a stroll, like this is Hyde Park. “And you do look terrible.”
“I meant the bit about her waking up and
wanting to see me,” I correct him, two steps behind him. If she wakes up. Then all I can think about is what comes next. Or, more aptly, what comes next if I have to do it without Lore. Yeah, she’s got a smart mouth, a shitty hand with a taser, and a memory like a goldfish, but she also sings like an angel, smiles like the devil, and loves like a—
Fool.
Which is exactly what I’ve been.
I reach out to stop Cas. “If things go to shit, I don’t want you to tell me. Just put a UV bullet in the back of my fucking head.” To his credit, he at least has the decency to look bewildered before I add, “It’s more mercy than I deserve, I know, but maybe it’ll be the thing that makes your Grinch heart grow three sizes today.”
There it is again, that considering look, like he’s trying to weigh the pros against the cons. He doesn’t agree, but it’s not a “no” either.
“You, Xaine, are the bane of my existence,” he finally says, beckoning me with the flick of a wrist as he resumes his saunter. “And when I pit that against everything else I’m fighting, that’s a fairly weighty accomplishment.”
“Yeah, well, you’re no prize yourself, Declan.”
That draws him up short, his lean body shifting until I’m caught in that penetrating amber stare once again. “That’s where you’re wrong, Xaine. We are all the prize.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means,” he says, “that we are all the prize. It means that, for one reason or another, the Legacy will do whatever it takes to win us.”
“And you think that Lore was a message,” I say. “A message to me? Or you?”
“All of us, Xaine,” he says, then adds an ironic, “Rule Number One.”
“Fuck St. John and his stupid fucking rules!” I yell at him. “And fuck you and your fucking cure that doesn’t fucking work! Fuck Matty and his goddamn—” But the rage fizzles, because none of this is their fault.
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