Her words were encouraging all on their own, but all that courage and strength and hope coming from Ronnie made my heart swell with a protective urge to rise above our pettiness and fight on her behalf. Every word she said was true. She couldn’t fight on her own as so many of us could, but if we could find the strength to fight together, we could all survive.
I wasn’t the only one moved by Ronnie’s words and sentiment. Bex looked a little shamefaced, Greta was grinning, Jeremy looked less churlish than usual, and Logan was actually returning Ronnie’s hold, sandwiching her little hands in his.
“Ronnie is exactly right,” Rowens said. “We need to come to some sort of an agreement, so we can work together. Only a united force can stand against Jillian and the might of the Damned. Are we all agreed on that statement?”
I nodded along with most everyone else. Walker didn’t nod, but that may have had more to do with the threat of Dominic’s lethal talons beneath his chin than disagreement.
“And despite Walker’s previous offenses to several people on this team, his skill set would benefit this case. Agreed?” Rowens asked again.
Bex snorted. “Yeah, and despite my leadership skills and beauty, no one’s appointing me queen of England, no matter who would benefit. Some dreams just don’t come true, darlin’,” she drawled.
“And sometimes,” Greta snapped back, “even convicted criminals make a deal in exchange for information that leads to the arrest of many, more criminals.” She met Dominic’s eyes. “Walker’s crimes against you matter just as much as his crimes against everyone on this team, but that’s not the question on the table. What we need to decide today is if holding him accountable for his crimes now is more important than using his skills to take down Jillian and the Damned.”
Dominic curled his lip. “We can’t trust him to use his skills against Jillian and the Damned. He’d as soon as kill us as kill her.”
“You need someone to stay behind to ambush Kaden as leverage,” Walker said. “Let me play my part, and I’ll be a team player. I promise.”
Dominic grinned in Walker’s face, all of his fangs gleaming. “Playing on this team means having my back, knowing I have yours.”
“It means protecting people you’ve spent years trying to kill,” Bex said.
“And sticking to the plan, even if an opportunity to kill us presents itself,” I added.
The silence stretched as Walker ruminated on that.
Greta raised her eyebrows. “Well? Are you a part of this team or not?”
“Yes,” Walker insisted, but his words were a little too certain and came too fast for my taste. “I’m a part of this team.”
I let my nails grow into talons and held out my hand in offering. “I want your word that you’ve got our back against Jillian. And then—only then—I’ll promise that we’ve got yours.”
Walker hesitated. His eyes slid past Greta and met ours one by one: the former night bloods he’d given shelter and protection to; his childhood friend and lifelong companion; his childhood idol turned nemesis; and me, his former flame; plus my brother, a former Damned; and Dominic, the former and contending Master vampire of New York City—all of us the dictionary definition of his worst nightmare standing before him and asking to be allies. I didn’t think he’d be able to swallow a lifetime of grief and hate and anger long enough to even contemplate shaking my hand, let alone agreeing to work with us, but I was wrong. After a long moment of staring at my talons as if they were a contagious disease, he reached out and took my hand in his.
“So, what’s the plan?” he asked.
Everyone groaned this time, but Jeremy loudest of all.
Chapter 26
“Jillian must have changed the Wi-Fi password,” Dominic said. And then his face brightened. “Try it again with a capital N. It may be case-sensitive.”
I ground my teeth against the first response that came to mind and dutifully entered in the coven’s Wi-Fi password into my phone for the eighth time, suspecting that Dominic simply couldn’t remember the correct password.
We had infiltrated the coven half an hour after sunset, ensuring the Damned had left for their nightly hunt, and our teams had gone their separate ways: Bex and Nathan along with five willing human donors were on their way to free the Day Reapers from the Underneath; Dominic and I had gone ahead to scout Jillian’s location; Rafe and Neil were scouting the honeycombs for Sevris and other potential allies; and Meredith, Rowens, Greta,Ronnie, Keagan, Jeremy, Logan, and Theresa were babysitting the remaining two-dozen human volunteers at the coven’s entrance, armed with a combination of Dr. Chunn’s and Walker’s ammunition to combat a possible Damned and/or Day Reaper attack. Trusting Bex’s theory that Jillian hadn’t adopted the full Master’s power and therefore wouldn’t sense our infiltration—assuming we refrained from using walkie-talkies this time—was a small leap of faith, but half an hour in, and the plan was unfolding with only one hitch: we didn’t know whether Walker had successfully ambushed Kaden, and until we connected to the Wi-Fi, we had no way to find out.
The password—even with a capital N, with and without a special character, with and without the numbers 1723 and every combination thereof—did not work.
“Nope, that’s not it either,” I said.
Dominic cursed. “Did you try it with an exclamation point?”
“I tried it every which way.” I looked up from my phone and met his eyes. “We need to consider an alternative option to video-chatting Kaden’s kidnapping.” I sighed, and the reluctance I felt at considering my next words made my sigh end on a low, rattling growl. “I know we had decided against it, but if we can’t get online to leverage Kaden virtually, Walker needs to bring Kaden here so we can leverage him in person.”
“Nathan’s arguments against that were valid,” Dominic reminded me. “Keeping Kaden away from Jillian and using him as leverage from afar was brilliant, not to mention the double benefit of keeping Walker away from us.”
“You think I don’t know that?” I snapped. “But if we wait much longer, we won’t have time to double back to get service, and then where will we be? No Wi-Fi, no service, and no Kaden means no leverage. You tell me: what other choice do we have?”
“We don’t,” Dominic growled. “Let’s double back and make the call.”
Twenty minutes later, we were standing just outside the coven’s entrance, and Walker picked up on the second ring.
“Do you have Kaden?” I asked.
“No, ‘hello?’ No, ‘how are you’?” he asked. “What happened to keeping it civil, DiRocco?”
Dominic cleared his throat suspiciously.
I glared daggers at him; I could feel the tremor of his amusement through his nonchalant facade. “You know me: straight and to the point.”
“Actually, I don’t know you very well at all.”
I rolled my eyes. “Do you have Kaden or not?”
Walker sighed. “Not. He hasn’t shown up yet.”
“Well, when he does, we have a change of plan,” I said and updated him on our Wi-Fi failure.
“We’ll make it work. I’ll let you know when I have Kaden,” Walker said.
“Great, I—”
But I heard the click from his end. I was talking to myself. “Bastard,” I muttered.
“No one employs proper phone etiquette these days,” Dominic commented.
I wrinkled my nose at him.
Two hours later, we still hadn’t heard from Walker, but we’d reconnected with Rafe and Neil and located Jillian. She must have already left the coven, hunted, and returned in the first few hours of sunset because she was positively aglow with good health. From our ten-story vantage atop the highest honeycomb in the coven’s great hall—the central location where New York City vampires slept during the day and either hosted dinner parties or slashed throats during the night depending on the guest of honor�
��s appetite—I could just tell her apart her from the vampire she was speaking with. The other vampire was also a lethal-looking woman wearing leather, but there was no mistaking the glow of Jillian’s ice-and-blue eyes, so eerily similar to Dominic’s eyes, and her blond, pixie-short hair. When we’d first met, her hair had been a riot of curls down to her waist, but after losing her long locks during her imprisonment in the Underneath, she’d chosen to keep the short style.
The other vampire left, and another replaced her. When that conversation finished, Jillian spoke to a third and a fourth and a fifth vampire, and my heart bottomed out into my stomach. I jerked my head back to Dominic, and we retreated from the overlook. Rafe and Neil were waiting for us at the back tunnel of the top level, guarding the entrance to the honeycombs. I put my finger to my lips for silence and waited until we were far away, buried back beneath the main coven by layers of earth and stone passageways so that we couldn’t be overheard, not by anyone, before speaking.
“Bex was wrong,” I whispered. “Having fully-adopted the Master’s power or not, Jillian knows we’re here.”
Dominic shook his head. “Jillian knows someone infiltrated the coven, but without the full Master’s power, she has no way of knowing with certainty that it’s us.”
I gave him a flat look. “Who else would infiltrate her coven but us?”
“For all she knows, we may be dead. She doesn’t know the extent of our plan, and she won’t anticipate Day Reaper or human involvement. How could she? Not even I could have foreseen such a united stand again her,” Dominic argued. “We have the advantage.”
“What’s wrong?” Rafe asked. “What did you see?”
“She’s consulting with people,” I said. “She’s being very discreet, but one by one, she’s giving orders, making plans,” I glanced at Dominic. “Planning a big move.”
“Our move is bigger,” Dominic argued. “Once we have our leverage and the Day Reapers are released, we’ll have the advantage.”
I sighed and turned to Rafe. “Did you find Sevris?”
He shook his head.
“Keep looking,” Dominic said, but we both knew the only thing more disheartening than Jillian planning a counterattack was imagining that Sevris was planning it with her.
Another three hours later, I’d gnawed all ten nails down to the quick and grew them back, but Walker finally called with good news: he’d ambushed and successfully subdued Kaden. At least one thing was going according to plan, even if it was the one thing Walker was in charge of. Dominic and I met him at the coven’s subterranean entrance. Kaden was draped over Walker’s shoulder, his arms and legs bound with the same debilitating material that Walker had used on me, but Kaden looked significantly worse than I imagined myself looking after being ambushed.
The majority of the skin on his face, neck, and upper body had been shredded, either by some sort of blast or excessive bullet spray. His long, auburn hair was matted with unidentifiable, mangled pieces of muscle or maybe skin and clots of blood, or all three, and his scalp, separated from most of his head, flapped in time with Walker’s stride, rhythmically revealing and concealing the skull beneath. The majority of Kaden’s extremities were visibly broken, evident from their unnatural angles, and in some instances, visibly exposed. His left ear and nostril were dangling by threads.
The contrast between Kaden’s beefy, muscle-bound body and its complete destruction was startling. There’d never been any love lost between Kaden and me—hard to feel anything but resentment toward a person who continually and unapologetically attacked and attempted to murder you—but even I couldn’t see Kaden’s injuries and not cringe. He was so unrecognizable that if it wasn’t for the fact that his remaining violet-hued eye was clearly glaring spears of hatred and vengeance at me instead of staring vacantly, I would have thought him dead, or perhaps, not Kaden at all.
“Could he have possibly shot more bullets into his face?” I hissed.
“Yes,” Dominic said coolly. “The right eye and part of his nostril remain intact.”
I pursed my lips and shot Dominic a look under my brows.
Walker dropped Kaden on the ground at our feet and stepped back. “Problem?”
Kaden coughed, and bloody foam spewed from the hole in his lower face that was once his mouth. The movement caused his ear to detach from his head.
I raised my eyebrows.
“He’s alive, which means he’s leverage, and his wounds are debilitating, which means he’s not a danger to us. I did my job.” Walker crossed his arms. “Let’s see you do yours.”
I could have said a lot of things; my gut reaction to Walker lately was more emotional than rational. I would have loved to feel the muscles in his jaw clench and smell the blush of his anger, like hot sauce, knowing that I could get under his skin and singe him in places he’d wounded me. But that kind of thinking was nothing but shackles to the past, and by God, I was moving forward, even if that meant gnawing off the shackled limb.
I nodded. “Thank you,” I said, my voice bland but sincere. I couldn’t work up a smile, but smiling with fangs was counterproductive anyway.
Walker swayed back slightly, relaxing where I hadn’t even noticed he’d already been tense. “You’re welcome.”
Dominic stepped forward and lifted Kaden into his arms, slinging him over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Kaden made a noise, something between a growl, a gasp, and a sob, but otherwise, remained deadweight. I shouldn’t have felt anything but satisfaction at a plan well executed—Kaden was a sociopathic serial killer, he’d attacked me multiple times, murdered dozens upon dozens of people, and was just as responsible for the deaths and destruction in New York City as Jillian—but that noise, even from a man like him, still chafed.
I picked up his ear and shoved it in my back pocket. If everything went according to plan, he wouldn’t need it, but bleeding hearts make you do things that go beyond logic.
I nodded to Walker and turned to leave.
“I could help.”
I glanced over my shoulder doubtfully, but by the earnest clarity in his expression and grim determination tightening his pinched lips, the offer was sincere.
“You’ve already been an extraordinary help,” I said carefully, nodding at Kaden curled over Dominic’s shoulder. “We couldn’t have done this without you.”
Walker glanced askance at the wall, looking extremely uncomfortable with my praise and suddenly fascinated with the slick, uneven cavern. “Yes, you could have. Not as easily, maybe, but you’d have figured it out. You always do.”
“True,” I conceded, “but like you said, not as easily, and we certainly don’t need anything more difficult than it already is. So thank you.”
He nodded. “Everyone’s a part of this fight—Greta and Rowens, Logan, Keagan, Theresa, and even Jeremy, for Christ’s sake—but somehow along the way, I became one of the people to fight against instead of one of the people to fight alongside. I’m not saying we’re friends, but tonight, we’re allies,” Walker said, standing his ground. “I promised, remember?” he said ruefully. “Let me see this through to the end. This is my fight, too, as much as everyone else’s.”
Walker would be a distraction, no matter his sincerity. I couldn’t focus on Jillian if I had to watch over my shoulder for Walker. Handshake promises and good intentions aside, that’s exactly where I’d be looking—back instead of forward. People get hurt easily enough when they trust the people covering their six; people die when they don’t.
But I hesitated, unsure how to reject his offer without also rejecting our tentative truce.
Dominic squeezed my shoulder. “Everyone is a part of this fight, including you,” he said, calm and sure and sincere, a voice that had led hundreds of people for hundreds of years and had had to speak even when he couldn’t find the words. “You’ve already done your part.” He shrugged, indicating Kaden over his shoulder.
“We couldn’t ask for more.”
“I’m offering,” Walker insisted.
“Let me rephrase,” Dominic said, still sure. Still sincere. “We won’t ask for more.”
Walker’s expression didn’t change. “If it’s a matter of trust, I gave you my word. I’m good for it, right, Cassidy?” He turned to me. “If you know me at all, you know that.”
I pressed my lips together to stifle a knee-jerk, sarcastic reply. The truce between us was a lie; I could feel it every time his eyes settled on me and his fist tightened in reaction. I could hear his bitterness and loosely leashed rage like the rattle and howl of a gale-force wind—but a lie that kept everyone alive was better than a truth that killed one or both of us.
So I looked him dead-straight in the eyes and spoke a half-truth I could live with.
“It’s not a matter of trust,” I said softly. “It’s a matter of planning. We have a mission laid out, which is already unraveling, and I want to stick to our original plan as closely as possible. We have enough foreseen obstacles to face; I don’t want to add unforeseen factors into the equation, no matter the good intentions behind them.”
I lifted my hand to touch his shoulder in comfort and to convince him of my sincerity. The movement was natural to me and unthinking, and when Walker jerked back violently and lifted his arm, I didn’t understand at first. I didn’t even react, but Dominic did. He was suddenly between us, twisting Walker’s wrist until the gun in his hand clattered to the floor.
I let my hand drop back down to my side.
Walker realized his mistake when I didn’t continue my advance, and he actually looked a little chagrined. He blushed and wouldn’t meet my eyes even after Dominic stepped back.
“Maybe it is a matter of trust,” I amended.
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