by Kit Rocha
Jade opened her mouth. Mad covered it with his hand and shook his head. Her thin cotton blouse was feeble protection, but he pulled it up over her mouth and nose and turned her toward the house, keeping his body between her and the woods. "As fast as you can," he told her, hustling her forward. "Try not to breathe it in."
She nodded her understanding and quickened her pace as much as she could in the rising haze. The wind was at their backs, pushing the smoke after them like a pack of hunting hounds. Mad pressed closer to her, trying to breathe as shallowly as possible, all of his focus on outrunning the cloud of smoke.
Jade stumbled, and Mad jerked her off her feet and hauled her clear of the encroaching smoke. The house loomed ahead of them, twenty feet, fifteen… The back door flew open, and he'd never been so fucking glad to see Deacon in his life. He staggered the last ten feet and shoved Jade at him. "Get her to safety. I'll deal with this."
"No!" Jade's hand shot out, her fingers tangling in his jacket. "Come with us, Mad."
"I can't." It risked shattering their moment of understanding, but Jade's survival trumped everything. "You're a sector leader now. Your job is to get someplace secure so you can keep protecting the people depending on you. Just like Dallas would." He cupped her cheek. "My job is to take care of the problem."
She hesitated, her eyes shuttered. Then she wrenched free of Deacon's grasp to grab Mad's hair, hauled him down, and kissed him hard. "Come back," she whispered hoarsely. "Come back, or Scarlet and Dylan will never forgive me."
Scarlet and Dylan would never forgive him for playing the martyr, for sinking a blade of guilt into Jade's heart. If he died today, like this, the wound would bleed forever.
So he wouldn't fucking die.
He kissed her again, but Deacon pulled her away. "Watch your ass," he said tersely, then slammed the door.
By the time he turned, the wind had brought the great billows of smoke to him. But he could still breathe and control his muscles, which meant the grenade was probably filled with some sort of psychoactive agent. Soon, he'd be tripping higher than a Sector Five junkie, but at least the smoke offered some cover. He wouldn't make for an easy target.
He drew his pistol and crept slowly into the pale cloud. The earth tilted beneath him as he listened for footsteps, for the slightest hint of his attacker's location, but all that filled his ears was a high-pitched whine that swelled and receded like the tide.
He couldn't trust his eyes, either. Shapes flitted in and out of the smoke, formless and fleeting, and he edged closer to the wall that surrounded the garden. It was something solid, maybe the only thing he could rely on with the ground itself trembling under his feet.
A shot cracked through the air, hitting the wall next to him. The brick splintered, and sharp pain sliced across his cheek, but he didn't care. He didn't care because it gave him a direction. He charged forward, firing at the shadow that darted past him. He was rewarded with a grunt of pain before the smoke swallowed the figure, but he kept firing, following the crunch of gravel under boots.
Too fast. The thought came a second before he squeezed his finger down a final time, emptying the magazine. A rookie fucking mistake, and he made another one by groping for the spare ammo he wasn't even carrying.
This time, the bullet tore past him so closely that he felt the heat of it along his arm. He dove to one side, hissing as he hit the gravel hard, and came up on his knees with his thoughts racing in a hundred directions, too warped to be trusted and too slippery to hold. He'd be dead before he formulated a plan to keep from dying—
Unless he stopped trying to think.
A sound came from his right. Soft, a muffled footstep. Mad rolled to his feet and rushed it. The figure appeared from the smoke a heartbeat before Mad barreled into him—tall, clad in black, his face distorted and hidden by googles and a mask. Mad crashed into him, and they both went down in a heap.
Metal skittered across gravel—a gun. Mad had only a split second to process that before the man swung hard, snapping him in the jaw with a solid blow that rolled him onto his back.
Oddly, the pain helped. It was purely physical, completely familiar. His body knew the dance of a bare-knuckle brawl. A hundred nights in the cage came back to him as the man slammed into him again, fighting to pin him to the ground.
He twisted his head out of the way of the next punch, letting the guy's hand smash into the gravel. Mad trapped his arm and returned the attack, but not with a punch. He ripped the mask from his attacker's face and tossed it away into the smoke. Panic flooded the hazel eyes staring down at him, a heartbeat's worth of hesitation.
Plenty of time for Mad to land a good right hook.
The man's face whipped to the side. He tried to recover, but Mad moved on pure instinct. He wrapped his legs around the man's waist and rolled, gaining the upper position. His opponent bucked, trying to throw him off, but Mad already had his boot knife in his hand.
He buried it into the side of the man's throat and yanked hard. Blood sprayed in a glittering rainbow, gushing over his hands and arms, splattering his clothes. It should have been red—he knew it should have been red, the same way he knew he couldn't just sit there, staring at the man who'd tried to kill him—but instinct faded along with the light in his opponent's eyes.
The smoke still surrounded him. The wind caught it, played with it, set it drifting as Mad rolled free of the dead attacker and sprawled onto his back. His arms and legs were too heavy to move. The earth itself was growing denser, dragging him down to its surface.
He'd get up. As soon as gravity righted itself.
"Adrian."
It was a man's voice. Low, deep. Familiar. But not Deacon. This voice bypassed the fog in his mind to sink into his heart.
Why did he always have to be haunted so literally?
"You have to get up, son."
Mad opened his eyes and faced his ghost.
Carter Maddox was tall and broad-shouldered, the only two things Mad had inherited from him. Carter had auburn hair, blue eyes, and freckles across a nose that had been broken exactly once—during a training exercise with Mad's mother.
He'd lost count of the number of times they'd laughingly told the story. The princess of Sector One and her trainer-turned-bodyguard. Their forbidden romance. The love against which he measured all love because it was the only example he'd had—the kind of love where nothing could stop you from fighting to your last breath. The kind where you risked everything.
No order from the Prophet could have prevented Carter from coming for his family. Nothing short of God coming to earth with all of his angels could have stopped him. He'd kicked through the door of their dark little hell, bringing light and hope with him. And for a brief, shining moment, Mad had believed in hope and happy endings.
Carter Maddox didn't obey orders from the Prophet. But he obeyed them from his wife. With the panicked cries of reinforcements echoing through the floor, she'd snatched the gun from Carter's hand and shoved Mad into his father's arms, changing his world forever with the last words he ever heard her speak.
Go. Get him to safety. They're still afraid to hurt me.
Carter got Mad to safety. And then he turned around and went back for Adriana, because their love was the kind where you never gave up. Where you died, if that was what it took.
Mad was going to die if he didn't get up.
He tried. He focused on lifting his arm, just one arm, but the second it left the ground, the world dipped sideways and his stomach swam. He rolled to his side and stayed there until the colors stopped throbbing so brightly they blurred out everything else.
His father was still there, waiting. "I can't," he rasped. "I can't do it."
"Yes, you can," Carter insisted. "You're a fighter."
Mad choked on bitter, bruising laughter. "I'm not a fighter. I'm a Rios. I'm a martyr."
His father crouched beside him. "You have Rios blood. Your mother's blood, and she was the strongest person I ever met. The best damn fighter yo
u could ever hope to see." He gripped Mad's hand. "So get up."
"You're not real," he muttered, squeezing his eyes shut. But the hand gripping his felt as real as anything else in the world.
Jade was waiting for him. Scarlet, with her angelic voice and her bright eyes.
And Dylan.
Dylan was the one who brought him to his knees. Dylan and all the words between them, all the bitter, angry words they'd finally given voice. Those couldn't be the last words.
He had to fight.
His stomach churned as he climbed to his feet. He swayed, almost went back down. The wind stirred his hair, blowing straight at him, and he knew if he could just put one foot in front of the other, he'd find the edge of the heavy cloud of smoke.
"You're almost there," his father's voice whispered, distant and hazy, as if he was fading along with the smoke. Not that he should be, because Mad broke into clean air and was still high as hell, but his staggering footsteps held no ghostly echo.
He made it up the path and braced himself against the side of the house. The door swung open, the darkness behind it vast and disorienting after the bright sunlight. He toppled forward and slammed into a slightly less hard surface.
"I've got you." Deacon held him up, practically dragging him inside the house. "Help me. Is any of this blood his?"
"I don't think so." Jade touched his face, cool and soothing, before sliding down his arms and across his chest. "We need to get him to Dylan."
"He's already on his way to One. We can meet him there."
"Mad." Jade's face filled his vision, beautiful and worried, with a gold halo shining behind her head, like a painting of a saint. "It's going to be okay. We're taking you to Dylan. Just close your eyes."
He didn't have a choice. The light behind her was so bright it made his eyes water. The blissful release of passing the fuck out beckoned, and Mad welcomed it, even as Jade's final words chased him down into darkness.
"I'll tell him about Gideon when he wakes up."
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The bathtub in the guest suite at Gideon's house was as lavish as Jade remembered, but Jade picked the shower this time. She stood under the hot spray until she'd scrubbed the last of the blood from her hands and arms.
None of it was Mad's, thank God, but he'd been covered in it. By the time they got him to Sector One, so was she. Maricela had taken one look at it and broken down in sobs, weeping until Isabela finally took her away.
There was nothing else Jade could do. Mad was sleeping off the drugs under a healer's supervision, and Dylan was working on Gideon. She hadn't even tried to shove her way into the room to assist—one look at her own wide pupils in the mirror told her she was still unsteady herself.
But she was also safe, whole. And when she wrapped herself in her robe and slipped from the bathroom, Scarlet was standing there, so familiar and necessary to life that a sob caught in her throat.
She opened her arms, and Jade flew into them. Scarlet held her close, rocking her gently as she pressed her lips to her wet hair. "Oh, baby. Are you okay?"
"I'm fine, I'm—" She clung to Scarlet, pressed so tight she could pace her slow, steadying breaths by the beat of the other woman's heart. "Mad didn't let him get near me. But he was in that gas for so long."
"He'll be all right," she soothed. "Dylan already consulted with Ryder, from Sector Five. It's a short-acting hallucinogen. It won't hurt him."
Jade pulled back far enough to read the truth in Scarlet's eyes, and relief nearly melted her knees. "I shouldn't have let him do it. I just kept thinking—if this is how he dies, for me…"
"I know," Scarlet whispered, then touched her cheek. "But any of us would do it, no hesitation. It's part of loving someone."
Jade swallowed tears and tried to be brave enough not to look away. "I should have talked to you, but I'm terrified. I'm so scared that you'll realize who I am and you'll hate me for it. That you deserve to hate me for it because I didn't show you everything."
"No." Scarlet stared back at her with eyes as clear and sure as the sky. "I know you, sweetheart. This is who you've always been—the woman strong enough to do this."
"Only because of you." She buried her face against Scarlet's throat again. "Gareth Woods broke me," she whispered, admitting it to herself for the first time. "Maybe only a little, but the bruises are still there. If I keep pretending they're not, I'll hurt all of us."
Scarlet sighed. "All I need is for you to talk to me. That way, I know you're not holding it all in, letting it build up and fuck with your head."
Talking terrified her only moderately less than assassins, which would make it so easy to put off. To murmur promises and then brush it aside and tell herself she'd start later, when the crisis was over. She'd mean well. But Jade could play herself almost as expertly as she played other people.
She backed toward the bed, tugging Scarlet with her, and perched on the end. "I didn't know how I'd feel about killing someone. And after it was done...I felt okay. But Deacon was angry with me for not letting him do it, and you were all so worried…" She twisted her fingers through Scarlet's. "Maybe I started to feel like I wasn't supposed to be okay."
Scarlet snorted. "Deacon was probably pissed because you offended his sense of honor or something. The rest of us…" She shook her head. "I don't know about Dylan and Mad, but for me? It's not as simple as killing someone and feeling okay about it. Even if it was right—even if it was righteous—sometimes that shit sneaks up on you. And you may not even realize it's happening until it takes you down."
Scarlet was right, and Jade knew it. Cerys had absolved herself of guilt by sending others to do her killing, but Jade couldn't fix it by blindly doing the opposite. She had to walk her own path, make her own choices—and talk about them with someone who loved her enough to give her hard truths.
Like Lex did for Dallas.
"I want to run Two," she told Scarlet softly. "Not because I feel like no one else can, and not because I have to. I want to do it because someone is going to create a new world for the people who live there, and I think I can make it a good one. But if I had to choose between Sector Two and you, I'd choose you. All of you, every time."
Scarlet's sudden smile was brilliant, as bright as sunlight streaming through a window, as warm as the trembling kiss she pressed to Jade's lips.
So sweet. Sweet and open and vulnerable, and Jade sank her fingers into Scarlet's hair and savored the impossible contradiction of a kiss that was both comfortably familiar and achingly new.
She might have kissed Scarlet forever if the soft click of the door hadn't intruded. Jade pulled back with reluctance only to find Mad hovering in the doorway, swaying with exhaustion, one hand still gripping the doorknob as if he was considering backing out of the room.
Scarlet rose, reached for him—then pulled her hand back and pressed her fingers to her lips. "You look like hell."
His lips curved in that quintessentially Mad smile—the one that laughed in the face of his own broken heart. "Funny, 'cause I'm looking at heaven."
He'd stand there forever if they let him, half-dead on his feet and too proud to impose. Jade moved past Scarlet and wrapped her arm around his waist. "Sit down before you fall over. You're too heavy to carry."
He walked mostly under his own power, but when they reached Scarlet, Mad dug in his feet. He touched her cheek with a trembling hand. "I'm sorry, Scarlet."
Tears glittered in her eyes. "Don't. Don't apologize to me."
"Too late." He slid his hand down to her back and tugged, pulling her against them. Jade put her other arm around Scarlet, holding them both as Mad rested his forehead against Scarlet's. "I walked away angry. We don't get to do that, not during a war."
"No, you were right." Her voice broke. "I don't understand the pressure, or what you two have to deal with. I've never had people depending on me."
"Bullshit," Mad said, low and intense. "Your band always depended on you. And before any of us even met you, Six talk
ed about you like you made the damn moon rise every night. You know what it means to take care of your people."
"You take care of us," Jade agreed, stroking Scarlet's hair. "You tell us the shit we don't want to hear—that we need to hear. That's a thankless job."
"It's annoying," she countered, "and more than a little mean."
"It's annoying." Mad kissed her forehead. "But only when you're right. And then it's not mean at all."
She met his gaze as the first tears slipped down her cheeks. "I'll always sing for you. I promise."
Mad's smile this time was new. Brilliant, shining—so real that it made Jade's eyes sting. Scarlet was the heart of them. Loyal, fearless, loving them all so joyfully that she could heal just by forgiving them.
Mad bent toward Scarlet and overbalanced, and Jade caught him before he brought them all down in a tangle. "Bed," she commanded, urging Mad toward it. "You can ask her to sing once you get there."
"Yes, ma'am." He let Scarlet get her shoulder under his other arm before leaning close to her. "I think Dylan's rubbing off on her. She's getting bossy."
"Or she doesn't want you to wind up back in the hospital. Or infirmary." Scarlet wrinkled her nose. "However that works here."
Mad huffed a laugh as he tumbled to the bed. "I think how it works is Dylan yells at me."
There was so much raw vulnerability in the words, but Jade couldn't soothe it. Only Dylan could relieve the last bit of tension keeping Mad coiled tight even as Jade and Scarlet curled up on either side of him.
They fit together in so many different ways, and for so many different reasons. The way Scarlet proved with every breath that a woman's strength could take whatever form she damn well pleased, then challenged Jade to believe it. The way Mad looked at the world with the same determination in Jade's heart, refusing to believe he couldn't make it better.
The way Dylan cut through the tangle of her desires to remind her that trust should be at the heart of everything—and that you didn't reward people with trust. You rewarded them for it, because there was nothing as valuable in a dark and broken world as someone who believed in you enough to let themselves be vulnerable.