Chapter Eighteen
TOREN
There are people in your life who arrive quietly and stay loudly.
Carnage De Santis arrived like a footnote and became the whole page.
He doesn't speak for the first ten minutes.
Neither do I.
That's the thing about Carn, the silence between us has never been the uncomfortable kind.
It's never been the silence of two people who don't know what to say to each other.
It's the silence of someone who knows exactly what to say and is giving you the time to come down from whatever height you were just at before he says it.
He does that. He reads the room and then he reads me, and he waits.
I watch the road unreel in front of the headlights and press my knees together and hold very still, because if I move too much or think too hard or stop looking at the road for long enough to think about the beach and the cold water and the look on Xaden's face when his hand grazed my stomach and everything fractured, I'm going to cry.
And I am not going to cry in the car. I have done enough crying tonight to last a season and I'm putting a moratorium on it, effective immediately, until I am somewhere private with a door I can close.
The USB drive is cold in my hand. I've been holding it since we collected it from the old house we were staying at when I came back to town.
Fiona Williams.
Everything on that drive. Everything Kellan gathered and hid, then handed to me in pieces across the months between his handler threatening him and his brain meeting the floor of the rink.
The hard copies of the files are hidden away safely, only in a place I know.
I can’t give those to Xaden, they implicate Cas.
I also refuse to give him any of the files on the Denver King’s, Filthy Few or The Butcher.
If Alex decides to reveal who Cas is to him, then that is his choice but I won’t be the one to rat anyone out.
I curl my fingers around it.
Win the war, Tor. That was always all I needed from you.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Carnage asks.
His voice is low and even, the particular register he uses when he already knows the answer but is giving me the dignity of choosing it myself.
“No,” I say.
A pause.
“Do you want to not talk about it while I pretend I'm not watching you hold that USB drive hard enough to crack it?”
Something that is almost a laugh moves through my chest. “Yes. That one.”
“Okay.” He shifts his grip on the wheel. Not a big movement. Just the adjustment of someone changing weight, someone whose left side is making demands he's choosing to ignore. “We're ten minutes out. He’ll have all his men there, Alex is on standby in case we need him.”
“Carn.”
“Tor.”
“Your side—”
“Is fine.”
“You keep saying that.”
“It keeps being true.” He glances at me briefly. Pale blue eyes in the dark. “More or less.”
I look at his profile. The easy set of his jaw, that isn't easy at all if you know him. The way his left arm is resting just slightly too close to his body, the angle of it too careful to be natural.
“He hit you in the side,” I say. Flat. Precise.
A pause.
“He hit me in the ribs. The wound is lower.” He says it like this is a meaningful distinction. “Different zip codes.”
“Carnage.”
“I've had worse.” His voice doesn't change.
I believe him and I hate that I believe him.
I hate even more that I know he's telling the truth, that the accumulated damage of his life means a punch to the ribs in a dark parking lot registers somewhere on the scale between inconvenient and unremarkable.
“I'm fine, Tor. I promise. You can yell at me about it tomorrow when we both have the energy for it. But tonight I am coming with you. Alex and the guys will be stationed down the street in case we need them. Harper is at the house with the girls. Everything is fine.”
I look at the road.
“I shouldn't have let it happen,” I say. “Any of it. You lying in that bed bleeding. Him—” I stop. Swallow. “I should have planned better. I should have known the phone was bugged and he was listening—”
“You put yourself between us,” he says. Quiet. Certain. “That's what you should have done. That's exactly what you did. As for everything else, it’s in the past and we can’t change it. We need to move forward now and focus on taking out the real threat.”
I ignore the last part. “You shoved me out the way earlier so he could shoot you and not me!”
“Because that's what I should have done.” There is no argument in his voice.
No drama. Just the simple, uncluttered logic of a man who has decided something and doesn't need to justify it.
“That's the arrangement, darlin'. That's how this works.
You put yourself between people and I make sure you're still standing when the smoke clears.”
I look at him.
He doesn't look back. Just watches the road.
“That's not a sustainable arrangement,” I say.
The corner of his mouth moves. “No. It really isn't.” His voice drops to barely above a whisper as he mutters, “But losing you isn’t an option.”
The new safe house he takes me to is a converted farmhouse twenty minutes outside of Somerset that belongs, technically, to a shell company that belongs to another shell company that Halo set up so meticulously that even Alex Denver's accountants had to look twice.
It is, in other words, the safest place that I can currently be.
Which is why it doesn't feel safe at all.
Safety is something that happens in your body, not in buildings.
You can be in the most fortified structure in the country and feel like you're standing in an open field in a lightning storm.
I know this from experience. I know it from Walter House, where every door was locked and every window was secured and I spent a year feeling like the most exposed person alive.
What I feel right now is not quite fear. It's the aftermath of fear. The physical exhaustion of having held yourself rigid against something for too long and then being released, and now every muscle is loose, shaky and untrustworthy and you're not sure you're standing straight.
Carnage opens the front door and the warmth of the house reaches me before I step through it.
I stop in the doorway.
I'm still wearing Xaden's hoodie.
I look down at it. The Stormsend Ravens crest on the chest. The navy-blue fabric that still smells faintly of cedar, salt water and something darker underneath that I am deliberately not thinking about.
I should take it off.
I don't.
Carnage clocks it. He clocks everything, always, with those pale blue eyes that don't miss a single thing. He looks at the hoodie for exactly one second, then he looks at my face and he makes the decision not to say a word about it. I love him for that, I genuinely and completely love him for that.
“Kitchen,” he says. “Sit down.”
“I'm not injured—”
“No, but you're running on adrenaline, you haven't eaten since this morning and you're pregnant.” He says it plainly, without ceremony, the way he says most things. “Sit down, Tor. Let me make something.”
I sit down.
I put the USB drive on the table in front of me and look at it.
The kitchen is the best room in the farmhouse. Wide oak table that could seat ten. Windows that look out over the dark flat of the fields. A wood burner in the corner that someone has kept banked, throwing a low amber light across the flagstone floor.
I sit in the kitchen staring at nothing, I put both hands on my stomach and I stay like that for a while.
Just the two of us.
Not the war, not Xaden, not the cartel, not Fiona, not the choices I've made or the ones I still have to make.
Just this.
The quiet extraordinary fact of it.
I have been so busy surviving that I have not once allowed myself to simply be with it.
To acknowledge that there is a life inside me that did not choose this and is growing regardless, that will arrive in a world I am still in the process of making safer, that will belong to me and to a man who does not yet know how to hold what he feels without breaking it.
We're going to figure it out,
I think. Not a promise. I'm too honest with myself for promises I can't guarantee. Just the intention of it. The direction.
I close my eyes.
To teach is to learn. To learn is to excel. To excel is to thrive. To thrive is to live.
Both of us.
Behind me, I hear Carn moving around the kitchen.
The low sound of a cupboard. The soft percussion of something being set down on the counter.
He does it with a deliberate quietness, the way he does everything when he thinks I need calm rather than noise, and I let the sounds wash over me and try to just be in the room.
To teach is to learn. To learn is to excel. To excel is to thrive. To thrive is to live.
I breathe.
“He gave you his hoodie,” Carnage says from behind me.
Not a question.
“He took my shirt,” I say. “He was checking me for a wire.”
A pause. The quiet sound of something being poured.
“And then he gave you his hoodie,” Carnage repeats.
I look at the USB drive.
“Don't make it something it isn't,” I say, because those were Xaden's words and they are the safest words I have right now, the most useful container for something I don't have the capacity to examine tonight.
Carn sets a mug down in front of me. Hot water, honey, a slice of lemon, the exact combination he's been making me since the first week we knew each other, when I was strung out from the aftermath of a panic attack and he appeared in the kitchen at two in the morning without being asked and made this without asking what I wanted.
I wrap both hands around it and watch as he places a piece of toast in front of me, I force myself to eat half because the nausea has given way to the specific hollow ache of not having eaten properly in two days.
“I'm not making it anything,” he says, pulling out the chair across from me and lowering himself into it in the careful, measured way he's been moving all night, the way that tells me exactly how much the parking lot cost him. “I'm just noting the facts.”