Chapter Nineteen
XADEN
There is a particular kind of damage that doesn't announce itself.
It doesn't arrive with noise. Doesn't come in through the door at full speed the way grief did when they put my sister in the ground, loud, obliterating and impossible to outrun.
It comes in quiet. It settles into the space between one decision and the next and it waits there, patient as anything, until you try to move forward and find you can't.
I watch the tail lights of Carnage's car disappear around the bend at the end of the coastal road.
I stand in the parking lot until there's nothing to watch anymore.
Then I stand there a little longer.
The cold doesn't bother me. It never has.
I grew up in Stormsend where the wind comes off the water like it has a personal grievance with everything it touches and you either learn to let it move through you or it breaks you.
I learned. I was eight years old when my father stood me on the end of the jetty in February and told me that a Devlin doesn't feel the cold, he uses it.
I stood there until I couldn't feel my hands and I told myself he was right.
He wasn't. I was just eight years old and desperate for my father to be proud of me and get his approval.
Some lessons take a long time to unlearn.
I reach into my pocket and pull out the ultrasound.
The parking lot light is weak, the kind of half-hearted yellow that does more to suggest illumination than provide it, but I don't need good light to see it.
I know the shape of it. The tiny blur of it.
The specific inadequacy of knowing that something real and irreversible is contained in that smear of gray and white and I have chosen, deliberately and repeatedly, to call it nothing.
A mistake.
A consequence.
Nothing more.
I said that to her face.
I watch myself say it again from the outside, the way you watch yourself do something inexcusable in a dream, present for all of it and powerless to stop it.
The look on her face. The way she went pale and very still for exactly half a second before the anger came up and replaced it.
I know that sequence. I've catalogued every expression Toren Kellar makes when something lands somewhere she didn't expect and I know the order they arrive in.
First the stillness. Then the fury. Then the thing underneath the fury that she tries to bury and almost manages.
I put that look on her face.
I fold the ultrasound back into my pocket. Carefully. Like it's something that needs to be handled with a specific kind of attention I have no intention of examining too closely.
My phone buzzes.
Cas.
I answer it because I have to and because standing in a dark parking lot on the coastal road, staring at nothing because her taillights have disappeared and she’s away from here… away from… me, is not a version of myself I'm willing to sit with any longer.
“Where are you?” His voice is measured. Cas always measures his voice when he's worried. It's one of the tells he thinks he's hidden and hasn't.
“The coastal road.”
A pause.
“Still?”
“Get everyone to the apartment.” I start walking toward my car. “An hour.”
“X—”
“An hour, Cas.” I keep my voice even. “She's coming with the files. I need you there and I need you thinking clearly so whatever you're about to say about tonight, save it. She’s on her way to get the files with Carnage and will meet us there.”
Another pause. Longer this time. I can hear him deciding.
“Carnage was shot three weeks ago,” he says finally.
I say nothing.
“He still came even after I warned him tonight what would happen if he didn’t stay away from her.”
“He wants her,” I say. Flat. Final.
“Xaden.” Just my name. The way he says it when he's set something down and he needs me to pick it up. “Did you kill him?”
I get in the car. I don't answer.
I hear the exhale on the other end of the line. “Jesus.”
“He's fine.”
“He had a—"
“He's fine.” The words come out harder than I intend. I stare through the windshield at the stretch of coastal road and think about the way Carnage moved in that parking lot. The way he absorbed the hit and didn't show it and kept going. I think about Toren's voice when she said
he has a bullet wound in his side and the way she looked at me when she said it, like she was daring me to be the version of myself she couldn't stomach.
I don't know which version I am tonight.
That's the problem.
“One hour,” I repeat and end the call.
I don't drive to the apartment.
I know I said an hour. I know the meeting is happening and Fiona Williams needs to become a target.
There are pieces to move and decisions to make and the entire war is in a state of recalibration that requires my full and undivided attention.
I still have Masen to track down and slaughter.
I was distracted earlier but I won’t be when I see her again.
She will give up the location of her piece of shit brother!
I drive to the cemetery.
I have never been to her grave before.
Two years.
Two years since they put her in the ground on a gray Tuesday morning, when the sky couldn't decide between rain and just a general, personalized misery.
I stood at the back of the crowd in a suit that cost more than most people's monthly rent and watched them lower the casket and felt nothing.
Not because I didn't feel it. Because I couldn't afford to.
Because the second I let it in, I knew it would take me under and there were things that needed doing that required me to stay above the surface.
I made a decision that morning, standing in the wet grass at the back of a crowd of people who didn't know half of who she was, that I would not let grief make me useless.
I didn't come back after.
Cas asked me once, early on, in the careful way he asks things when he already knows the answer won't be good.
I told him the dead don't need visiting.
That she wasn't there. That standing in front of a piece of carved stone and talking to the dirt was a performance for the living and I didn't have time for it.
He didn't push.
He never does, which is the only reason I haven't killed him yet.
The cemetery gates are locked. I find the gap in the east wall anyway, the one I identified two years ago, on a night I drove here and sat outside for three hours and couldn't make myself get out of the car. I paid the groundskeeper never to fix it.
I get out of the car now.
The grass is wet. The dark is the particular quality of dark that exists at two in the morning, in a place built for quiet, thick and broken only by the weak spill of a half-moon through cloud cover.
I don't have a torch. I don't need one. I know where she is.
I have always known where she is, the coordinates of it burned into me the way everything about her is burned into me, permanent, involuntary and completely beyond my control.
I walk.
I stop at the headstone.
I just stand there.
My hands are shaking.
I look at them. Me, Xaden Devlin, who held a hammer over a man's kneecap without a tremor. Who pressed a scalpel to a woman's throat with a steady hand. Who sat in his father's study at seventeen and was told, plainly, what he was being built into and didn't flinch.
My hands are shaking outside my dead sister's grave.
I close them into fists.
Emmerson ‘Emery’ Devlin.
Beloved daughter and sister.
Gone but never forgotten.
The headstone is simple. She would have hated something ornate.
She used to say that people who needed grand gestures to prove their love hadn't been paying attention to the small ones, and she was right.
She was almost always right about things like that.
About the texture of people, the real shape of them beneath the version they presented to the world.
She could read a room in thirty seconds.
She could read me, which is a considerably harder proposition, in less.
Raven hair down to her waist. Gray eyes the same shade as mine. The particular kind of laugh that made everyone in a room feel like they were the most important person in it.
She looked at me like I was the version of myself I hadn't become yet. Like she was just waiting, patient and certain, for me to catch up.
She never got to see if she was right.
I lower myself to the grass in front of her headstone and I sit there for a long time before I say anything. The wind moves through the cemetery. The trees shift. Everything is wet, cold and quiet and I am here, finally, two years too late, and there is nothing to do about that except be here now.
“I should have come sooner,” I say.
It comes out rough. Stripped of everything.
“I know that. I knew it when I didn't come the first week and I knew it when I drove here two years ago and sat outside the gate for three hours and couldn't get out of the car, and I have known it every day since.” I stare at her name in the stone.
“I told myself you weren't here. That's true enough.
But the fuller truth is that I couldn't come because coming meant accepting that you were gone and I needed you to be— ” I stop.
Press the heels of my palms against my knees.
“I needed the grief to stay useful. If I came here and let it be real, actually real, it would have stopped being fuel and started being just what it is.” My voice drops.
“Loss. Just the ordinary unbearable loss of losing you.
And I couldn't afford that. Not until I'd finished what I started.”
The wind moves.
Nothing answers me.
Because the dead can’t fucking speak.