Chapter Twenty-One
XADEN
I stick my back against the wall as we climb the stairs, keeping my gaze up and my gun raised, ready to strike at any second.
She may know this place and how things work but I don’t trust her not to try and fuck me over.
The Denver Kings are hot on my fucking heels and I have to grit my teeth and fight the urge not to put a bullet in their fucking heads.
I spot a door as we make it to the next level.
The door gives way and I move through first, low and quiet.
I release my hold on Toren and raise one hand behind me.
I don't need to look back to know my men are following behind those five cunts.
I can feel them, disciplined, breathing controlled, weapons ready.
And Toren.
I always know where Toren is.
That's the fucking problem.
I shouldn’t be able to feel her out in a room filled with people, but it’s almost like a pull or a tug in the gut that alerts me to her being near.
She pulls the door shut behind us. The latch catches without a sound.
I don't acknowledge it. I don't acknowledge her.
I move forward and I keep my eyes ahead and I do what I always do with Toren, which is pretend that her being within ten feet of me doesn't make everything inside me pull in two directions at once.
It's easier when there's a mission. Focus narrows to a point and everything else falls away.
I signal two men left, two men right. They peel away without a sound.
Then the air hits me and whatever thought I was using to avoid thinking about her dissolves entirely.
It's cold in a way that has nothing to do with temperature.
The kind of cold that settles into a place over years, pressed into the stone by the weight of everything that's happened inside it.
Damp. Antiseptic. Something older underneath both of those that I feel in the back of my throat and don't have a clean name for.
I've been in prisons. I've been in places built by bad people for worse reasons.
This is different.
I move forward. The corridor is long and narrow, ceiling low, walls half bare stone and half cracked plaster peeling back in long strips.
The lights along the floor are half dead, the rest throwing out a sickly yellow glow that thickens the shadows more than it cuts them.
Heavy deadbolts on most of the doors are too new, too clean against all this rot.
Someone has been maintaining the things that matter.
I feel Toren move up to my shoulder before I hear her.
That's the thing about her that I resent most if I'm being honest with myself, which I try not to be.
She moves like she was built for this—quiet, precise, completely without hesitation.
In any other context, with any other person, I would call it an asset.
With Toren I call it inconvenient and leave it at that.
“Locks are new,” she murmurs, close enough that I feel the warmth of it against my jaw.
“I noticed,” I say flatly, and move ahead.
I don't look at her. I haven't looked directly at her since we entered and I intend to maintain that until we're back outside and I can put sufficient distance between us to think straight again.
We move deeper into the building. The sound behaves strangely in here. Footsteps return slightly wrong, echoing off surfaces they shouldn't reach. Something groans above us, long and slow. Below, that dripping I heard from outside, patient and rhythmic, counting down to something.
The stairwell opens on my right. Descending.
I point two fingers down and take the stairs without waiting.
Toren falls into step behind me and I am acutely, irritatingly aware of every single movement she makes in the dark.
The way she breathes. The way she stays exactly one step behind me, not because I’m holding her but because she knows I won’t let anyone hurt her because she is mine to torment and kill. Only I get that satisfaction.
I hate her.
I hate a lot of things about her, and I am aware, something I refuse to examine, that the cunt has lived longer than I should have allowed.
The lower corridor stops me cold.
Clean. After all the rot upstairs, down here is clean. Bare concrete. Swept floors. Steel doors, modern, reinforced, each one with a frosted observation window and a slot at the bottom. I move to the nearest door and angle my torch through the glass.
Small room. Metal cot. Drain in the center of the floor.
A figure flinches from the light, arm thrown up over their face, body curling inward. It’s the automatic brace of someone who has learned that whatever comes through that window is rarely good.
I pull back.
I stand still. I breathe as I press down everything that threatens to surface. I’m a sick son of a bitch and live to torture those who deserve it but this… This isn’t something even I could do to innocent fucking kids. The one in this room can’t be much older than puberty age.
Then Toren is beside me.
Not at my shoulder this time. Beside me, close enough that her arm nearly touches mine, and she looks through the same window and goes very, very quiet. I make the mistake of glancing at her.
Her jaw is tight. Her eyes are bright in the torchlight, not with tears, but with something raw and furious and deeply, privately felt.
She stares through that frosted glass and I watch something move across her face that she doesn't bother to hide, because she never bothers to hide anything, and that has always been the most disarming thing about her.
She feels everything loudly.
I look away first.
“Sixteen doors,” I say quietly. “Maybe more further in.”
She's silent for a moment. Then, “Twenty-two doors.”
It isn't a question. It isn't a statement.
“We get all of them,” she says. I move forward ignoring her like she didn’t just speak.
She falls into step beside me, not behind me this time. Beside me. Level with me, her shoulder almost brushing mine, and she doesn't say a word.
I raise my weapon and move deeper into Walter House. I don't look at her and I don't think about her, I focus entirely and completely on the mission.
And I am only partially successful.