Chapter Thirty-Five
TOREN
To teach is to learn. To learn is to excel. To excel is to thrive. To thrive is to live.
I repeat the phrase over and over again as I drive back to the house at breakneck speed, my worry over Carnage's safety choking me. I feel sick to my stomach, knowing he was hurt because he was helping me.
The texts are still burning on my screen.
Halo — Get back here now! It was a set up. They knew we were coming.
Halo — They took Carn down, he's hurt… bad.
Bad. The word is lodged in my chest like a piece of shrapnel I can't dig out. I've heard Carnage has taken hits that would put any other man in the ground and kept walking. Whatever Halo means by bad, it is worse than anything I want to imagine.
Harper is in the passenger seat. She hasn't said a word since I yanked her out of the rink and pushed her toward the car.
She knows better than to talk to me right now.
She can see my hands on the wheel, knuckles white, jaw set, the version of me that Carnage has spent weeks building, the one who doesn't crumble, who calculates instead of collapses and she is smart enough to let that version breathe.
I already told Meekan he would have to wait but he didn’t reply.
I already told Harper we're not meeting him tonight.
Some wars have to pause so you can count your casualties.
The operation was a set up. My father slipped through. The supply run was compromised before they ever got close, and the only reason anyone in that house knew the details of the plan, the routes, the timing, the number of men we had, was because it lived inside the walls of our house.
Inside our conversations.
I already know what I am going to find.
The lights are on when I pull up to the house. Two of the Kings' vehicles are parked crookedly at the front like they were abandoned in a hurry. I'm out of the car before Harper has her door open.
The front door is unlocked.
That alone tells me everything ran wrong.
The moment I step inside I hear it, low voices from the back bedroom, the particular kind of quiet that people use when someone is hurt and they don't want them to hear how bad it actually is. I follow the sound with my heart hammering against my ribs and push the door open.
Carnage is on the bed.
He's shirtless. There's a field dressing packed tight against his left side, the white gauze already blooming red at the edges.
Omen is crouched beside him pressing it flat, his jaw locked.
Vatican stands against the far wall with his arms crossed and his eyes on the door.
He clocks me the second I appear. Pope is on the phone, voice low and clipped, and I catch the word medic before he turns away.
Halo looks up from his laptop. His face tells me nothing and everything at once.
Carnage's pale blue eyes find mine before anyone else can speak.
“You're late.” His voice is rough but it's him. Still him. The knot in my chest loosens by exactly one degree.
“You got shot.” I cross to the bed and stand over him, just looking at him for a second because I need to. I need to see him breathing and cursing at me before I can think straight. “Who?”
“Doesn't matter.”
“It matters to me.”
He shifts and Omen's hand presses harder. Carn exhales through his teeth. “Ambush on the fourth truck. They were waiting. Had men posted on both sides of the road, we didn't see them until it was too late.” His eyes find mine again. “They knew exactly where we'd be, Tor.”
“I know.” The two words feel like swallowing glass.
He hears something in my voice. He always does. His gaze sharpens even through the grey tinge crawling under his skin. “What do you know?”
I look at Halo.
Halo closes his laptop with a quiet click. He takes his glasses off. Cleans them. Puts them back on. It's the closest thing to a tell he has, the deliberate pause of a person organizing something they know is going to land like a grenade.
“Your phone,” he says.
The room goes still.
“The one he gave you,” Halo's voice is flat and precise, the way it always is when he's delivering something irrefutable.
“It has been transmitting since before you arrived in this town. Location, continuously. Audio, triggered by calls, activated when it detected other devices close by.” He pauses.
“I put it all together after the ambush.”
I pull my phone out and stare at it.
The one Xaden gave me weeks ago at the beach. He was already planning his move back then. He gave it to me knowing I would carry it everywhere and talk near it… he knows everything.
He heard the kidnapping plan. The supply run. The timeline. Harper's call. The routes. Every conversation held in this house for weeks. He heard Omen, Carn, Pope, Halo and Vatican plan the operation that just put a bullet in my friend's side.
And he heard the library.
This morning. He was there, in my pocket, against my leg, through that phone that I couldn't make myself throw away because throwing it away would have meant admitting something I wasn't ready to admit.
When I stood in front of that computer screen and my world came apart, he heard Maddison's voice.
I thought you knew about the cameras in here.
He heard me break in the worst and most private way.
He heard me sob and he heard Harper's name and he heard me say don't tell the guys, not yet, heard every terrified decision I made in the hours between the library and the rink.
He knew about the tape before I did.
The shame arrives like a wave I didn't see coming. It floods everything. And then behind it, bigger and hotter, the kind of rage that burns so cleanly it almost feels like clarity—
I stand up. I walk to the bathroom, drop it into the toilet and flush it. I stand there with my hands on the cold edge of the sink and I breathe. Once. Twice.
I look at myself in the mirror.
I am wearing his jersey.
I pull it over my head and drop it on the floor. I am done wearing his name.
When I walk back into the bedroom, four pairs of eyes are on me. I don't offer an explanation. There isn't one that would cover it.
“He's known everything.” My voice is steady. “The operation, the plan, this house, all of it. He let the supply run go far enough that our people were out in the open and then he closed the trap.” I look at Carn on the bed and I feel the guilt of it like a blade between my ribs. “That's on me.”
“Like hell it is—” he starts.
“It is. I carried that phone. I kept it.” I hold his stare and don't let him argue me out of it. “But we don't have time for me to fall apart about it right now.”
The sound of tires on the road outside.
More than one vehicle.
Moving slowly.
Halo is back at his laptop before anyone speaks. “Movement on the south camera. Multiple vehicles. Lights off, two blocks out.” His fingers move. His face doesn't change. “I count six cars.”
Six cars.
I do the math with the speed of someone who has been living inside a war long enough to count casualties without flinching.
Halo, Omen, Vatican. Pope still on the phone in the hall.
Harper behind me in the doorway. Carnage on the bed with a bullet in his side and a field dressing that is already soaked through.
And Xaden Devlin with six cars worth of men who have known our exact position for weeks.
“Get Carn out.” I turn to Omen. “The gap in the east fence, he showed it to me weeks ago. Take him through there. Harper goes with him.”
“Toren—” Carnage's voice is warning.
“I need you alive, Carnage.” I face him and I let him see that I mean it, every word of it, that this is not sacrifice disguised as strategy but the truest calculation I have. “Alive and breathing and able to stand. That's what I need from you. So I need you to go.”
The first car rolls to a stop outside.
A door opens.
Then another.
I watch the war move across Carnage's face, the refusal, the pride, the gut-deep instinct to plant himself between me and whatever is coming through that door. And then the thing underneath all of it. The thing that is just him, just Carn, the most loyal person I have ever had beside me.
He trusts me.
“Twenty-four hours,” he says. His voice scrapes out raw. “I don't hear from you in twenty-four hours and I come back with everything we have. Including The Butcher.”
A shiver trails down my spine at the mention of his boss. “Deal.”
“I mean it, darlin.”
“I know you do.” I grip his hand once. Hard. Then let go. “Now go before he gets through the door.”
Vatican is already moving, getting an arm under Carn's shoulders. Omen takes the other side. Carnage doesn't fight them and the fact he doesn't fight tells me more about how bad the wound is than any of Halo's careful non-answers have.
Pope appears in the doorway. “Medic is seven minutes out.”
“Change of plan.” I look at him. “Carnage needs them at the east fence, not here. Go.”
He goes.
Halo pauses and looks back at me. “I cracked the burner, the moment we get Carn help, I’m calling the last number in his phone then we'll know exactly who has been helping him.” I nod “Twenty-four hours, Toren. No contact and we’ll be coming for you, believe me when I say your boyfriend doesn’t want to meet Alex.
Carnage cares for no one and the fact my twin cares for you will mean something to Alex.
He’ll burn this town to the ground for Carnage. ”
“I care about your brother too, Halo.”
“I know, which is why I’m asking you not to die. We don’t see eye-to-eye, never have, but I see the way he feels about you and I won’t have my twin suffering because he lost you. It won’t just be The Butcher slaughtering your boyfriend and his men, it will be us as well.”
I pray he can get the information we need because Xaden is coming, no one can stop him. He knows what I did. He knows what I was planning and he heard it all.
Harper appears at my elbow. Her face is chalk white but her chin is up. That's my girl. “What do I do?”
“Go with them. Stay with Carn until the medic comes. Don't call me, I'll call you.”