Chapter Seven Pax
Chapter Seven
Pax
“What? How do you know?” Aria begged from where she stood wrapped in a towel outside the bathroom.
In an instant, the bubble we’d been cloaked in earlier popped. Those threads of peace that’d been weaving around us stripped away.
Grief tugged at my insides, but it went so much deeper than that.
It was dread.
The heaviest kind of dread sank down to the pit of my stomach.
“Didn’t know him well,” I told her. “But I knew his last name and his hometown. Couldn’t shake this feeling, so I looked him up.”
I lifted my face so I could fully meet her gaze as I delivered the news. “He died of a drug overdose two nights ago.”
“Oh my God.” It gushed from Aria’s mouth, and I knew her heart was immediately stretching out for Claire. Like she might be able to reach her on another plane and comfort her. Though I doubted there would be much comfort for this.
Aria blinked through the disorder, and I could feel it gather inside her. The same awareness I’d been terrified of recognizing last night. “You don’t think it’s random.”
I exhaled heavily. “I can’t say for certain, but this shit doesn’t sit right. Two of our family in a week? Both of them young and healthy? When we haven’t lost anyone in years? And I don’t buy that bullshit that William OD’d. He didn’t strike me as a junkie.”
And God knew I’d encountered many of them hunting the streets of Las Vegas.
I looked to the floor, processing, before I tentatively returned my attention to her. “What that bastard said to you . . . something about ending you all. You took it as him meaning Valients . . .”
It took her a moment of the same processing. “You think he meant all Laven and not just me.”
She didn’t phrase it as a question. I think we’d both arrived at the same conclusion a while ago. Or maybe we’d just known it was coming all along.
“I don’t know for sure. But if it is? If these deaths weren’t by chance?”
“Oh God, Pax.” Tears blurred those pale-gray eyes.
“Maybe I’m being paranoid . . .” Sighing, I anxiously ran a hand through my hair. Nothing about saying that sat right. Fit right.
Slowly, Aria moved toward me.
A lure, because there was nothing I could do but shift around to sit up on the side of the bed. My hands went to her thighs, and I held on to her like she could be an anchor.
She breathed out. “We have to stop him. Find him here, on this plane, and stop him like Ellis said. And we have to do it soon.”
Silence stretched between us.
“How the hell do we do that?”
She softly brushed her fingers through my hair, surety in her voice. “He’ll come for me.”
My arms curled around her waist, and I blew out a ragged breath where I buried my face in the towel at her belly.
Terrified that she was right.