Chapter Twenty-Four Aria #2
My laughter was hoarse. “Did you think I wouldn’t do anything to try to protect you? And don’t you dare tell me you wouldn’t do the same for me.”
She sighed. “I know. It’s just . . .” Her attention dipped before it was back on me. “You’re important.”
“And so are you, Dani. Every single one of us is. But you know you’re especially important to me. I don’t know what I would have done without you growing up. You taught me so much. You were there through so much of my confusion and questions. You’ve always been my best friend.”
Affection ridged her expression. “And you’ve always been mine.”
Dani paused, glancing around as if she were trying to find an anchor, before she turned her gaze back to me. “I still can’t believe you’re standing in my house. This feels . . . insane. Like maybe I’ve finally lost it.”
She shook her head a little, her hair a strike of pink beneath the rays that slanted in through the kitchen window.
I fiddled with the hem of my sweater and shifted on my feet. “I thought I’d been losing it my whole life . . . And then there was Pax . . . and now there is you.”
She blinked, and a tear slid down her face.
“I’ve been so scared. Knowing all these Laven have been dying.
Being here by myself and completely helpless.
Not knowing what was happening. To my family.
To you and Pax. To Timothy.” She could barely get his name out around the knot that bobbed in her throat. “God, I hate this.”
The kettle started to whistle, and she crossed back to the stove and filled three mugs that she’d pulled from a cupboard and set on the counter. She tossed tea bags into each one, grabbed a container of sugar, and set everything out on the bar. “There you go.”
“Thank you,” I told her as I pulled out a stool and sat.
I could feel Pax’s presence. His stealthy movements as he came to lean his hip against the end of the wall that separated the kitchen and the hall on the other side.
Quiet and furiously protective.
Dani stood on the opposite side of the bar, and she stirred a teaspoon of sugar into her mug, lost in thought. The words were thin when she asked, “So, he’s coming for me? I’m next?”
“No. You’re not next.” It shot out of me. “That’s why we’re here. We aren’t going to let that happen.”
“But you saw it . . . My death?”
I didn’t want to give her the details, but I had no right to keep it from her, either.
“I think that’s what he wanted me to see, at least. Whether it was the actual plan or a manipulation to send me on a different path than the one I was on, I don’t know, but there was no chance I was going to take that risk. We came as fast as we could.”
Steam wound up from my mug, and I blew it before I brought it to my lips and took a sip. Warmth spread through my chest and into my stomach.
Her brow pinched. “How did you see it?”
A disbelieving sound rolled out of me, and I told her about what had happened last night. How Ambrose seemed to be able to get to me in ways I’d never fathomed. Dragging me into the unknown.
“God. I feel like we’re inside some kind of weird freaking movie,” she said. “One of those horror-slasher kinds.”
Air huffed from my nose. “We might as well be. The Kruen must be the origin of every terror that has ever been written.”
Every fear and insecurity that people possessed.
Every evil that captured humans’ minds.
Pausing, Dani stared into her tea, leaning on her elbows on the counter, before she looked back up, blinking at me from behind her glasses. “Do you feel it, Aria? This thing in the middle of you?”
She edged back to touch high on her abdomen. “It’s ugly and foul. Ominous. Like I can feel something coming. Something changing.” She wavered, then whispered, “But there’s also a pulse in the middle of it. Something urgent. Like I’m supposed to do something, but I don’t know what it is.”
I knew exactly what she was talking about. I had felt it coming for weeks. That tsunami in the distance that gathered strength as it surged forward to consume the land.
“Yes,” I said in a rush. “I feel it, too.”
She shifted to look at Pax, who still hadn’t taken his mug of tea, the man just standing there, observing us.
“Do you?” she asked point-blank.
Pax’s nod was slow, his voice rough. “Yeah. I feel it. Like wickedness is rising up from the ends of the earth. Building in power as it is driven to one specific place where it all will come together. And when it does, there’s going to be a catastrophic implosion.”
“Where?” she asked in exasperation.
To all of us, herself included.
“Don’t know. I’m afraid it’s going to hit us from out of nowhere,” he said.
“He wants to rule here,” I murmured. “Out in the open. He said everyone would bow to him.”
“How is that even possible?” Dani wheezed as her face pinched in aggrieved disgust.
“I don’t—”
My words were clipped off when there was a soft thud and then a clatter on the outside of the house. Our attention whipped toward the wall the shelves rested against.
Our teeth clamped down and plunged us into silence, though I could hear the sudden ravaging of our hearts. The boom, boom, boom that thundered through the room.
We remained still, barely breathing as we listened.
We all heard it at the same time. The clicking of a latch.
Someone’s out there, I mouthed.
“The gate that leads into the backyard,” Dani muttered beneath her breath.
“Fuck,” Pax spat, and he eased off the wall and pulled his handgun out from inside his jacket. I didn’t know when he’d moved it from the duffel and into his pocket, but he lifted it then, turning off the safety and checking that it was loaded.
Horror ripped from Dani, though she clapped her hand over her mouth to cover it, and Pax mouthed, Get down on the floor, both of you.
Dani dipped behind the counter, and I slipped off the stool and climbed down onto my hands and knees so I could crawl over to her.
Dread pulsed and pulled, the uncertainty of what we would face stirring us into a frenzy. We wondered if Ambrose was here, in the flesh but so much stronger than any man. Or if it was another he’d sent. Someone he’d wielded his power over and bent to his will.
Dani gripped my hand the second I got to her. She was shaking so hard that she rattled in my hold.
“We’re going to be okay,” I promised, squeezing back.
We peeked around the corner, watching Pax carefully edge across the floor, keeping his boots silent as he moved toward the French doors.
He leaned his back against the wall to the side of them, and he shifted to peer out into the sunlight that poured in through the panes through a break in the clouds.
“Don’t see anyone,” he rumbled, turning back to us. “Dani, need you to shut off the alarm so I can go check it out.”
“I’m coming with you,” I said, getting to my feet, though staying low.
Part of me had expected him to argue, but instead he muttered, “Ah, baby, like I’d go anywhere without you.”