28. One Day Until Bonding
Chapter twenty-eight
One Day Until Bonding
Carrson
The ballroom has become a battlefield.
Tables lie overturned across the floor. Men in tuxedos crouch behind them, rising long enough to fire before dropping back into cover. Across the room, men dressed as servers return fire from behind pillars, bars, and toppled furniture.
There are more dead here. Women and men who will never make deals in backrooms again.
Laurel remains behind my right shoulder, both hands wrapped around the gun I gave her.
A voice carries from the kitchen behind us.
“Where’s my son?” My father. “Has anyone seen my son?”
The panic in his voice stops me. Carr never raises it without purpose. Even his anger is controlled, each word chosen before he speaks it.
This voice is high and strained, close to breaking.
I backtrack toward the kitchen.
“I’m here,” I say as I step inside.
The room carries a trace of cinnamon and clove, now mixed with gunsmoke and the sharp scent of blood.
Carr spins toward me.
“Don’t worry.” I open my arms enough for him to see I’m intact. “Your precious heir is still alive.”
I expect him to make a sharp comeback from my sarcasm but instead he whispers, “Thank God.” He crosses the space between us and clasps my shoulder. His eyes move over my face, my chest, and the blood covering my clothes, searching for an injury.
That’s…different.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
“Silas Creed.” Carr releases me and rubs a hand across his forehead, smearing blood from a cut over his eye. “The Jackals came disguised as waitstaff. They waited until everyone was drunk, then opened fire. No one knew which servers belonged here and which had come to kill us.”
My thoughts return to the men in the hallway. The tattoos concealed with makeup. Teardrops. That’s what they were hiding.
“We were at Sinners,” I say. “We just got back.”
“Silas?” Laurel steps out from behind me. “I saw him earlier, dressed as waitstaff.”
Father and I turn to her.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask.
Laurel’s fingers close harder around the gun. “I meant to.”
“When?”
“I don’t know.” Her eyes move over my face, searching for an answer that will make sense to either of us. “It all happened so fast after that. Your father had shown everyone the brand. You were furious with me. You left, and I followed you. I let everything else take over.”
“You forgot Silas Creed was inside this house?”
“No.” She winces. “I didn’t forget. I didn’t realize what was going on. Not fully.”
Carr steps closer. “What did he want?”
“He asked whether I’d seen Evangeline Montgomery. The Sister he loved when they were younger.”
“Silas and Evangeline?”
“You know her?” I ask.
Father ignores me. “What else did Creed say?” he asks Laurel.
“Nothing.” Her face crumples.
A burst of gunfire tears through the room.
Bullets punch through the swinging kitchen door. One buries itself in the cabinets. Another strikes a hanging pan and sends it clanging across the tile.
I grab Laurel and pull her down behind the steel preparation counter.
Carr crouches beside us and shouts toward the doorway. “Who has the west corridor?”
“Thomson and Brentson!” someone calls back.
Laurel’s breath comes against my neck. The gun trembles between our bodies. I take it out of her hand before she drops it.
“I thought he was alone.” Shame makes her voice unsteady. “There are thousands of Order members here. Armed guards at every entrance. Brothers in every room. It never occurred to me that one man could do this.”
Father looks toward the ballroom as another round of gunfire rings out.
“Silas could have hurt you,” I say.
Laurel hesitates, and the pause opens a hollow place inside me.
“I don’t think he would.” Tears well in her eyes. They hang suspended on her lashes.
“Why?”
“Because he already had the opportunity, and he didn’t.” Her voice cracks. “I don’t trust him. I know he lies. I know he’s violent, and everything he does serves some purpose of his own. But after he helped me escape Jackson, I didn’t believe he would hurt me.”
The kitchen door slams open.
Jack Beaumont storms in with two armed men behind him. Blood stains the cuff of his tuxedo shirt, but none of it appears to be his. A tablet rests in one hand.
He points at Laurel. “Traitor.”
I rise from behind the counter to stand between them.
“Choose your next words carefully.”
“She knew Creed was here.” Jack thrusts the tablet toward Father. “We have proof.”
The footage is already playing. Laurel stands in the service corridor outside the kitchen. A man approaches in a blue jacket and stops beside her.
“Is that him?” Father asks Laurel.
“Yes.”
There’s no sound, only the motion of their lips as Laurel and Silas talk. She doesn’t call for a guard or try to stop him. When he walks away, she turns her back on him and never looks over her shoulder.
That’s the part that hurts. She trusted him enough to give him a clean shot at her.
Jack freezes the image.
“One of the security officers recovered this,” he says. “You concealed the enemy’s presence while his men took their positions.”
“I didn’t conceal him.”
“You warned no one.”
“I made a mistake.”
“How many people have to die before a mistake becomes betrayal?” asks Jack.
I take a step toward him, fury vibrating under my skin.
Laurel catches my wrist. “Carrson.”
A Brother stumbles through the door with blood covering one side of his face.
“The west entrance is under attack.”
I turn, ready to launch into action.
Laurel’s hand slips from my wrist.
Carr points at the Brother. “Get everyone who can’t fight upstairs. Barricade the eastern hall.”
The man runs.
The relief Carr showed when he found me alive disappears behind the expression he wears when everyone expects him to make a decision.
“I can’t ignore that Laurel didn’t warn us,” Father says. “Not while the house is under attack.”
“She saved my life,” I say. “Three of Creed’s men fought us in the hallway. She stopped one from putting a bullet through my back.”
Jack glances at the blood on my hands. “Loyalty to you does not equal loyalty to us.”
“She isn’t required to love The Order.”
“No,” Jack says. “Only to refrain from helping its enemies slaughter its members.”
“I didn’t help them.” Laurel steps forward.
Her face is red, but she isn’t crying. She holds herself rigidly, as though any movement might cause her to break apart.
Carr looks at Laurel. “Until the attack is contained and we can examine the evidence, you will be confined.”
“No.” My answer overlaps his final word.
“Carrson.” Laurel touches my shoulder. The tremor in her fingers reaches me through my shirt.
“I know her.”
“You love her,” Jack says, flinging the word like an accusation. “That makes you less reliable, not more.”
“She stays with me.”
“People are dying while we stand here debating,” Carr says. “The Brothers need their leader.”
“I’m not leaving her with him.”
Father lowers his voice so only I can hear. “If the other members learn she recognized Creed and told no one, they will come after her. Confinement is for her protection as much as theirs. The Vault has one entrance, reinforced walls, and no windows. Right now, it’s the safest room in this house.”
“I can keep her safe.”
“At the cost of how many others?”
Gunfire comes from the ballroom, followed by men yelling.
When the shooting pauses, Father speaks. “She goes to the Vault. No one touches her until we determine what to do.”
“I’ll take her,” Jack says.
“No,” I answer.
Laurel moves out from behind me. “I’ll go.” She glances at Jack. “Fighting it will only make me look guilty.”
“I don’t care how it looks,” I say.
“I do.” She keeps her eyes lowered. “I already made one decision because I thought I understood the danger better than everyone else. I’m not making another.”
“You aren’t choosing this.”
“Yes, I am.”
The words carry an echo from Sinners.
That choice belongs to me too.
I want to argue that this is different. Fear and guilt have narrowed her choices until only one remains. But deciding her reasons are invalid because they don’t give me what I want would make me exactly the man I promised I wouldn’t be.
Laurel turns toward Carr. “I’ll go willingly.”
Then she looks at me. “I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
“I know. Silas did this.”
“But I might have stopped him.”
The denial rises inside me. Then I see Stretson on the floor again. His body covering Juliette’s. Her hand reaching out from under him. Laurel watches the words die before I can speak them. She doesn’t protest or demand I defend her. She simply stops looking at me like I might make this better.
“I don’t know.”
The truth is all I have left to give her. It’s also the cruelest thing I could have chosen.
“Neither do I.” Tears spill before she can blink them back. “That’s what I’ll think about every time I close my eyes.”
“Laurel.”
“And every person who died will be there when I open them again.”
More gunfire echoes from the back of the house. Someone yells my name. A Brother staggers through the kitchen door with blood pouring down his neck. “They’ve broken through the west entrance. Rebecca’s pinned behind the stairs.”
“Go,” Laurel says. “They need you.”
Jack’s men fall into place on either side of her. She walks into the hallway without resistance, her shoulders rigid and her head held high.
An explosion rips through the kitchen. Part of the ceiling crashes down beyond the swinging door.
I take one step after her, but she doesn’t look back.
Another scream comes from the ballroom. It cuts off abruptly.
Laurel disappears around the corner, her arms wrapped around herself as though she’s already preparing for the freezing cold of the Vault.
My world splits in two.
Laurel through one door. My duty through the other.
“Choose,” my father says.
I look toward the empty hallway.
Then I raise the gun and run into the ballroom, blood dripping from the dagger clenched in my fist.