Chapter Seventeen
TOREN
Some things follow you out of the dark.
The parking lot is cold.
I hadn't noticed how cold until now, standing here with the ocean still dripping down the back of my neck and sand grinding between my toes inside shoes I somehow managed to pull back on before I made my exit.
The rest of me is still a disaster. Bra.
Pants. The knowledge that I just had the most devastating, most honest, most completely wretched conversation of my life and walked away with nothing to show for it except a wet bra and the particular brand of heartache that comes from loving a man who's decided destruction is the only language he wants to speak.
I wrap my arms around myself and stare at my phone.
Call Carnage.
Simple. One tap. One call.
I stand there for another ten seconds not doing it, because the second I do, the night becomes real.
The beach conversation becomes something that happened and not something I'm still suspended inside of, some horrible ember holding me in place while I try to figure out how to breathe around the weight of it.
He told me to get rid of our baby.
I press dial before I can think about it again.
It rings once.
“Tor.” His voice is low and immediate, like he's been sitting there waiting, which he probably has because that is the particular torture of having Carnage De Santis as your closest friend. He never goes far. Even when you tell him to. Even when you beg him.
“I need you.” My voice comes out smaller than I want it to.
A pause. Short enough that someone who didn't know him wouldn't catch it.
“Where are you?”
“Parking lot off the coastal road. The one near—” I swallow. “The beach.”
Another pause. Longer this time.
“I know it.” His tone tells me he knows exactly which beach. That he knows who took me there and why. "Give me ten minutes.”
“Carn, he told me to get rid of the baby—”
“Ten minutes, darlin'. Don't move.”
He hangs up before I can argue.
I stand very still and count the stars instead of thinking about the look on Xaden's face when his hand grazed my stomach and the whole thing broke apart. The way he jerked back like I'd burned him. Like the baby was something that could hurt him just by existing.
Maybe it can.
Maybe that's the only power I have left.
I hear him before I see him.
Not Carnage.
Xaden.
The sound of footsteps on tarmac, unhurried, deliberate, the particular cadence of a man who has never once rushed toward anything because the world has always been willing to wait for him. I close my eyes for exactly one second, then turn around.
He's standing at the edge of the lot where the road meets the concrete, hands in his pockets, gray eyes cutting through the dark like they don't need the light at all. His Stormsend Ravens hoodie I didn’t know he had with him is damp at the hem from the ocean.
His hair is still wet. He looks devastating, furious and something else underneath both of those things that he will never once in his life admit to out loud.
“You're still here,” I say.
“So are you.”
I hold his gaze and refuse to be the first to look away. “I'm waiting for my ride.”
“Your ride.” The two words come out dipped in something cold. “Carnage.”
“Don't.” The warning in my voice surprises even me. “Don't say his name like it's something you're allowed to be angry about.”
His jaw locks. I watch the muscle jump beneath his skin.
“You told me I was a means to an end,” I continue, because I can't seem to stop myself, because apparently standing on wet asphalt in my bra in the middle of the night is when I develop the courage I should have found six months ago.
“You told me to get rid of our baby. So the man I call to come and get me is none of your business, Xaden. Not anymore.”
Something moves through his expression.
Gone before I can name it.
“You're half naked,” he says finally.
“You took my shirt.”
“I was checking you for a wire.”
“You took my shirt,” I repeat, slower, like he's missing something obvious. “And then you said what you said. And then I left. So here we are.”
He crosses the distance between us before I can step back, and I force myself to hold my ground even as every nerve ending in my body fires in that particular traitorous way they always do when he gets close.
He stops a foot away. Close enough that I can see the water still beading at his hairline.
Close enough that the warmth of him cuts through the cold of the night air.
He looks down at me and says nothing for a long moment.
Then, very slowly, he pulls the Stormsend Ravens hoodie over his head.
I stare at him.
He holds it out.
“Don't make it something it isn't,” he says quietly.
I look at the hoodie. I look at him. I look at the way he's standing there in just a damp T-shirt, jaw set, eyes hard, holding out a piece of his clothing like it costs him absolutely nothing, while somehow costing him everything.
I take it.
Not because it means something. Not because I'm forgiving him. Because it's cold and I'm standing in a parking lot in my bra and whatever dignity I have left doesn't require me to freeze.
I pull it over my head and the smell of him engulfs me, cedar and salt water and something darker underneath. I hate that I recognize it. I hate that I want to press my face into the collar and stay there.
I don't.
I look up at him and steel every part of myself that wants to reach out.
“Thank you,” I say evenly.
He says nothing. Just looks at me in that way he has, like he's cataloguing damage.
The headlights appear at the far end of the lot.
I know the moment Carnage clocks Xaden.
The car doesn't slow, it pulls into the lot at a steady pace and comes to a stop mere feet from where we're standing, and Carnage gets out before the engine fully cuts.
He moves the way he always moves, deliberate and contained, but I've been around him long enough to read the things underneath the containment.
The slight forward lean. The way his hands come out of his jacket pockets and stay loose at his sides.
He's in pain.
Even at this distance, even moving the way he forces himself to move so no one can see it, I know.
The bullet wound in his side from the ambush is still healing.
Has been healing for weeks. The field dressing and the medic and the twenty-four hour window that felt like watching someone hold themselves together with sheer force of will.
He should be in bed.
He came anyway.
Of course he did.
His eyes find me first, a fast sweep that clocks the hoodie, the wet hair, the bare feet shoved back into my shoes, all of it, and something moves through his expression that he smooths away before it can settle. Then he looks at Xaden.
The distance between them contracts.
Not because either of them moves. Just because the air changes.
“Carn—” I start.
“You should get in the car, Tor.” His voice is quiet and completely steady and absolutely does not leave room for argument.
“I'm fine—”
“Tor.” Just my name. Just the way he says it, low and certain, like the conversation is already finished.
I look at Xaden.
Xaden is looking at Carnage.
There is something happening in the space between them that has nothing to do with me and everything to do with me, something that was always going to happen eventually because of the specific nature of the world these men inhabit and the specific nature of who I am to both of them.
I take a step toward the car.
Xaden moves.
Not toward Carnage. Toward me. Just one step, just a shift of weight, just the instinctive motion of a man who has staked a claim he refuses to name and doesn't know how to let go of.
Carnage steps forward too.
“Don't.” The word comes from Carnage, aimed squarely at Xaden, voice stripped of everything except the raw and particular warning of someone who has very little left to lose and is fully prepared to spend it.
Xaden goes very still.
I stop moving.
“You want to tell me,” Carnage says, and his voice stays even, quiet, just carrying enough to reach us both, “why exactly she's wearing what belongs to you?”
The question lands differently than it would from anyone else. Because Carnage isn't asking it to provoke. He's asking it because he sees everything and has already drawn conclusions. He needs Xaden to either confirm or deny them out loud where they become real.
Xaden holds his gaze. “No.”
“She came down here in a shirt.”
A beat.
“And?” Xaden says.
“Where's her shirt?”
The muscle in Xaden's jaw ticks. He doesn't answer.
Something shifts in Carnage's expression. He looks at me then, just briefly, and I watch him read the whole of it across my face the way he always does—the things I don't say, the things I'm trying to hold very still so they don't spill over into the parking lot. He looks back at Xaden.
“You need to step back from her,” he says. “Right now.”
“I don't take orders from you.” Xaden's voice is flat and completely without heat, which is somehow worse than if he'd shouted it. “Not in my town. Not on my road. Not anywhere.”
“Then you take them from her.” Carnage takes another step forward and I see it now, the way he compensates for his side without appearing to.
The way his left arm holds slightly closer to his body than his right.
Three weeks of healing, still not enough and he is standing here in the dark prepared to put himself between me and Xaden Devlin anyway.
“She said she's done. That means you're done.”
“She doesn't get to decide when this is finished.”
“She absolutely does.” Carnage stops five feet from him.
“I know men like you, Devlin. I grew up around them.
I am one. And I'm telling you right now that whatever you think this is, whatever claim you think you have over her—” he pauses, and his voice drops to something quiet and surgical, “—it ended the second you told her to get rid of your kid.”
The silence that follows is total.
Xaden's eyes cut to me for one fraction of a second.
I look at the ground.