Chapter Seventeen #2
“You should be in bed.” Xaden's voice shifts, not softer, just redirected. “You're still healing.”
“I know.” Carnage's chin lifts fractionally. “Didn't stop me getting here to her.”
“The bullet wound in your side disagrees.”
“The bullet wound in my side is my business.” He holds Xaden's gaze with the particular steadiness of someone who has already decided how far he's willing to go and has made peace with it. “Same as Toren is mine.”
Everything in Xaden's face goes blank.
Blank the way it goes when he's at his most dangerous.
“Say that again,” he says. Very quietly.
“She is my—”
Xaden moves.
I've seen fast.
I've watched Xaden move with the kind of speed that makes you understand why people are afraid of him, the way violence looks different on some men, not like a loss of control but like a door being opened.
He has that quality. The capacity to shift from still to devastating in the space between one breath and the next.
I've never seen Carnage match it.
Until now.
He moves at the same moment Xaden does, and for the space of half a second they meet in the middle of the lot in the particular collision of two men who are both accustomed to being the fastest thing in the room.
There's no elegance to it. There's no careful choreography.
There's fists and concrete and the ugly grunt of impact, then the specific sound of pain that someone tries to swallow and can't quite manage.
Carnage.
His side.
“Stop it!” I'm already moving, already between them before I make the decision to be, one hand against Carnage's chest and one arm extended toward Xaden. “Stop. Both of you. Right now.”
Neither of them listens.
Xaden catches Carnage's arm and twists, using his weight to drive him back against the side of the car.
Carnage takes it. Absorbs it, and then pushes back with the kind of force that tells me exactly how badly he's been holding back up to this point.
That all that careful stillness has been retention, not absence, and now he's spending it freely.
He gets a hand against Xaden's chest and shoves.
Xaden stumbles back two steps, then catches his footing.
They face each other across four feet of parking lot, both breathing harder than they should be, both bleeding from different reasons, and neither one of them looking at me.
“If you hit him again,” I say, my voice has gone somewhere very flat and very clear, “I will shoot you with your own gun!”
That gets their attention.
Xaden looks at me.
Carnage looks at me.
“He's injured,” I say, still in that same flat voice, looking at Xaden.
“He has a bullet wound in his side that is three weeks from being field-dressed and not yet healed.
You know that. I know you know that because you know everything about every person in my orbit, that's the whole point of you.” I watch him absorb this.
“So if you hit him again knowing that, then you're not the man who couldn't put the scalpel through my throat.
You're the other one. And I need to know which one I'm dealing with.”
The silence stretches.
Xaden's jaw is tight. His breathing is controlled again, that deliberate recalibration he does when something has gotten closer than he meant to let it.
He looks at Carnage.
Carnage looks back.
Something passes between them. I don't know what it is. I don't think I'm meant to.
“The file,” Xaden says finally. His eyes move back to mine. “An hour. The apartment.”
I hold his gaze.
“An hour,” I confirm.
He turns and walks back toward his car without another word.
I watch him go because I can't seem to stop myself.
Then I turn to Carnage, who is leaning against the passenger door with one arm pressed very subtly against his left side, his face a careful arrangement of fine.
“You're in pain,” I say.
“I'm always in pain. It's my natural state.” He pushes off the car and reaches for the door handle. “Get in, Tor.”
“Carn—”
“I need you in the car.” His voice drops, losing the lightness it was holding.
“I need you in the car and moving away from him and I need to be the one driving because if you keep looking at me like that I'm going to do something we're both going to have feelings about and I don't have time for feelings tonight.”
I get in the car.
He gets in beside me.
Neither of us speaks for the first few minutes. The road unspools in front of the headlights and I watch it go without really seeing it, cataloguing instead the way he breathes, the slight catch on the left side, the way his hand on the wheel stays very still when I know it should be moving.
“How bad is it?” I ask.
A pause.
“Worse than yesterday,” he admits, and the fact that he admits it tells me more than the words. Carnage De Santis doesn't admit things like that unless the alternative is lying to someone who's already seen the truth. “Better than the week before.”
I look at his profile in the dark.
“You shouldn't have come.”
His mouth curves slightly. “I’ll always come when you call.”
Outside the window the ocean disappears behind the tree line and the cold of the night retreats.
I am still wearing Xaden Devlin's hoodie in the car with the man who came anyway, bullet wound and all, because that is the world I am living in.
That is the war I am fighting. And somewhere behind us on that stretch of coastal road, the Don of the Devlin Cosa Nostra is standing in the dark, denying he feels anything for me and our baby.
I know which one I'm dealing with.
I just have to figure out what to do with that knowledge before it destroys us both.
To teach is to learn. To learn is to excel. To excel is to thrive. To thrive is to live.
I close my eyes and let Carnage drive us away from the ocean.
Away from the beach.
Away from him.
For now.