Chapter Eighteen #3
“In the parking lot. When he was walking away.” Carn's voice is measured, careful, giving me the information without the weight of what he thinks it means. “I saw him put his hand in his pocket. The way a person touches something they're checking is still there.” A pause. “He's kept it.”
I stare at the USB drive on the table.
I don't say anything for a long moment.
“Don't make it something it isn't.”
“I'm not making it anything,” Carnage says. And there it is again, the echo. Him giving me back my own words, the quiet suggestion that maybe I should hear what I'm saying. “I'm just noting the facts.”
I look up at him.
He's watching me with those pale blue eyes and I see something in them that is so carefully restrained, so deliberately contained, that for a moment I feel the weight of everything it's costing him to hold it there.
To be this, this constant, this steady, this present for me.
Night after night and the warehouse, parking lot and dark road.
“Carn,” I say quietly.
“Don't.” His voice is gentle. Certain. “Whatever you're about to say, Tor, don't. Not tonight.” He picks up the mug he made for himself, black coffee of course.
He doesn't have a soft drink in his body and sits back in the chair.
“Tonight you go to the apartment, you hand over the file, you plan the war. Tomorrow you sleep. The night after that we figure out the rest.”
“And in between all of that?”
“In between all of that,” he says, “you drink that honey water and eat something and stop trying to process everything at once.” The ghost of the smile again. “One crisis at a time, darlin'.”
I look at him.
“Is that what you do?” I ask. “One crisis at a time?”
Something moves through his expression. Fast, almost too fast to catch, and then it's gone.
“I try to,” he says.
I don't push on it.
I pick up my mug, drink the honey water and let the warmth of the farmhouse kitchen do what warmth does, which is not fix anything but make everything slightly more bearable.
The wood burner ticks. The fields beyond the window are dark, flat and empty.
Somewhere in Stormsend, Xaden Devlin is driving toward his apartment or away from it or sitting in the dark with an ultrasound in his pocket, doing whatever it is Xaden does with the things he can't bring himself to put down and can't bring himself to acknowledge.
He kept it.
I don't make it something it isn't.
I just note the fact.
Forty minutes later I'm standing in front of the mirror in the small bathroom off the hall and looking at myself and trying to decide who I am tonight.
This is a question I've been asking myself since I came back from Walter House.
Some days the answer is easier than others.
Some days I am Toren Kellar, nineteen years old, blonde hair and blue eyes, with a baby the size of a lemon growing in my body that I didn't plan for and cannot stop feeling fiercely, irrationally protective of.
Some days I am the girl from the bonfire, the one who used to love freely and trust blindly and look at the world like it had something good to offer if you walked toward it.
Tonight I am neither of those things.
Tonight I am the girl who sat in a warehouse and watched Xaden Devlin take people apart without looking away.
The girl who offered herself up as a sacrifice and meant it.
The girl who slapped the devil across the face for calling their baby a mistake and walked away and didn't cry until she was out of earshot.
After showering and ridding myself of the sand in places it shouldn’t be, I slip his hoodie back on.
I look at the crest in the mirror.
Stormsend Ravens.
I should take it off. I know I should take it off.
I am walking into that apartment in a matter of minutes to plan a war with the man who owns this hoodie and standing across from him wearing his clothes is not the power move that it should be, it is something else entirely, something that lives in the territory between surrender and statement, and I genuinely cannot decide which one it is.
I leave it on.
Because he took my shirt and the night is cold and the hoodie is warm, and those are the only three facts I'm willing to hold right now.
I look at myself one more time and say, very quietly, the way I used to say it at Walter House when the walls felt close.
“To teach is to learn. To learn is to excel. To excel is to thrive. To thrive is to live.”
My reflection looks back at me.
She doesn't look broken.
She looks like someone who has been through the kind of night that either ends you or builds you and has decided, not for the first time, that being built is the only acceptable option.
I turn off the bathroom light and go to find Carnage.
He's waiting in the hallway with his jacket on and the car keys in his hand, and when I come out of the bathroom he looks at me once and nods.
“Don’t let someone who did you wrong make you think there’s something wrong with you. Don’t devalue yourself because they didn’t value you. Know your worth even if they don’t.”
I have no words. All I can do is stare at my friend and nod.
We walk out into the cold together.
Toward the war.
Toward him.
Toward whatever comes next.