Chapter Twenty-Nine #3
“I don't know,” Carnage admits. “But he's right about one thing, if the cartel falls apart, the chaos that follows won't care that you're not involved. It'll come for you anyway.”
I bury my face in my hands, the weight of it all crushing down on me.
“I can't do this,” I whisper. “I can't be what everyone needs me to be. I'm just... I'm just me. And I don't know how to handle any of this.”
“Then don't handle it alone,” Carnage says gently. “Tomorrow night, when you walk into that house, you'll have me beside you. You'll have Halo and the others. You're not facing this by yourself.”
“What if I make the wrong choice?” The question tears from my throat. “What if I stand beside Masen and it makes everything worse?”
“Then we deal with it,” he says simply. “But at least you'll have made a choice instead of letting fear make it for you.”
I look at him through my tears, and the steady certainty in his eyes steadies something in me.
“I'm scared,” I admit.
“Good,” he says. “Fear means you understand what's at stake. Means you're taking this seriously.”
“What would you do?” I ask. “If you were me?”
Carnage is quiet for a long moment, considering.
“I'd go tomorrow night,” he finally says. “I'd see what we're really dealing with. I'd listen to what the men have to say. And then I'd make a decision based on what I could live with, not what Masen wants or what anyone else expects.”
“And if I decide I can't do it? Can't stand beside him?”
“Then we leave,” he says firmly. “We get you and that baby somewhere safe and we let the chips fall where they may.”
The certainty in his voice makes me want to cry all over again.
“Why are you so good to me?” I whisper.
Something flickers in his expression—something warm, painful and impossible to name.
“Because someone has to be,” he says quietly. “And I'm selfish enough to want it to be me.”
The words hang between us, loaded with everything we're not saying.
Everything we can't say.
Carnage helps me up and guides me out of the room, his hand never leaving my back.
When we reach my bedroom door, I turn to face him.
“Thank you,” I whisper. “For... everything. For being here. For—”
I stop, unable to finish.
For almost kissing me. For pulling back when I needed you to. For being what I need even when you want more.
“Get some sleep, darlin’,” he says gently. “Tomorrow's going to be another long day.”
He starts to turn away, but I catch his hand.
“Carn?”
He looks back at me, and the heat in his eyes makes my breath catch.
“I'm sorry,” I say quietly. “For not being able to—for not—”
“Don't,” he interrupts. “Don't apologize for having a heart that belongs to someone else. Even if that someone is too fucked up to see what he has.”
He squeezes my hand once, then lets go and walks away.
I stand in the doorway of my room and listen to his footsteps disappear down the hall and don't move for a long time.
I've been not-thinking about what almost happened for three hours.
I am very good at not-thinking about things I don't want to deal with.
I kept KennaDee's death behind a door in my head for months.
I kept the truth about Masen behind one.
I have a whole internal architecture of closed doors and I know exactly when I'm doing it and I do it anyway.
But this one won't stay shut.
He was close enough that I could have closed the distance with less effort than it took me to breathe.
He had his hands on my face and his eyes on my mouth and I felt it.
I want to be honest with myself enough to acknowledge that I felt it.
The want. The pull of someone who has never once made me feel unsafe or used or like I was only as valuable as what I could offer him.
And I pulled back.
Not because the feeling wasn't real. Because something else was more real.
I press my back against the closed door, stare at the ceiling and I make myself look at it directly, the thing I have been calling complicated and difficult and not the right time.
I love Xaden Devlin.
Past all reason, past all sense, past every piece of evidence that says I should have stopped by now. I love him the way you love something that has gotten so deep inside you that removing it would require removing yourself along with it.
And Carnage deserves someone who loves him like that.
Not like this. Not as the safe harbor while I'm busy being destroyed by someone else.
I owe him the truth of that. I've been letting him be everything without making clear what everything amounts to, and that is on me. The cowardice of a woman who wants the comfort and doesn't want to pay for it in honesty.
I'm going to fix that. Not tonight—tonight I am hollowed out and running on fumes and there is too much war ahead of us. But soon. Before someone gets hurt in a way that can't be walked back.
I push off the door, cross to the bed and lie down in my clothes, staring at the ceiling and thinking about a man with gray eyes who has never once made me feel like anything other than his enemy, and how that is not the same as making me feel like nothing.
It is, in its own terrible way, the opposite.
He makes me feel like everything.
Even when it costs everything.