Chapter 24
TWENTY-FOUR
GRIM
The club vibrated beneath my feet.
Thump.
He touched her.
Thump.
He touched her.
Thump.
He—
I grabbed Lock by the throat, shoving him against the couch. The girl he was with fell off his lap and scrambled away. A few moments later, the upper deck emptied.
“What the hell is going on?” Raze asked.
“He knows.” My grip on his neck tightened. Lock didn’t react, bored.
“The fuck did you do this time?” Raze asked Lock.
“You really think I did it?” Lock countered, eyes narrowing on mine.
“I think if it was any other girl you wouldn’t think twice,” I said.
“Yeah.” Lock leaned into my grip. “If it was any other girl, I wouldn’t.”
I stilled.
Fuck.
I yanked my hand back and stepped away, facing the railing. Bodies writhed on the club floor below. I ran my hands through my hair.
Fuck.
Shit.
“Someone better fuckin’ talk,” Raze said.
“White Privilege Barbie tried to blow me today,” he said. “But her mouth was too small. In the interest of full disclosure, I do have a picture of her tits.” Lock held up the phone as proof.
I reacted without thought, grabbing it and smashing it against the railing. Raze looked to the shattered phone, then back at me. What the fuck? was plastered on his parted lips and twisted brow.
“You’re acting like you’ve fucking marked her.” Lock stood off the couch, face-to-face with me.
The muscles between my shoulder blades tightened, about to snap.
It was a dark fantasy that I never let myself indulge. Gemma Crowne marked? She would belong to me. Anyone who touched her would know the consequences. She would be mine.
“You can’t mark Gemma fucking Crowne,” Lock said, reading the look on my face.
Of course not.
I rubbed the back of my neck, trying to release some of the tension.
It was never supposed to have gone this far. It was easier when she was betrothed. Not only was that guy like her brother—there was no possible path forward.
“The entire Underworld would want her dead,” Lock continued. “It would be really fucking easy to find the Reaper’s girl when she’s the most famous girl in America.”
“You think I don’t know that?” I said.
Lock raised his hands, eyes flashing pointedly to his smashed phone, like Do you?
Fuck.
He was right.
“Gemma said something interesting to me,” Lock said. “Wasn’t gonna pay much attention to it, but—”
I arched a brow. “But?”
“But then you tried to take my fucking head off.”
Lock stared, cocking his head.
He knew.
He knew I’d lied. He might not know the details, but he’d figured out enough.
Maybe that was why I spoke. Or more likely, it was because possession burned inside me, threatening to turn everything I cared about to ashes. For the first time in my life, I’d lost control.
I exhaled. “She didn’t want it.”
They stilled, not fully believing what came out of my mouth.
“Gemma didn’t ask for a contract,” I continued in their silence.
Raze dragged two hands through his hair. “Dude, what the fuck?”
“It wasn’t all a lie. I did save her, but she didn’t ask to be saved. She didn’t want…” I dragged my hand along my jaw. “She didn’t want any of it. She wanted to die.”
“You’ve been lying for five years.” Raze spoke without emotion, processing. “We’re stuck because of you.”
I dragged a hand down my face, nodding.
A tense moment passed. I felt Raze’s and Lock’s eyes on me as the song changed from some up-tempo EDM bullshit to something heavier with a metallic, industrial beat.
Then it shattered.
“We can’t shield a weakness until you acknowledge it!” Lock roared, the effort stretching the stenciled hemlock on his neck. In the decades I’d known Lock, he’d yelled a handful of times. Max. Now, he was loud enough that people on the dance floor turned their heads, looking for the source.
“She’s not a weakness.” I worked my jaw. “I can let her go anytime.”
Lock and Raze shared a look, like sure.
“Are the rumors true?” Lock asked. “Are you killing people?”
I dragged the hand on my jaw up and down the side of my face. That was all the confirmation Lock and Raze needed.
Raze tangled his hands in his hair, staring down at the floor. “I can’t fucking believe this.”
“No one from our world is dead—” I started, but was cut off by Wraith coming up the stairs.
“Where the fuck were you?” He spoke to Raze, falling into the couch as he did, kicking his legs up on the iron-and-glass table, pulling out a book. “You were supposed to relieve me of babysitting duty.”
“Sorry,” Raze said sarcastically. “My mind was busy exploding.”
Wraith glanced up from his book, something resembling curiosity in his emotionless eyes. For the next five minutes, Raze and Lock explained everything.
“That’s all?” Wraith made a face like waste of fucking time and went back to his book.
“You knew?” we all said in unison. Wraith gave us all a look like, What?
“It was obvious.” Wraith flipped a page in his book. “You’ve killed seven people by my estimation. I covered up your tracks when you got sloppy. But…she’s made you really sloppy, dude. So the rumors are there.”
Lock let out a short, incredulous laugh.
I rubbed my forehead.
“Incredibly obvious if you get off on stalking,” Raze said under his breath.
Wraith grinned, feral.
“I feel like I don’t know you anymore, man.” Raze worked his thumb into the space between his brows. “This thing only works if we’re all on the same page. We started this together. We’re bound together. It’s not about you. It’s never just been about you.”
Before guilt could settle like sludge, Lock continued where Raze left off.
“You kill someone, it’s not just you doing it. It’s all of us.” Lock threw out his arms, gesturing at everyone. “That was the fucking deal.”
“So what about the guy whose fingers you broke?” Wraith asked, still busy reading his book. “Was that all of us too?”
Lock looked caught.
“What?” Raze asked.
“When Lock was on babysitting duty,” Wraith continued, “he broke one of Gemma’s friend’s—”
Lock interrupted. “Not a friend—”
“Some guy she knows,” Wraith said, irritation battering his normally emotionless words. “Whoever the fuck he was, you broke his fingers.”
Silence settled.
Lock exhaled. “He was talking shit.”
“So?” I asked.
“So. Shit. I don’t know.” Lock rubbed the back of his neck.
“She’s like a fucking virus.” Raze dragged his hands through his black-and-white hair. “Who else is infected? You gonna tell me you bugged her room or something?” Raze directed the last question to Wraith.
“Yes.” Wraith flipped a page. “I keep track of liabilities.”
I thought back to her room, to the hundreds of times I’d cleaned it for bugs.
Of course I didn’t find one. It was fucking Wraith.
So Wraith knew, then.
Beyond the deaths, he realized how fucking far I’d let myself fall—Gemma wasn’t the liability he was referring to. I was.
It wasn’t that Wraith was being kind in his lack of anger or supportive in his silence. He just didn’t care. I wasn’t sure if he had any bone in his body capable of feeling.
“Is that all?” Lock asked. “Is there anything else you’re not telling us?”
Anything else?
They still didn’t know the truth of Gemma’s contract, why I’d kept us in limbo for five years. Why I couldn’t get us out.
I could have let Gemma go that night. Even after I showed up with the tattoo, I didn’t have to finalize it. To seal it. But a crazed part of me needed it, needed our lives connected externally to match the visceral, internal connection.
So I made it official.
And I damned the rest of us.
I knew what would happen if I told them the truth, what they would demand of me. So I lied.
“Nothing else,” I said.