Chapter Forty
The warehouse looks abandoned and dead when we pull up. The street’s empty, full of veiny lines of cracked asphalt and bad lighting, our three-car convoy the only thing disturbing the quiet. “Still ugly,” Lila says, climbing out of Cam’s car and eyeing the building.
“Security and privacy over curb appeal,” I say.
“You’re welcome.” I do a slow three-sixty turn—checking corners, roofline, and sightlines.
The roll-up doors are still locked in the pattern I left them in.
The side-entrance keypad blinks its steady, patient red.
“Give me five,” I say. “I want to clear the place first.”
Cam nods, already dragging his go-bag out of the trunk. “Try not to blow anything up.”
“Fucker,” I mutter, heading for the side door.
The keypad lights up green after entering the code, and the lock disengages with the same mechanical sound I’ve heard a thousand times.
Inside, the air is stale and cold, the faint scent of dust and old oil that settled into concrete and steel.
I sweep the first floor, storage bays, and empty staging areas; the control room with its mountain of monitors that are currently dark.
By the time I circle back and reappear at the door, the tension in my shoulders has eased a notch. “All clear.”
Cam whistles low as he steps in. Lila follows, eyes scanning, taking in exits.
Kiera hangs back in the doorway for a second, fingers brushing the frame like she’s saying hello to an old bruise.
The overhead fluorescents buzz to life in sections as I flip breakers, cutting the darkness into manageable chunks.
It takes us a while to get the basics up: heat systems waking with a cough, motion sensors checked and reset, the internal cameras flickering on, one by one.
Lila takes over the kitchen, tossing out anything that looks like it remembers the last war and making a list of what we’ll need if we don’t want to starve.
Cam stakes a claim on the office space, dragging his tech into a nest of cables that will become mission control by morning.
Through it all, Kiera is quieter than usual.
Not silent. She cracks a few jokes, rolls her eyes in all the right places, but there’s intent in the quiet now, like she’s waiting for something.
When the essentials are finally humming, and the others are occupied enough not to overhear, she catches my eye and jerks her chin toward the stairs.
“Upstairs,” she says. “Now.” Not a request.
“Bossy,” I mutter under my breath.
“I’ll bring in Dr. Reyes and Evelyn,” Cam announces as he heads for the door again.
Kiera heads for the mezzanine, following behind as we climb up to the catwalk that wraps around the main floor and leads to the small apartment I built out of one corner.
Up here, the warehouse looks like it is—a giant metal box rigged to keep bad things out and worse things in.
Down below, Lila’s voice floats up in fragments; Something about coffee and how if I ever buy the cheap stuff again, she’ll stab me.
Cam answers with a muffled retort. Once we’re out of earshot, Kiera stops.
Turning, she braces her back against the railing, facing me fully.
The marks between us hum. “Okay,” she says.
“I need you not to do the thing where you go silent and start creating fifty scenarios in your head before I finish a sentence, or cut me off. Let me finish speaking because if I stop, it may never come out.”
“I promise nothing,” I say. “But I’ll try.”
Kiera’s mouth twitches, then flattens again.
She blows out a breath like she’s psyching herself up to kick in a door rather than tell me whatever she’s been hiding.
“I’m just going to say it,” she says. “I’m pregnant.
” No preface. No edging. Just the words, clean and sharp.
For half a heartbeat, they don’t register.
Then every piece of information I’ve been avoiding aligning—opera, Nesting House, chapel, the way she’s been moving, late nights, quiet nausea, trips to get air.
It all slams into place with a magnitude.
The room spins as I put one hand on the railing to keep it upright. “How sure?”
“I had blood work done,” Kiera whispers. “Early, but not hypothetical.” She’s talking as if this is something we can strategize. “If we do the math, it lines up with the opera.” A night that was already burned into my brain, now rewriting itself with an alternate ending.
Something hot and ugly flares under my skin—rage at Cicada, at whoever thought any of this was a good experiment. Rage at myself for letting it happen in a world built like this. The rage cools into something heavier. “Okay,” I exhale. It’s the only word that doesn’t feel like a lie.
Kiera studies my face like she’s waiting for a verdict.
“You’re allowed more than okay.” She steps closer.
“Yell. Swear. Tell me it’s a fucking terrible idea.
I can take it. I know it’s not ideal for us.
Hell, I’m not even sure what us means yet, let alone if we want to bring an innocent human into this. ”
“I don’t think you planned this, Ki,” I say, leaning into her. “It happened in the middle of letting go, tired of being half broken. Blame feels…doesn’t feel right.”
Kiera’s fingers curl around the railing.
“I need you to hear me on this…” She takes a deep breath.
“I haven’t decided what I’m doing. I’m not sure I want to keep it.
I don’t know if I can. I just know I didn’t want you finding out from a lab result or because I fainted in the middle of a firefight. ”
“Good.” The words feel wrong. Realizing that my words came out wrong, I mumble an explanation. “That you told me, I mean. Not the fainting part.”
A quick, brittle laugh escapes her. “Dr. L says I have time,” Kiera goes on. “Weeks, not forever. Enough to decide if I want to fight the war that comes with keeping it, or if I’m allowed to say no without turning that into another weapon to beat myself with.”
“Dr. who?” I growl.
“She’s a friend. Off-grid. One I can trust. She’s the one I called from the cabin and ran the labs. She’s the reason I’m spiraling out of control right now.”
“Okay.” If she says we can trust her, I have to trust her judgment.
Kiera snorts. “I’m telling you because you’re…
involved,” she says. “Biologically. Emotionally. Idiotically. Pick your adverb. I’m not asking you to decide for me.
That’s not fucking happening. But if you were going to bolt, I’d rather know now than halfway through whatever this turns into.
You get to have a voice, too. I just need to prepare for how you feel. ”
The idea of bolting hadn’t even made it onto the list. Neither had the idea of being allowed to love something so pure.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I swear. The words come easier than I expected.
“If you keep it, I’m in. If you don’t, I’m still fucking in.
If you want to hide it from everyone until you’re ready to say it out loud again, I’m in.
You are mine. Whether we keep this child or not.
” I pull her into me. “Just remember, while you’re deciding, that this wasn’t Cicada.
This was us. They had no part in the opera, and they have no part in this child.
That was all us, Thorn, no one else.” I’m practically begging her not to spiral and make a decision based on someone else.
Kiera looks at me, searching my eyes, like she’s checking for cracks. “And if I decide I want it? If I decide I want the opera to be where this started, what then?”
“Then we make it ours,” I say before I can overthink it. “Not theirs. We build whatever paranoid, fucked-up version of safe we can manage around you and…” I swallow the word kid. It feels too big. “Around this.” I place my hands gently on her stomach.
Something in Kiera’s expression flickers, then steadies. “You know that probably means running. Eventually. We can’t keep doing this job with… that in the equation.”
“I know,” I agree. “I’m not married to Cicada’s to-do list. And we have friends who can help carry out the rest of the plan if needed.
We can take a step back and figure this out.
” She starts to cut me off, but I stop her.
“No, I’m not saying you can’t be involved, but it will be behind the scenes, calling the shots if you decide to keep it.
“Since when do you compromise?” she asks, skeptical.
“Since before I walked into a condemned chapel and let you carve your name under my ribs,” I raise my shoulder. “This just… accelerates the timeline.”
Kiera exhales, some of the tension bleeding out of her shoulders. “Okay,” she says quietly. “That’s… more than I expected, honestly.”
I rest my forearms on the railing beside hers. “We don’t have to tell Cam or Lila yet,” I say. “You get to pick who knows and when. For once, you get to be the one choosing what gets written down.”
“Lila’s going to sniff it out by breakfast,” she giggles lightly. “But yeah. I’d like a few hours where it’s just ours.”
“Ours,” I parrot, letting the words sink in.
Kiera lets go of the railing with one hand and reaches for mine, fingers hooking into my palm with more certainty this time. “If I decide to keep it, that’s the story. Just…two idiots on a balcony, and my body decided to follow through.”
“Then that’s the story.”
Kiera squeezes my hand once, hard, then releases it, like she’s testing the truth of that. “Okay,” she says. “Then I can actually… think about it now, instead of just panicking around it.”
Below us, the warehouse hums a little louder as the heat kicks fully on, warm air bleeding into the chill. For the first time, the future doesn’t feel like a cliff we’re unthinkingly racing toward. It feels like a road—twisted, dangerous, badly lit—but a road we’re on together.
Down on the main floor, Lila laughs at something Cam says, the sound faint and distorted by distance.
It feels like it belongs to another life—one where the worst thing we had to worry about was heartbreak and bad coffee.
Up here, it’s just us and a word that keeps echoing in my head.
Pregnant. I clear my throat because if I don’t say something now, I’ll start pacing and she’ll think I’m looking for exits instead of air.
“Tell me what you need from me tonight.” I rush out. “Let me help.”
Kiera’s eyebrows lift, like she wasn’t expecting me to narrow it that way. “Tonight?” she repeats.
“Tonight,” I say. “Between now and when you try to pretend to sleep.”
Kiera huffs out a breath that might be a laugh if you’re generous; her grip tightens on my hand. “I need you not to look at me like I’m a bomb,” she says. “Even if I am.”
“Too late,” I say. “I’ve always looked at you like you’re a bomb; this just changes the blast radius.”
That pulls the ghost of a real smile out of her. “True.”
Kiera tips her head back, staring up at the exposed beams above us. “I don’t know how to do this without turning it into a mission,” she admits. “My brain keeps trying to make flowcharts. If I keep it, then run. If not, then compartmentalize and weaponize the guilt. It’s fucking exhausting.”
“You’re allowed not to solve it in one night,” I say. “You’re allowed just to be… freaked out. That’s normal.”
Kiera glances at me sideways. “What about you?”
“Same,” I admit, a blip of vulnerability spilling out.
“Good, I’d hate to be the only one.” A smirk slides into place as we fall quiet again, but it’s softer now, less like a chokehold.
I shift so my shoulder brushes hers, a small point of contact.
After a moment, she leans into it, just enough that I can feel some of her weight. “You know what else I need?” she says.
“Hit me.”
“Food. Like real food,” Kiera beams. “And a shower that doesn’t have kids listening outside the door. Maybe one night where we don’t talk about the future, also.”
I nod. “We can do that. Lila’s already declaring war on my pantry. Shower’s yours first. As for the future…” I shrug. “Tonight, it doesn’t exist. Just these four walls and our poor life choices.”
She snorts. “You say that like opera night was a mistake.”
Smiling at her, I take her face in my hands. “Nothing could ever make me regret that.”
Kiera watches me before she turns her head. “You don’t,” she whispers. It’s not quite a question. The trauma of Wade and Asher is weighing on her, even if she won’t say it out loud.
“I regret a lot of things. You are not on the list.”
Her throat works. “Even if this ends up being a no?” Kiera asks, voice low. “Even if I decide I can’t do this?”
“Still not on the list.” I laugh so deeply that it sounds like a growl. “What you decide from here doesn’t retroactively make that night a crime scene.”
For a second, I think she might cry, her eyes shine, tears damming at her waterline. She looks away, blinking hard. “Okay,” she says quietly. “That also…helps. But for the record, it was most definitely a crime scene.”
“Only if you turn me in,” I argue, letting out a soft laugh.
We stand there like that for a while, shoulders touching, hands linked, the warehouse humming around us like a big, ugly heartbeat. Eventually, Lila’s voice cuts through from below. “Sterling!” she yells. “If you don’t approve this grocery list, I’m buying nothing but kale and decaf.”
Kiera winces, “She means that.” She squeezes my hand once more, then lets go; the absence of contact immediately feels like a loss. “We should go down. Before she adds tofu to that list.”
“You two are monsters,” I mutter.
Kiera pushes off the railing and turns toward the stairs. Hesitating, she looks back at me, something bare and sharp and fond all tangled up in her expression. “Sterling,” she says.
“Yeah?”
“Thanks. For not…running.”
“I’ll save the running for when you start sending me at-home ultrasound videos from whatever safe hole we end up in,” I chuckle.
“You think you’re getting videos?” She rolls her eyes. “Cute.”
I offer her a shallow bow toward the stairs.
“After you, Thorn.” Keira snorts, but there’s warmth under it.
We head back down together, the echo of our boots on metal.
Downstairs, Lila starts waving a notebook at me like a weapon.
Cam’s half-buried in cables. For the first time, when I look at the space, I don’t just see a bunker—I see something we might be able to call home.