LIX
By the time we made it back to the front hall, I had no idea how long we had been gone.
The festival had folded back around itself in our absence. Music still drifted through the ballroom. Candlelight still burned in every polished surface. People still laughed too loudly and danced too easily beneath the solstice chandeliers.
But none of it felt real anymore.
Not after the garden. Not after his mouth on mine.
Not after the impossible, terrifying pulse that had lived for one heartbeat beneath my palm and then vanished.
I was still wearing Heaton’s coat.
It hung heavy around my shoulders, the sleeves too long, black wool swallowing most of my dress and carrying the sharp scent of pine needles and woodsmoke.
My coat had long since disappeared into the checkroom chaos, but I hadn’t been in a state to argue when he wrapped his around me and left it there.
Which was probably how Penny spotted us.
Victor leaned against the wall near the exit, inspecting his fingernails, auburn hair a vibrant slash of color against the gray stone.
“There you are!” Penny said, relief warring with curiosity as she took in our disheveled state. “We were about to send a search party. You two missed the finale.”
“Fresh air,” Heaton said, voice clipped.
Penny’s eyes narrowed like she didn’t believe a single syllable, but she let it go. “Well, if it helps, our creepy friend disappeared before the last number anyway. Slipped out with two guys near the side corridor. So, unless you were planning to chase him into the dark, you didn’t miss much.”
Heaton’s expression sharpened. “Julian left?”
Victor pushed off the wall, eyes narrowing as they landed on Heaton. A slow, knowing smirk spread across his face.
“Well, well,” he drawled, loud enough to carry. “Look at you, Heat. You’re practically glowing.”
He tapped his own cheek.
“Got a bit of color in your cheeks for a change. Did you get lost, or did you find a little sun?”
Heaton kept his eyes forward as he moved toward the coat check.
Penny’s head snapped between them, eyes widening. She looked from Victor’s grin to Heaton’s stiff form, then to the coat swallowing me whole, my windswept hair, and the unmistakable fullness of my lips.
“Oh, brava, Madeline,” Victor crowed, clapping softly. “It’s a miracle. I haven’t seen Heaton look this alive since . . . well, ever.”
He grinned at Heaton, unabashed.
“We should do this more often.”
“Be careful, Victor,” Heaton said, voice dangerously low. “Lest you forget the rules of our little field trip.”
Victor’s smirk didn’t falter, but something harder entered his eyes.
“And what a lovely collar it is, brother.”
Heaton’s jaw flexed, but he said nothing more. He took the coats from the attendant, helped me into mine with a cold, impersonal touch, then shrugged back into his own before leading us to the doors.
The ride home felt unreal.
The kind of quiet that only exists after a wreck.
Or a first kiss.
The Nova hummed beneath us, tires whispering over the mountain road. In the backseat, Penny and Victor had drifted into a world of their own, heads bent close, voices low. Victor said something that made her laugh under her breath, and for one strange second, the night almost felt normal.
It wasn’t.
We hadn’t gotten what we came for. Julian’s inner circle had slipped past us. The Lanterns had watched from every corner. And whatever had happened in the garden still sat between Heaton and me like a live wire neither of us knew how to touch safely.
The estate came into view in a wash of pale headlights.
Heaton killed the engine.
Penny hooked her arm through mine as we climbed out, and we made it to the porch before all four of us stopped.
A thin white line ran straight across the threshold.
Not snow. Not dust.
Salt.
My heart gave one hard, sick beat.
Victor’s voice went flat. “Tell me that’s friendly salt.”
“We didn’t put that there,” I whispered.
The words froze in my throat.
Heaton caught my upper arm and put me behind him in one swift movement, his body going hard as a blade.
It was all the warning we got.
The first blast hit like thunder.
A salt round tore through the dark and caught Heaton across the chest. He jerked hard, a violent sound ripping out of him as white fire burst through the front of his coat.
The second shot came almost on top of the first, slamming Victor sideways so fast Penny screamed.
“Heaton!”
I lunged for him, but he was already dropping, one knee hitting the gravel with a curse dragged up from somewhere feral.
Through the bond, pain detonated under my ribs.
It felt like being burned alive from the inside out.
Victor hit the porch rail hard, one hand braced against it, the other clamped over the wound smoking through his shirt. Every trace of charm vanished from his face.
Lanterns rose from the dark as if they had grown there—black tactical jackets, salt canisters clipped to their belts, suppressed rifles already lifted.
“Move!” someone barked from the treeline.
Then the hounds came.
They hit low and fast from the side yard, all teeth and shadow and eyes like wet coals. Penny shouted something I couldn’t hear. Heaton tried to get up.
Another shot drove him back down.
“Madeline—” he started.
The rest broke apart as two hunters moved on him at once.
I ran onto the porch.
Not away.
For the knife.
I had hidden Heaton’s blade beneath the loose board by the top step the day I brought it home, a private little safeguard I had told no one about.
My hands hit the wood, ripped the board up—
Nothing.
For one frozen second, my brain refused to understand it.
Gone.
Of course it was gone.
They had known. They had been watching me.
A hound lunged.
I grabbed the first thing my hand found in the dark—the tire iron from the porch bench where Ford had left it after changing a flat last month—and swung with both hands.
Metal cracked against the hound’s skull.
It felt like hitting a tank of pressurized ice.
The creature slammed sideways into the rail with a sound no living thing should have made, then unraveled into ash.
Penny had snatched up one of the iron stakes from the garden border. She swung it with both hands as another hound launched for her, the metal whistling through the air before it connected with a sickening crunch that sent the thing tumbling into the frozen flowerbeds.
“Penny!”
She didn’t look at me. She was too busy tracking the shadows, chest heaving, iron stake raised in both shaking hands as two more hounds circled low in the yard.
“Take the civilian,” a voice snapped from the dark.
A hunter in a black mask broke from the line.
Penny saw him and shifted, the stake lifting higher.
He tilted his head.
“Easy,” he called, conversationally. “Wouldn’t want you to embarrass yourself.”
Penny’s face twisted.
“Come closer and I’ll embarrass you instead.”
He did.
One step. Then another.
Slow enough to look careless.
Penny lunged exactly when he wanted her to.
The stake came up in a wild arc for his head, but he was already moving. He caught her wrist mid-swing with terrifying ease and twisted it. Penny gasped, the iron rod jerking out of line.
“Predictable,” he taunted, voice a low, amused rasp behind the mask.
“Quit playing with her, Rafe,” another Lantern said, coming in from her blind side. His voice was flat with boredom. “We’re on a clock.”
A gloved hand fisted in Penny’s hair and yanked.
She cried out as her head snapped back, balance gone. Her knees slammed into the icy ground at the bottom of the porch steps with a crack that made my stomach drop.
“Maddie!” she shrieked.
The first hunter still had her wrist. The second had her by the hair.
Between them, they folded her down as if it was nothing.
“Get off her!”
I launched myself off the porch.
My heel caught wrong on the icy bottom step.
The strap snapped.
One shoe skidded into the yard. The other twisted halfway off before I kicked free of it entirely. There was no time to care. No time to feel the cold bite up through my legs.
I barely made it two steps.
A third Lantern stepped into my path as if the dark had opened and let him through.
One second there was an empty yard between me and Penny. The next, there was black tactical armor, a skull mask, and the cold gleam of intent.
I swung the tire iron on instinct.
It connected with his ribs in a jarring metallic crack that shot pain straight up my arm. He rocked back a fraction.
No more.
His masked face turned slowly toward me.
Then he drove into me.
His shoulder slammed into my middle, hard enough to tear the breath from my lungs. The world flipped. I hit the frozen ground flat on my back, the impact cracking through my spine like lightning. Mud and ice splashed up my legs.
The tire iron nearly flew from my grip.
He went for my wrist.
I twisted, gravel grinding into my knees, and brought the tire iron up again in a blind, ugly swing. It clipped the side of his mask with a crack.
He cursed and caught my forearm.
I clawed at his mask with my free hand. My nails scraped beneath the fabric and found skin.
He jerked back.
Then I bit down on the first thing I could reach—his gloved hand, hard enough to taste copper through leather.
He roared and slammed my head back into the ice.
Stars burst behind my eyes.
I kicked blindly, my heel connecting with the bridge of another Lantern’s nose as they tried to pin my legs down.
Someone swore. Warm blood sprayed across my ankle.
For half a second, the pressure shifted.
I reached for the tire iron again—
and a boot came down on my wrist.
Pain shot clear to my shoulder. My fingers spasmed open.
“Enough!”
The voice cracked across the yard like a gunshot.
I looked up through a haze of snow and pain.
Penny was on her knees at the bottom of the porch steps, wrists wrenched behind her back and cinched tight with restraints. One Lantern had a fist twisted in her hair. Another stood behind her with a serrated knife tucked under her jaw, the edge so close to her throat it made my skin go cold.
Penny’s chest heaved. Blood streaked the corner of her mouth.
Her eyes were huge and furious and terrified all at once.
“Drop it, October,” the man pinning me said. “Or she bleeds.”
My hand twitched uselessly in the mud.
The boot ground harder into my wrist.
Across the yard, Penny’s eyes locked on mine.
“Maddie, don’t—”
The knife bit just enough to raise a thin line of red.
The fight went out of me all at once.
Not because I wanted it to.
Because I knew exactly what would happen if it didn’t.
I let the tire iron sink into the slush.
They were on me immediately.
Hands everywhere.
One Lantern wrenched my arms behind my back so hard my shoulder screamed. Another caught me around the waist when I bucked and twisted, trying to tear free. A third seized my wrists.
Plastic bit into skin.
Tight.
Then tighter.
The porch swam in and out of focus.
By the time they dragged me upright, my breath was coming in ragged bursts. The entire world had narrowed to pain, white noise, and Penny’s bloodied face.
One hunter shoved me forward, gloved hand heavy on the back of my neck. I stumbled, gravel biting through my ruined stockings, and looked up just in time to see someone step out of the shadows near the top of the steps.
Relief tried to rise and died in the same breath.
Heaton.
He was whole.
Not in the gravel. Not fraying into ash.
Not torn open by salt rounds.
Whole.
He stood perfectly still, the black wool of his coat untouched by the violence of the yard.
The agonizing scream of the bond—the pain that had nearly blinded me—had vanished so completely it left me dizzy.
He looked down at his sleeve, adjusting one cuff with calm, almost absent precision as he slowly descended the porch stairs.
For one broken, stupid second, my mind still tried to manufacture a rescue.
He had gotten free. He had come back.
He—
Never even looked at me.
Heaton stopped beside Penny only long enough to clear the steps. Then he cut straight across the yard, not toward me, but toward another masked hunter standing in the wash of the headlights with a shotgun still raised and half the field moving on his commands.
The hunters parted for him without a word.
The man with the raised gun didn’t lower it.
Didn’t even blink.
He only waited.
Heaton crossed the last few feet and put a hand on his shoulder with the ease of an old friend.
“Goddammit, Boaz,” he said. “That fucking hurt.”