Chapter Twenty-Five - Evie
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Evie
I COULDN’T BELIEVE I was finally out. Out of that soft-lit nightmare. Out of His hands. Back in Luc’s arms. But Destiny wasn’t, and that truth felt bottomless.
She had come for me, and she was gone because of it. Because of Him. Because of me.
I pressed my face harder into Luc’s chest, but there was no hiding from that. I had escaped. Destiny hadn’t, and I hated myself a little more.
The van rattled through the dark as Liora drove. But for a little while, none of it felt real, the road, the desert, not even the others all packed into the silence with us, carrying fresh grief like a second skin. The only thing that felt real was Luc.
Luc, warm and solid and breathing. Luc, alive and holding me as if he let go for even a second, another realm might steal me back.
I stayed folded into him because I didn’t think I could do anything else.
My cheek was against his chest. One of his arms was locked around my back so tightly it should have hurt, but it didn’t.
His hand kept moving over me in slow, restless passes like he needed the proof of me there just as badly as I did.
Every now and then, his mouth brushed my temple, my hairline, the side of my head, little wordless touches that made something in me ache so hard it almost felt like relief.
I was home. But it wasn’t a place. It was him. And that was the awful truth of it. After everything, the first thing my body recognized as safety was Luc. And for a few minutes, I let myself have that.
His heartbeat was steady under my cheek.
And his scent, god, his scent was everywhere, smoke and cinnamon and that dark impossible warmth that was just Luc.
But it seemed stronger now somehow, richer, wrapping around me until it felt less like breathing him in and more like drowning in something I wanted more of.
It was the only thing keeping me from flying apart.
I stayed pressed against him just to keep it around me, greedy for it in a way I didn’t have the energy to examine.
I couldn’t cry anymore. I thought maybe I should. My best friend was gone, dead. Topher had made a sound on that mountain I knew I’d hear for the rest of my life. Everything hurt too much for tears to feel like enough.
So I just stayed where I was, breathing Luc in, trying not to think at all about anything. And then—
His hand slid up into my hair. He caught a loose strand and tucked it carefully behind my ear. My whole body flinched. I couldn’t even control it. One second, I was melting into him, and the next, I jerked so hard I nearly hit the van door.
My breath hitched sharp and ugly in my throat.
Every muscle in me locked. Because for one horrible, blinding second it wasn’t Luc’s hand.
It was His. That same terrible gentleness.
That same careful, possessive touch. Hair brushed back from my face like tenderness could make a cage holy.
My skin remembered before my mind did, and by the time I understood why I’d flinched, I was already back there, trapped in that bed with Him holding me while disgust surged up the back of my throat.
Everyone looked away, pretending they didn’t notice. But I caught Liora’s eyes in the rearview before she quickly looked away.
Luc froze, and I looked at him. The look on his face made the shame hit almost as hard as the memory.
He wasn’t hurt, but it was worse. That immediate shattered understanding of a man who knew exactly what had just happened and hated that my body had put him anywhere near that monster, even for a second.
“Evie,” he said softly.
I shook my head too fast. “I’m sorry,” I said, but my voice came out thin and wrecked.
“You don’t have to apologize.”
“I know. I know it was you, I just—” I broke off.
The words snagged somewhere between my ribs and my throat and dissolved into tears as I stared at the floor. Heat climbed my face.
But he didn’t move toward me again. He just sat there looking at me like I was something breakable he would rather die than mishandle, and I hated that even more because I didn’t want him afraid of touching me.
I didn’t want him to be careful. I didn’t want Him to take one more thing from us and turn it into something we had to work around.
“It’s not you,” I said, softer now, fixing my eyes on the dark window, trying to force the tears back because if I looked at him, I knew they would spill. “It’s not.”
“I know,” he said immediately.
But his voice had changed. It had gone rough at the edges, too controlled, like he was holding himself still with both hands and a prayer.
I folded my arms over myself after that, not because I wanted distance from him, but because suddenly I didn’t trust my own body to know the difference between comfort and memory, and that felt like one more theft I didn’t know how to bear.
The silence after that wasn’t empty. It was crowded with Destiny’s absence and Topher’s grief. Mara sat in it too, still trapped in that golden realm while I rode away in the dark.
And now, Luc’s restraint sat there with the rest of it, the way he kept every inch of himself carefully back from me now, as if giving me space was the only thing he trusted himself to do right.
I hated that most of all, and I hated myself for causing it.
Because all I had wanted for those first few blessed minutes was to be in his arms and stay there. And now even that was ruined.
When Liora pulled the van into the service drive behind the hotel, the silence inside had gone past grief and into something heavier. Something that pressed against my ears and made every ordinary sound feel wrong.
The city was waking up around us in ugly little flashes, neon still bleeding against the edges of dawn, the Strip trying to pretend the world had not just split open somewhere above it.
Everything looked too bright. Too normal.
Like Vegas had no idea Destiny was dead, and we had come back one person fewer.
The van stopped, and for one suspended second, no one moved.
Outside, an older man in hotel coveralls was scrubbing the driveway entrance with a long-handled brush, pushing soapy water toward the drain as if it were any other morning. He looked up when the van doors opened and saw Luc first.
“Good morning, Mr. Morningstar,” he said automatically.
The words barely had time to leave his mouth before he realized this was not, in fact, a good morning. Something in Luc’s face must have told him. Or maybe it was the way we all sat there like survivors of a fire no one else could smell.
Luc stepped down first, one hand braced near me like he still didn’t trust anything not to try and take me back.
“Morning, Eddie,” he said.
But there was nothing warm in it. No easy charm. No lazy wicked amusement. Just a name offered like a warning that now was not the time.
The old man straightened a little too fast, brush still dripping in his hands. “Sir, I didn’t mean, I just—”
Luc didn’t answer. He was already turning back toward the van.
Then Topher shoved the side door open so hard it slammed against the track. He got out without a word. He looked like a zombie.
He wasn’t stumbling or out of it, and somehow that would’ve been easier to understand.
No, he looked emptied out in the most horrifying way, pale and blank and moving only because his body had not yet figured out it no longer had a reason to.
His hands hung at his sides, empty, but I couldn’t stop seeing them the way they’d looked in the dirt, still curved around the shape of someone who wasn’t there anymore.
“Topher,” Luc said.
Topher didn’t stop. He stepped down onto the pavement and just kept going, crossing the drive like the hotel, the van, all of us, were already too far behind him to matter.
I watched him go, but none of us moved at first. We were all too wrecked and too stunned. None of us knew what to do with the shape of grief after what we’d just been through.
Maybe because we had all heard the sound he made on that mountain and understood, in some animal part of ourselves, that whatever came after it was not something you stepped in front of lightly.
“Hey,” Az finally called after him. “Where’re you going?”
That made Topher look over his shoulder, only for a second.
His face didn’t change. He didn’t even really register the question.
He just gave the smallest shrug, then shook his head once like the answer either didn’t exist or wasn’t worth explaining, and kept walking straight toward the darkened street.
The older man with the brush stared after him, then back at Luc, then wisely lowered his eyes and went very still, like he had decided scrubbing concrete was suddenly a deeply private matter.
“Should someone—” I started, but the words came out thin.
Luc was already tense beside me, torn in too many directions at once, especially since we’d barely gotten out alive. His hand hovered near my back, not touching this time, just waiting, but I could feel the warmth.
“Let him go,” he said quietly.
Something in me snapped toward him.
“Let him go?”
My voice came out sharper than I intended.
Everyone heard it. Az lifted his head. Vespera looked over from the other side of the van, her face still too pale beneath all her usual charm.
Liora didn’t look up, but she had gone still in that dangerous way people did when they were listening harder than they wanted to.
Luc looked at me carefully, maybe too carefully. “He needs a minute,” he said.
A minute. The words hit wrong. It sounded too normal, too small for what just happened. Like Topher had just stormed out of a bad meeting instead of watched Destiny get torn apart and sewn into the sky.
I looked back toward the edge of the drive. He was already farther than I liked, moving with that same terrible, empty purpose. The dark street swallowed him by degrees until he was more absence than person.
“He’s not coming back in,” I said.
No one answered. Because they all knew I was right.