“I MEAN, in a way this is a good thing,” Blaze said, bracing his elbows on the dining table as he tried his best to put a positive spin on the situation. “You found the root of all your problems, and it all comes down to the same guy.”
Dess grimaced as she stalked restlessly through the open concept room. She poked at the rocky wall at one end of the living area that served as a reminder that the house we’d borrowed was literally built into the side of a hill. “It’s not good at all. I got answers, and the main answer is that this Blood Hunter guy has been controlling me from behind the scenes practically my entire life. How many of my decisions have really been my own? He’s had his fingers in everything.”
“He hasn’t managed to get his hands on you, not since you got free,” I felt the need to remind her. I’d seen the tension building in her from the moment we returned here, while she laid out everything the man we’d known as the Hunter had told her.
Some of that tension burst out now with the slam of her first against the top of the sofa. “Small victories. You know what pisses me off the most? He obviously thinks there’s no way we could ever touch him—that we haven’t got a chance at taking him on if we wanted to. He thinks he can get away with everything because of all his power.”
I didn’t want to think it, but for all we knew, he was right. That thought was clearly weighing on Dess too. I’d never been affected by other people’s emotions much before, but my God, I would have done anything in that moment to lift some of the stress and frustration radiating off her.
She’d finally found out the whole truth about her life, and it’d been more horrible than any of us could have guessed.
Julius shook his head, his jaw tight. “All this secret organization bullshit. We’ll find out exactly what this asshole is up to and work from there. No one’s invincible, fancy aliases or not.”
His voice came out as gruffly commanding as usual, but I knew him well enough to recognize that he was nearly as tense as Dess was. The bulky muscles in his arms flexed, and his hands kept shifting in little increments where they were resting on the top of a chair, like they were feeling for something to hold on to.
Just this once, our leader didn’t have the situation already in hand. He’d found out that we’d all been played by the Blood Hunter. The man had been manipulating our actions at every turn, even when Julius had thought he’d been strategic. It had to be eating at him that he hadn’t realized and that he didn’t know exactly how to throw off that yoke immediately.
“We don’t have to change our plans,” he went on. “We were talking about flying home tomorrow. That would give us some distance to regroup—and it’d send him a very clear message about your disinterest in working for him.”
Garrison rubbed his finger over his narrow chin. “It’ll definitely send a message, but I’m not sure that’s the message we want to send. It could look to him like we’re running scared. And we’ll have a harder time investigating his operations from afar.”
Dess leaned against the sofa and groaned. “I’d like to go home,” she groused, and despite the problem in front of us, something in me lit up at hearing her refer to the crew’s apartment as her home too.
Blaze lifted his eyebrows. “What, you’re not in love with the unique architecture we’ve been blessed with here?” he teased.
Dess wrinkled her nose at him. It was true that the house’s unusual features, being half embedded in rock, gave it natural air conditioning and built-in defenses against attack. But Dess had at least a few reasons beyond homesickness not to appreciate it.
“There are a lot fewer bugs in the apartment.” She gave a little shudder of disgust.
“He said he’d give Dess two days to decide,” Garrison put in. “What’s he going to do after that? Is he really going to accept a ‘no,’ or will he try to force the issue?”
Blaze frowned. “He obviously doesn’t have any issues with using force. All the attacks we’ve faced since we arrived in the DC area must have been orchestrated by him, right? One more way to cast suspicion on the Maliks while accomplishing his own ends.”
Julius’s eyes darkened. “He was targeting us rather than Dess. Probably hoping he could take as many of us out of commission as possible so we couldn’t influence her decisions away from what he wanted.”
Dess let out a huff that was almost a growl and pushed herself away from the sofa. “Fucking prick. There’s no way in hell I want to work for him, period, but if he hurt any of you… He already has.” She glanced around at us, her gray gaze turned stormy. “I don’t care if he’s the king of the universe. He’s been a threat to me since I was a kid and to all of us for the past few months, and that means we need to take him down.”
“Hey.” Garrison leaned across the table, his normally nonchalant expression turning intent as he tipped his head toward Julius and me. “During one of the attacks, we ran into a guy you two knew. There’s our in. He got dragged into this mess by the Blood Hunter somehow. You’ve got ties to him. We should tug on those and find out what he knows.”
It’d been strange, spotting that familiar face in the middle of the fray, aged by fifteen years since we’d last encountered him. I’d almost thought I was wrong until I’d seen Julius’s momentarily startled reaction. How a guy we’d trained with back in our military days had ended up on the other side of this conflict would definitely be some kind of crazy story.
“I’m not sure we’ll get anywhere with Petrov,” Julius said. “I haven’t spoken to him in over a decade. His loyalties are clearly elsewhere now.”
Garrison rolled his eyes. “You obviously have a history you can lean on. Or we can literally lean on him until he bows under pressure. There are five of us and only one of him. He’s the only person with a connection to the Blood Hunter that we know of.”
I could tell Julius wasn’t happy about this idea either, but I couldn’t think of a better option. We did have a little leverage, and we had nowhere else to start.
Julius balked for a few seconds longer and then nodded. “You’re right. It’s by far our best lead. I’ll reach out to him and see what kind of approach we’ll need to take.”
“When you question him, I want to be there with you,” Dess chimed in. “There’s plenty I’d like to know about the Blood Hunter’s whole set-up, and I’ve seen and heard more about it than the rest of you, so I’ll know the right things to ask.”
That point made sense too, but the thought of her in the same room as a known enemy sent an unexpected jolt of ice through my veins. My chest constricted, and suddenly I was back in the nightclub a couple of hours ago, watching her walk away with the Blood Hunter into his office without any way of following, any way of protecting her. My hands clenched at my sides.
Dess was the strongest person I knew. There was no reason for me to worry, let alone panic, about her taking part in a simple interrogation. So why was this emotion clamping around my lungs when I barely ever felt anything at all?
Because of her. Because the more time I spent in her presence, the more I cared, beyond anything I’d thought I was capable of. More than I’d ever cared about anyone, even my brothers-in-arms.
Was this… love? This desperate need to stand by her and watch over her in every way I could? I hadn’t ever expected to feel anything that intense, but I couldn’t deny that something powerful gripped me whenever I thought about her, whenever I looked at her.
I wasn’t sure I liked it. She deserved that much feeling—she more than deserved whatever loyalty and admiration I could offer her. But the pang of emotion that resonated through my heart seemed like a weakness. Was I going to be able to fight to my full ability when I needed to if I couldn’t shut away all those impulses and give myself over to cold, unshakeable focus?
But if that was the trade-off, I couldn’t think of anyone worthy of making it for other than her.
Dess’s hand jerked to her pocket. She pulled out her phone, which I guessed had given a vibrating alert. As she peered at the screen, her expression stiffened. I stepped forward, automatically going into protective mode from that reaction alone.
“What’s the matter?” Julius demanded with equally fierce concern.
“It’s my mother,” Dess said quietly. “She texted me—she knows Damien and the others are dead. She says… she says she knows what we did. Turn on the TV. Channel 6.”
Garrison was closest to the TV. He leapt for the remote and switched it on before the rest of us could do more than turn around. Then we all stood there staring at the footage playing on the screen.
Blaze managed to speak first, with a weak sort-of chuckle. “Looks like the clean-up crew didn’t get there in time.”
“There” was the Maliks’ country home. We’d only spent an hour on the property at most, but I instantly recognized the pale building with its broad porch and the barn in the background, where Garrison had been tied up. In front of those structures, police officers milled around while figures carried black-bagged bodies to a coroner’s van.
A news reporter came into frame, blatant horror etched across her carefully made-up face. She cleared her throat and launched back into what must have been a continuing spiel.
“The police haven’t yet released a definitive statement about the official number of victims or their identities, but there’s evidence of a much more devastating crime at play here. We have reason to believe that a group targeting children for horrific ends was operating out of this property. There is speculation that Damien Malik is among the deceased, and that perhaps this was a revenge killing for his role in that group. Clearly, we still need more answers. Tune back in at the top of the hour for the latest information on this case.”
Dess’s lips had parted with shock. “There wasn’t any evidence about the child killings when we were there,” she said. “Nothing that was obvious enough that it should have come to light this quickly.”
Julius’s expression darkened. “The Blood Hunter is playing more games. He wanted his revenge on the Maliks for his daughter, right? Having Damien’s daughter murder them wasn’t enough. He wanted to ruin their entire legacy. He must have sent people in right after we left to plant the evidence.”
Garrison sucked a breath through his teeth. “Or maybe they were already there. Someone grabbed me and left me there as bait, and I think we can assume now that it wasn’t anyone operating under the Maliks’ orders. The Blood Hunter used me to lure you out there for the final showdown.”
My eyebrows shot up, but the moment he said it, I could see how much sense that made.
“You’re right,” Julius said, his voice even tauter than before. “And he must have called in the cops too, to make sure they found everything he wanted them to before our clean-up guys got there.”
“Fuck.” Dess’s fingers tightened around her phone. She stared down at the message for several seconds longer and then shoved the phone into her pocket without replying. I certainly couldn’t have offered any suggestions about how to tackle this subject with her sparse remaining family.
“There’s nothing I can tell them that would make any difference,” she said stiffly, and wandered down the hall to the stairs.
That might have been true, but the fact obviously unnerved her. I didn’t like seeing her shaken. How could she not be when her life had been ripped apart and then the pieces shredded into even smaller pieces?
As I moved to follow her, Blaze straightened up too. Seeing me, he held himself back and offered me a respectful nod. Maybe he figured that I spoke little enough that he should give me room to when I was going out of my way to talk.
I found Dess in the bedroom she’d claimed as her own, sprawled on top of the covers, her hands folded over her abdomen. She was staring at the ceiling as if deep in thought, not stirring when I entered, though it was hard to believe she’d missed my entrance. That suspicion was confirmed when I reached the edge of the bed and she spoke, still gazing upward.
“Is this what people mean when they say that life sucks?”
I couldn’t stop the corner of my mouth from twitching into a smile. Sinking down onto the bed next to her, I rested my hand on her shin in what I hoped was at least a vaguely comforting gesture. “You’re still upset about what you had to do.”
“No—yes—I don’t know.” She scowled at the ceiling. “I don’t feel like I had a whole lot of choice. And they were sick. Child-murdering psychopaths, any way you slice it. How can I feel bad about ridding the world of them?”
The hint of roughness in her voice suggested that some small part of her did anyway.
I rubbed my fingers gently up to her knee and down to her ankle. “You know I’ve been there. Killing my parental figures. And they’d actually raised me—and they weren’t going around torturing kids.”
“But they’d tortured you,” Dess muttered, her eyes flashing as she must have remembered the story I’d told her during the drive to the country house.
“One is less than many,” I said. “But… After I did it, I felt a little guilty. Maybe for a day or two. And then that faded away beneath the knowledge that it’d been for the best, and… that might be the last moment I really felt anything in a long time.”
Finally, Dess tipped her head to the side to look at me. “It sounds like not feeling anything would be easier.”
I shrugged. “It might be. But given what I know about normal human behavior, somehow I think it’s better for you to have your feelings and work through them rather than losing them like I did. It just means you’re a better person than your family was, because you do care. You didn’t want to hurt them. You did what you had to do, and you should know that you didn’t do a single thing wrong, but it makes sense that it was hard.”
“Well, I guess if even you think that…” she grumbled, but she sat up and scooted closer to me. When she leaned into me, accepting the slide of my arm around her waist and tucking her head against my shoulder, so much emotion swelled in my chest that it was difficult to imagine I’d really spent years feeling nothing at all.
“Thank you,” she murmured. “We’ll get through this. Because none of us are alone.”
My arm tightened around her as if I could imprint into her body how true that statement was. No matter the cost—no matter the consequences—I’d protect her from the forces working to control her life all over again. I’d see that she got all the justice she deserved for the crimes committed against her.
