He said the word as though it didn’t belong in his mouth.
“Just… come with me, Bryce. Don’t put up a fight. You need to get out of here.”
His eyes were so earnest for a moment, so softened from that hard glare he had often sported. Immediately, Cassie went to him, and I wanted to pull her back, to protect her, to tell her truths about her father that she was too young to understand.But I hated how her instincts would likely feel relaxed. That part of her would know, subconsciously, that she was his.
It terrified me. It terrified me to see Mason reach out a hand to Cassie, pull her through the door, and wait for me.
When I hesitated, Mason’s eyes flashed.
“You want your daughter to wait for you in a burning house? “ he growled.
I couldn’t keep looking at him, and my anger won out as I went through the door without his help. Yet, as I gathered Cassie back in my arms, I couldn’t ignore how she stared at Mason.She knows, I thought.A part of her knows something. My instincts told me to move in front of her, to shield her from him.
He had never raised a finger to me, yet his words had hurt, his rejection, everything he had purposefully done to make me an outcast. Seven years or not, scars remained, and his was the deepest one of all.
“Bryce—”
“Just do what you came to do,” I snapped. “And donotspeak to her.”
“I came to protect you. Your brother’s team is here to do damage control. My goal was solely you.”
The words struck me with too much honesty that I didn’t know how to handle. My jaw clenched as I tried to ignore his confession. It didn’t matter. He couldn’t just swoop in and play hero because he’d known I was in dangernow. He hadn’t given a shit seven years ago when he’d been the one putting me in harm’s way. When he’d let a rejected, hurt eighteen-year-old walk away from her pack, forced to start over in a new town alone.
I didn’t know what to do with what he’d told me, and thankfully, I didn’t have to think hard, because my brother came over, and Cassie’s inspection of Mason broke in favor of running at her uncle.
“The fire’s under control,” he told me, hugging Cassie. “Hey, honey. How’re you? My God, you’ve grown, like, a foot since I last saw you.”
Cassie giggled, pulling back. “No, I haven’t!”
“No, seriously, has turning seven made you grow? You’re almost at the ceiling, Cass.”
He grinned at her before his gaze lifted to me, to Mason, and then back to me. If Mason was piecing together Cassie’s age, he didn’t show it, either. I purposefully didn’t look at him. I couldn’t bear to.
“Well,thisisn’t awkward at all.” Jackson chuckled, looking between us both.
I only looked back at my brother. “You buzzed your hair off?”
“Yeah,” he snorted. “I mean, it’s not exactly the most pressing issue right now, but—”
“It looks good.”
I walked past them both, and although I hadn’t seen my brother since Christmas five months ago, I was marginally annoyed at him for allowing Mason to come with him. The other part of me knew that Mason was stubborn enough that if he’d wanted to come, then he’d have found any sort of way. He had always been headstrong like that.
“Come through,” Jackson said, guiding me through the kitchen. The destruction around me had me feeling weak in the legs. “These attacks are… well, some of the guys think they’rebecoming increasingly common. But you’re lucky by the other standards we’ve seen in Honeycreek. The rooms are scorched, and the demon destroyed a good deal of furniture, but the house is intact.”
It was—but everything was destroyed, and I couldn’t help but let out a pained, choked noise when I looked at it all. The sofa where I had held Cassie the day I brought her back from the hospital was nothing but a frame with deep, burn holes in it. The rug I’d found in the cellar, left by the previous tenant, was nothing but ash.
The walls were charred up and down, and the TV was smashed in. My heart ached at the devastation. Everything I had built for the last seven years—all of it was destroyed.
“Intact, but… gone,” I whispered.
“If the causes of the attacksaredemons,” Mason said, startling me, “then you’re lucky to have what is left at all. They’re getting bolder.”
I wanted to whirl on him with anger, to tell him that I wouldn’t have had to move to this house, to try to build my life here only to now lose it, if it hadn’t been for him.
It’s not too bad, I tried to tell myself, if only to block out Mason’s voice.It’s not too bad. You’ll be fine. You can rebuild.
“This was no ordinary attack,” Jackson told me. “I know that’s not what you want to hear, but God knows we have enough experience with demons to know the signs.”
