“I don’t want to run from this,” I said, fingers curling against Goblin’s fur. “I’m tired. I’m…exhausted. But we’re close. Closer than we’ve been since this started. I can feel it.”
Legend nodded slowly, something like pride flickering in his eyes. “Then we stay until Alphabet gets the next solid lead.”
AB lifted a hand. “I can get you that by tonight. Tomorrow at the latest.” He grunted. “Okay, forty-eight hours tops. I want to make sure I drill down far enough that we don’t miss anything.”
Voodoo finally stopped pacing. “Then we prep. Weapons. Extractions. Evac contingencies. Because the second we tug one wrong strand of that cabal web, they’re going to feel it. Might already know Sinclair’s missing.”
A tremor slipped down my spine.
“Does it matter?” I asked.
Bones came around the couch and sank beside me, letting his shoulder brush mine in silent answer.
He was right.
It didn’t matter.
We weren’t stopping.
Not until we found Amorette.
Bones raised his arm.
It was such a small gesture—barely more than a quiet invitation—but my body moved before my mind caught up. I leaned into him, curling into the curve of his chest as though that was the place I’d been meant to fit all along.
He didn’t say anything at first. Just held me, his warmth sinking into my skin, into me, into the hollowed-out spaces where adrenaline had finally burned itself out. We’d all showered and changed back at Sinclair’s house before we left it behind—somewhere in the fog, I remembered that. The soap, the steam, the scrape of a towel across my skin. Washing off the sweat and fear and the stink of the basement.
But none of it touched the tiredness.
“Do you want to rest?” Bones asked quietly, his breath stirring the top of my hair.
“I don’t…” My fingers curled in Goblin’s fur again. “I don’t know what I want.”
That earned me the full attention of the room.
Legend’s head lifted immediately, all that mischief he wore like armor snapping off his face as if someone had flipped a switch. Voodoo paused mid-swipe over whatever tactical list he was building on his phone. Even AB’s typing cut off mid-click, his hands suspended over his keys.
For a heartbeat, nobody breathed.
Then Legend said, abruptly and with the weight of absolute certainty, “Food.”
All of us looked at him.
He lifted his chin. “No joke. That’s what we need. She needs to eat. We all do. And we need a beat. Just us. Nothing heavy. Clear the mental palate before we start wrestling with the next monster.”
Voodoo’s thumb tapped once against his thigh. “Agreed. Low blood sugar and high stress is a shit combination.”
AB rolled his chair back from the table. “I can pause. Algorithms won’t implode if I take thirty minutes. I have plenty of searches that can run while we break.” He pointed to the screen without looking at it. “I already know where to pick the threads up.”
Legend rubbed a hand over his jaw. “So. Options. We can cook here. Or we can pick up from that little place three blocks over—the one with the day-old pastries and the weirdly excellent sandwiches.”
Voodoo snorted. “The café with the chairs that collapse when you breathe too hard.”
“They fixed the chairs,” Legend shot back. “Their grilled cheese is god-tier, don’t even lie.”
Bones glanced down at me. “Dollface? Any preferences?”
I didn’t. But the normalcy of them debating sandwiches and collapsing chairs and delivery apps felt like a rope thrown to a drowning swimmer. Something to hold onto.
