The leather seat beneath me is cold. My limbs feel foreign, as if they no longer belong to me. I stare ahead, unblinking, barely breathing, as the estate fades into the darkness, swallowed by the night.
My father. My brothers. Their blood is still warm on the marble. Yet here I am, breathing shaky breaths with sweaty hands.
I don’t move. I don’t cry because I can’t seem to. I just sit, spine stiff, hands curled into my lap, my skin damp, bloody, and trembling.
Hayden is silent beside me. His long legs stretched out, one hand resting on the leather beside him, the other toying with the signet ring on his pinky. The ring catches the passing streetlights, the intricate engravings on its face glinting as it catches the light. I lean forward to see the skull and bones crest on it, the ring the Bonesmen wear.
The same ring my brothers wear.
Wore.
I steal a glance at him through my eyelashes out of the sides of my eyes. He’s calm and somehow unbothered by the scene back at the estate. Like he wasn’t just standing over my family’s bloodied bodies. Like he hadn’t just dragged me away from the only world I’ve ever known.
My pulse slams against my throat. “Where are you taking me?”
Hayden doesn’t answer, and I can’t stop the anger that coils in my gut, but there's barely any room for it. I’m so full of grief I’m nearly brimming over with it.
I swallow. “I need to go back,” my voice is thin, barely above a whisper, “I need…”
“You need,” he cuts in, smooth and unhurried, “to be quiet.”
The words are soft. But the command in them is sharp enough to slice skin. I can tell it’s not personal, it’s just an instruction I’m expected to follow.
A chill prickles up my spine. I rub my sweaty and bloody palms on the side of my thighs, then raise my hand and wipe my nose with the back of it, not caring for social graces.
“I didn’t ask for this, and I have no idea who you are. You have no right to take me!” I snap, my voice breaking.
“No.” He finally turns to me, his gaze unreadable. “But that doesn’t matter, does it?”
I hate the way he’s looking at me like he knows something I don’t. Like I’m already his.
The tires hum against the road. The driver says nothing, only a shadow behind the wheel.
I clench my jaw. “You had something to do with this.”
His lips twitch, but the amusement doesn’t reach his eyes. “Did I?”
“Don’t play games with me,” I hear the edge in my voice, sharp with the weight of my grief, my rage, my fear. “You knew something was going to happen to my family. You knew it, and you did nothing to stop it, didn’t you?”
I’m aware of the gravity of the accusation I’m making. I don’t know anything about this man, and suddenly I’m here, drowning in his aura of ownership and possessiveness, terrified at his odd assumption that I somehow belong to him now, as though I’m just an item picked up at an estate sale.
Like he can hear me thinking, he pauses. Leaning his head back against the seat, studying me, fingers still idly toying with that ring. He only hums in amusement.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one you’re getting.”
Frustration coils inside me, but there’s a weight beneath it, a heaviness dark and suffocating.
“You can’t simply take a person with no explanation. Tell me now why I’m here,” I demand.
He only cuts me a glance that could shatter glass.
Suddenly, like whiplash, the overwhelming truth of the day settles in my bones.
I have lost everyone. In one single day, my entire family has been slaughtered. Once the most powerful family in our Society, cut down to only bloodied flesh and useless bones.
I gulp at the fact that my mother and father are dead. But I break with the knowledge that Ford and Dex are gone.
