My disaster.
Angel:Never yours. This ends now.
You're already mine. Have been since that first text. Next time, you'll admit it.
She doesn't respond, but she doesn't block me either.
Because we both know the truth—this is inevitable. We're inevitable.
Two disasters colliding until there's nothing left but beautiful wreckage.
And I can't fucking wait to burn.
Chapter twenty-three
Brother's Fury
Lena
Miguel's face when he saw my wrecked state told me everything.
I'm standing in my Mobile Mercy Unit, my scrubs wrinkled like I've been through a medical emergency—or gotten finger-fucked on my own exam table, but who's keeping track? My hair's escaped its ponytail in that specific way that screams "sexual activity" rather than "saving lives," and I'm alone. Completely alone. Zane slipped out the back door minutes ago, but his presence lingers like a fever I can't shake.
"You're fucking an Iron Talon," Miguel says, not a question. A diagnosis. Terminal.
"It's not like that," I lie, my voice steady despite my pulse running tachycardic enough to require medical intervention.
"You're marked, disheveled, and smell like sex," he lists, like presenting symptoms. "Your lips are swollen, there's a hickey forming on your neck that you haven't even noticed yet, and—" he pauses, his jaw clenching, "—his bike is still warm outside."
My left ovary composes a funeral march while my right brain calculates exit strategies. None of them end well. All of them end with either Zane dead, Miguel devastated, or me alone. Possibly all three.
"Miguel—"
"Him or family." His voice is quiet now, which is worse than yelling. Miguel quiet is Miguel lethal. "That's your choice. Right here, right now."
"That's not fair," I protest, even though fair is a concept that died with our parents, with his wife, with every person I couldn't save.
"Life isn't fair," he says, and there's so much history in those three words. "We both learned that young. Choose, Lena. Him or us. The enemy or your family."
I think about Zane, currently breathing as quietly as possible six feet away, probably planning seventeen different ways to kill Miguel if this goes south. I think about the texts, the way he watches me work, the way he makes me feel like my disasters are features, not bugs.
I think about Miguel, who raised me after our parents died, who taught me to be strong, who built a family from broken people and blood oaths.
"It's already over," I lie, the words tasting like antiseptic and ash. "Whatever you think happened, it's done. Finished."
Miguel studies me with those eyes that have seen too much, know too much. For a moment, I think he's going to call my bluff, going to search the van, going to find Zane and paint my medical sanctuary with violence.
But then his shoulders drop, just slightly. "Good. Because if I find out you lied to me, hermana, if I find out you chose him..." He doesn't finish the threat. He doesn't need to.
"I know," I say quietly. "I know what I'd lose."
He pulls me into a hug, and I smell leather and motor oil and home. "You're all I have left," he murmurs against my hair. "I can't lose you to them. Not to them."
"You won't," I promise, another lie to add to my collection. I'm becoming quite the curator of deceptions.
He leaves, finally, his bike roaring to life like a warning. I wait until the sound fades completely, then wait another full minute, counting heartbeats like rosary beads.
My phone buzzes.
