Beyond the deaths, he realized how fucking far I’d let myself fall—Gemma wasn’t the liability he was referring to. I was.
It wasn’t that Wraith was being kind in his lack of anger or supportive in his silence. He just didn’t care. I wasn’t sure if he had any bone in his body capable of feeling.
“Is that all?” Lock asked. “Is there anything else you’re not telling us?”
Anything else?
They still didn’t know the truth of Gemma’s contract,whyI’d kept us in limbo for five years. Why I couldn’t get us out.
I could have let Gemma go that night. Even after I showed up with the tattoo, I didn’t have to finalize it. To seal it. But a crazed part of me neededit, needed our lives connected externally to match the visceral, internal connection.
So I made it official.
And I damned the rest of us.
I knew what would happen if I told them the truth, what they would demand of me. So I lied.
“Nothing else,” I said.
TWENTY-FIVE
GEMMA
It was the first day of February, the salty Saturday air bitter with cold, and the biggest party of the year for the Horsemen—Heart Eater Day. Every February, two weeks before Valentine’s Day, the Horsemen throw a party, some kind of themed, debauched version of the romantic holiday.
The morning after Grim visited me, the Horsemen were gone. Another day passed, and another. They vanished like smoke.
I shouldn’t care. I definitely shouldn’t be sitting in bed with a bottle of tequila, trying to numb whatever Grim had wakened. I ran my fingers up and down my inner thigh, remembering too easily how he’d touched me.
“Gemma?”
I yanked my hand from my thigh, caught, and turned to the voice.
My sister stood in the doorway. I thought I was seeing things at first. When my sistermarried her bodyguard, my mother disowned her and banished her from Crowne Hall. Since Grayson, that banishment had been lifted, but still, Abigail rarely came back home.
Couldn’t blame her.
I sat up a little in bed. “What are you doing here?” Anxiety twitched my chest—was my mother having another party? Had I forgotten?
Abigail picked at her lip, her slightly crooked front teeth visible. She was nervous.
I held up a bottle of tequila, but she shook her head.
“’Cause you’re, like, a mom now?” I fell back to my bed, head at the end. “Never stopped ours.”
Seconds dragged, and I could picture Abigail picking her lip in my mind.
“I’m worried about you,” she said softly.
I put my lips to the glass rim, muttering, “Gross.”
Abigail came to the side of my bed, her face upside down from my view. Brow furrowed.
“So…Grayson filled me in.” She picked at her lip.“I knew there was something going on when I found him in your room. That was years ago, though…”
Once upon a time, I pretended to fuck her now husband so I could get his journal and give it to Grim. In that same era, Abby had found me in this room, with Grim.
Still picking her lips, she continued. “I should have been a better sister. I should have dug deeper. Asked questions.”
