I nod, because when it comes to her, I’m not willing to gamble. Not even a little.
My hand closes around the blade in my pocket as we push back into the crowd.
Because I’m not leaving this building without our little valentine.
The hallway spits us back into the rave like it’s trying to get rid of us.
Heat slams into my chest. Smoke hangs low and thick, catching in my throat. Emergency lights pulse red and wrong, strobes out of sync, turning everyone into fragments instead of people. The music is dead, replaced by alarms, radios barking orders, voices stacking on top of each other until it’s just noise and panic and movement.
We don’t talk, we just push.
Bodies shove past us without looking. Glitter-smeared hands grab at my jacket and slip. Someone stumbles into Kade’s shoulder and bounces off like they hit a wall. It’s pure fucking chaos. People are running in every direction at once, trying to escape something they don’t fully understand yet.
My eyes are everywhere.
Over heads. Through gaps. Past shoulders.
A surge of bodies crashes into us from the left, forcing us sideways toward the edge of the dance floor. The lights flicker hard, red washing over everything, then white, then red again.
And then, impact.
The collision happens right at the edge of the dance floor.
One second I’m shoving through bodies, lights strobing red and white, alarms screaming overhead. The next, someoneslams straight into my chest hard enough to knock the air out of both of us.
“Aeri—”
“Kross!”
We grab each other at the same time, hands locking like neither of us trusts the other to still be there if we let go. She’s breathing hard, green eyes blown wide, hair plastered to her cheeks. Red crystals flash violently under the emergency lights.
She was coming for us.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I shout over the noise.
“Looking for you!” she yells back, fists tangled in my jacket. “I saw the cops—I was worried they would?—”
A surge of bodies crashes into us again, jostling us sideways. Kade’s there instantly, closing in on her other side, one hand steadying her while his eyes sweep the crowd.
“Listen to me,” I snap, gripping her shoulders. “You need to go. You and your friends,” I add, nodding at the two girls with her. “Now.”
“No,” she fires back without hesitation. “I’m not leaving you.”
“Come on, Aeri. He’s right,” one of her friends chimes in. “This place is getting heated, unless we want to spend the night in a jail cell, we need to dip, like pronto.”
Before either of us can say another word, someone else barrels straight into Kade’s shoulder.
Hard.
A fucking cop.
He staggers back a step, eyes flicking up, and landing on the masks.
On all of us.
On the blood that Kade and I forgot to wash off ourselves in the chaos.
Dark smears across my chest, from the little nic Mark gave me. The dried blood painting my hands from the clean-up.
