Honey keeps his hands busy. Not with a gun – there aren’t any, there can’t be – but with straps, with zip ties, with inventory, with counting. Counting is a prayer when you don’t have one.
Snow paces. Scuffed boots, restless laugh, torn tune – “Kookaburra sits…” – over and over until the melody rots. Bones told him to stop. Nightshade hit him once. Now no one wastes breath. Nothing stops Snow doing whatever he wants.
Nightshade’s hands are raw where concrete didn’t give and his control slipped. When he speaks, it’s clipped, directed at Valentine. When Valentine doesn’t answer fast enough, Nightshade’s voice goes quiet in that way that steals oxygen.
Valentine’s phone vibrates again and again. Seytan. He ignores it. Maybe he’s afraid of what she’ll say. Maybe he already knows.
Bones wears a groove into the concrete. His hand keeps finding the burner phone like it’s a pulse he can restart by touch: promise, absence, promise, absence.
I don’t sleep. Eyes closing is a trap. Behind lids, Kayla appears – laughing at something Honey said, mouth bright, head tipped back – and then the image breaks apart into water, into fire, into a room that I can’t access. The brain flips channels on a broken television.
Kayla.
The name is everywhere without being spoken. In pauses. In the way eyes slide to Nightshade. In the way the air tightens when Ghost whispers.
Sometimes I swear I can smell her – lightning-before-it-strikes, freedom, cold air – and it twists me up until my fingers need to break something to prove she was real.
Ghost flinches when I move too fast. Honey grounds me with a steady hand on the shoulder. Bones watches. Always watches.
Snow laughs and says she ran. Says maybe she’s better off. Says maybe?—
The third time, I break his nose.
It happens without ceremony. Fist, cartilage, wet crack. Snow hits the concrete laughing through blood like pain is a joke he’s proud of.
Honey catches me before I can follow through, arms locking around my chest. Not restraint, as punishment. Restraint as triage.
Nightshade turns, exhaustion carved into him. “Enough,” he says, but the word is thin.
Ghost whispers something sharp from the corner and it slices the room open. Donnelly.
“Do it,” the voice says. “Kill something. She’ll come back if you bleed.”
Ghost jerks upright, pupils blown. “Shut up,” he rasps. “Shut up, shut up?—”
The warehouse goes very still.
Valentine looks up, face grey – the look of a man watching the last threads of control slip.
“We need rest, order—” Valentine starts.
“What we need,” Nightshade cuts in, “is that call.”
The burner on the crate vibrates.
Once.
Every head turns.
Bones snatches it so fast the motion blurs. “Branson. Talk.”
Static. Paper. Then a tired voice: “Your attitude’s still intact. That’s reassuring.”
“You got something or not?” Bones says.
“Trail’s cold. We found the staged wreck,” Branson replies. “Highlands. No bodies. Damage pattern’s wrong. It was a diversion.”
Nightshade’s spine goes rigid.
