“Stand down,” he says.
No one does.
The armed men flick their muzzles between Nightshade and Honey and me and the idling helicopter. They’re waiting for a cue that isn’t theirs to give. Nightshade’s lips peel back from his teeth. He takes one step toward Valentine.
“Stay thefuckout of this,” Nightshade says, and the wind takes the word and throws it across the roof.
Valentine doesn’t blink. The coat flares; the line of his shoulders doesn’t shift. “I’m already in it.”
Shoot him,Donnelly says gently.Fix the problem at its root.
Don’t,Silas says.He’s here to help. He has to be. He?—
The nearest armoured man decides he has heard enough and lifts his weapon. Honeymonster moves before anyone else, dragging my collar to smash me lower, and Nightshade breaks the distance in a smear.
There’s a scream, a gun clatters, and then Nightshade’s fist is at a throat and the owner of the throat is on his knees choking on his own cough.
Valentine sighs. It is not dramatic. He is not the kind of man who performs sighs. It is something he can’t help, the sound of a gear engaging with a grind.
“I know you won’t take no for an answer,” he says to Nightshade. To all of us. To the armed men. To the wind.
Nightshade’s eyes are so dark they’re almost holes. The corner of his mouth twitches. He looks like a saint painted by a madman: blood for a halo, hunger for an icon.
“Good,” Nightshade says.
Valentine’s gaze slides across me; I feel flayed, weighed, filed. The thin electricity of my skin – my too-fast heart, my too-fastthoughts – crackles against the inside of my bones. I am a jar full of bees. I am a man, sometimes.
“You’ll all come whether I permit it or not,” Valentine says. “So I won’t waste breath pretending I can stop you.” He turns his head slightly, the line of his jaw cutting moonlight. “All six of you. With me.”
The sentence falls into the gravel and settles there, heavy as a body.
I clock us properly now: Bones two steps left, angling his shoulder into the crosswind; Hatchet a dark gravity at his elbow, hands now empty but still lethal; Snow wired and grinning, fingers twitching like he’s playing a song only he can hear.
“Family reunion,” Snow says cheerily.
Valentine looks at the six of us – the island’s favourite psychotic ghosts collected under a strip of cloud – and something behind his eyes rearranges. The set of his mouth says he has just calculated the cost and knows he cannot afford not to pay it.
“Get in the chopper,” he says. Clipped. Final.
For one perfect, impossible second, the night holds its breath.
Then heels click on concrete.
The sound cuts through the rotors like a metronome snapping a rhythm back into place. Measured. Unhurried. Wrong.
I turn with everyone else.
Seytan stands at the edge of the roof, framed by the stairwell door like she’s stepped out of the building itself. White coat. Hair immaculate. No weapon in her hands. No guards at her back.
She doesn’t look surprised.
Nightshade stills. Not through fear, but with calculation. His blood drips onto the concrete, bright and obscene against the grey. Honeymonster shifts, weight rolling forward like he mightstill try it. Bones goes very, very quiet. Hatchet doesn’t move at all.
Valentine exhales.
It’s small. Barely there. But it’s real.
“This is where you stop,” Seytan says.
