He shakes his head firmly. “Not the way it works. You know. Kinship Law. All for one and one for all.”
Goddammit. I clench my fists, knowing it’s better in the long run if we all go after her. But I size him up, making sure that I phrase my next statement as a question, not a challenge. “What are you going to do, Raphael?”
He’s surrounded by shadows. I can barely make out his eyes. As usual, the creepy asshole doesn’t move a muscle.
“What I must.”
Shitshitshit. That’s not good. Definitely better if we come. She will need all of us to survive Raphael. Part of me wants to ask if we could just let her go. What harm would it do to give her the freedom she wants? Hasn’t she earned it? We have no basis for comparison after all the other girls died. I pace the barn slowly, the questions multiplying in my brain.
“I loosen your tongue, Vincent,” Raphael says in a subtle but patronizing tone.
Turning to face him, I stare him down, the first time I’ve ever truly challenged him as strongly as this. Despite my fighting background, I know never to attack blindly as I’ve done with Rory. Rory has a fire monster in him that comes out clawing and roaring, emotional, blind, easy to overcome.
Raphael? He’s a different breed of monster. He’s an apex predator with pure ice in his veins. The kind of black ice you never see until you’re spinning, then crashing. One time. One time, I attacked him back at our group home. I had a knife pressed against my throat a moment after.
I grit my teeth, my gaze locked on the dark line of trees just beyond the barn. The quiet here feels unnatural—thick and charged, like the air before a storm. “She doesn’t deserve this,” I excuse, knowing it’s weak, knowing he doesn’t give a fuck.
The words hang there, but they don’t move him. Nothing ever does.
Raphael’s voice is silk stretched over steel. “She does.”
The sound of it turns my stomach. I don’t need to look at him to know what comes next. It’s always the same—the slow, circling pace, the predator winding around his prey. Me, tonight.
I feel the shift in the air before I hear his footsteps.
“Why do you think she waited until now to run?” Raphael murmurs, his voice too calm, too damn knowing. “She gets the greenhouse ready. She heals. She smiles more. Then she adopts a pet…and she runs.”
I clench my fists. I don’t want to hear this. Not the way he says it.
“It wasn’t impulse, Vincent,” he says, drawing closer, always closer. “It was instinct. The old self surfacing. She was settling in, adapting to her role, glimpsing it. She doesn’t fully understand it yet, but she wants to.”
“You don’t know that,” I snap, finally looking at him.
He smiles. It isn’t kind. “I do.” His voice dips, dark, almost reverent. “She is letting her old scars define her when she has far more beautiful ones now. Ones she shares with us. Her old ones haunt her. She’s self-sabotaging, but for a purpose. She isn’t running from us. She’s runningforus. Hoping, praying we’ll follow, needing to know how far we’ll go. It’s written in her bloodand bones—the need to be claimed, conquered, understood. Accepted. All her sharp, pretty pieces.”
My chest tightens. I fucking hate it when he talks like this—in that cryptic, poetic way, like thunder rumbling low before lightning tears the sky open. The kind of words that wrap around you and squeeze until you forget what you were so sure of.
“She’s in denial,” Raphael says, in front of me now, his gaze pinning mine. “But after tonight, she’ll know. Her role as our Queen isn’t some privilege she can toss aside. It’s a duty. An honor.”
He stops just close enough for me to feel the weight of it. “She is the force that binds us—the queen chess piece inside the circle of five chains. And we…” His voice drops to a razor-thin whisper, “We will hunt her down. And remind her.”
I swallow hard, my pulse hammering in my throat.
I hate this. Hate how some broken, frayed part of me understands it.
Worse. The fighter in me rears up. I held him down in that dungeon. I only let the shell of him out, detaching when I fucked her for the first time. But she’s seen a glimpse of that ghost.
And she wanted to see more.
41
Jude
“BRIELLA’S NOT THE ONLY ONE IN DENIAL,” I TELL HIM.
Citizen Soldier Playlist
“Soldier”
