Luca sags next to me. “She’s not here.”
“We’ll kill them,” Malach growls. “They’ll pay fortaking her.”
Alistair pounds his fists against the door and screams her name. I shrink away from his rage, studying him warily. His hands are red and swollen from hitting the door. If I weren’t one wrong move away from a full-blown panic attack, I would tell him to shut the fuck up. His meltdown helps no one.What if there’s no one left to help?
I clear my throat. “Do you think?—”
“No,” Luca snaps, his fingers spasming against my back. “She’s alive. If the goal was to kill her, they wouldn’t have separated us. They would have left all five of our bloody corpses to rot.”Comforting, Luca. Incredibly comforting.
I massage my temples and try to piece together what happened.
Weaving the nightmare to hide us made it harder for me to stay warm, I remember that. I held it for as long as I could, but I was barely conscious during the fight. “We never had a chance,” I whisper. “They were waiting for us.”
Luca leads me to a cot and sits down beside me, his breath escaping in a whoosh. “It’s my fault. I led us into an ambush.” He sounds utterly devastated, and I shift uncomfortably. Sad Luca is my least favorite Luca.
“Don’t be dumb.” I nudge his shoulder with my own. “Correlation doesn’t equal causation.”
“What?”
“Just because it was your plan doesn’t mean it was your fault,” I tell him. “We had to try.”
“If we had stayed in the hollow, we would have?—”
“Starved and frozen our nuts off.”
“But now we’re?—”
“Warm, with eight balls between us, which is a plus. We can regroup, scheme, get Celine back, then go on a legendary killing spree.”
Luca scrubs his hand over his face and nods. “Yeah, okay.”
Alistair kicks the door hard, cursing viciously, and Luca stiffens.For fuck’s sake.
“Stop that,” I snap. “You’re giving me a headache.”
“I can’t stop,” Alistair snarls. “I need to get to her.”
Red eyes burning with unfiltered madness, his hands curl into claws at his sides. The hairs on the back of my neck stand on end as he surges away from the door, knocking over a basin of water and soaking my half-defrosted feet.
I shoot Luca a side-eyed glance. He’s the best suited to calm Alistair down, but he barely seems to notice Alistair is losing it. Hunched in on himself, Luca is smaller than I’ve ever seen him, weighed down bythe situation.
“Don’t ignore me, Casanell,” Alistair hisses.
“Shut. Up.” I push to my feet and get in his face. “Think of someone besides yourself for once. You don’t get to turn into a raving lunatic because you’re worried about Celine. News flash, you fanged fuck—we’re all worried about her, and you’re making it worse.”
Alistair’s chest heaves, grazing mine with each exhale. His gaze darts to my throbbing pulse, and I narrow my eyes in warning. I’ll lay him out if he goes for my throat, but I’m done with his rage.
The silence is brutal, charged and primed to explode.
I hold myself perfectly still, refusing to so much as blink until he stands down.
When Alistair finally takes a step back, my shoulders droop. His Adam’s apple bobs wildly as he rakes his fingers through his hair. “I’m sorry,” he mutters.
I nod, but I’m not sure if I’m included in the apology or if he’s simply offering a general catch-all for being dickish in front of a captive audience.
Alistair crouches in front of Luca. “What’s going on in your head?”
Luca sighs. “Too much.”
