My stomach drops.
“Didn’t realize it was advertising itself,” I manage. “What are you, some supernatural x-ray machine, or something?”
“You’d be surprised,” she replies. “A lot becomes visible once you’ve mastered your power.”
My skin prickles.
Pain said something similar once.
We’ve already established that I hate feeling powerless. It’s the kind of thing that sticks with you after someone kills you and you wake up on the other side with rules you didn’t agree to. But this isn’t just pride flaring and making me itchy in my own skin.
This woman has leverage.
I don’t know what she wants or why she’s here, but I owe her. And she just proved, in the span of three sentences, that she’s light-years ahead of me in Grim Reaper proficiency.
The realization lands with the same graceless thud as Talon’s guilt in my chest.
They tangle together, tight and ugly, until I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.
And my brain does what it always does when it’s cornered: it reaches for the simplest solution.
Get rid of the threat.
Just… find one of the guys’ daggers and slash her into oblivion. Because in what universe is it allowed that I can’t kill my murderous son-of-a-bitch ex-husband, but I do have to fulfill a promise to my new man’s ex-girlfriend?
“Don’t look at me like that, Skye,” Rhea says. “I did not come here to be malicious toward you.”
Oh, really?
Is that why she sent a flock of crows to try and bite my eye out like they were straight from a horror movie?
I shift my weight and the burn under my bandages pulls tight. My body supplies the answer my mouth doesn’t.
This girlhatesmy guts.
And maybe that’s why Talon makes that tiny, broken sound in the back of his throat. His guilt surges so hard through our bond that it slams into my chest and, for a heartbeat, it’s like I’m the one who feels it. Like Iamhim.
I draw in a breath to steady myself, and reach for the bond to calm it down. Instead, it drags me under.
Blood.
So much blood it turns the air metallic on my tongue.
The crunch of bone under my hands. The wet, sick sound of someone gurgling around broken teeth. Rage so blinding it burns everything else to white around the edges.
There are men on the floor in front of me. Plural. I can’t catch their faces—just impressions: a tattoo curling up a neck, the glint of a ring, a boot scraping across concrete. They’re begging. Or maybe that’s my brain filling in the sound, because my focus is a tunnel narrowed to one thing.
I hurt her.
This is all my fault.
I watch their chests go still. I wait for the last breath. The last twitch. The last whimper.
And then the only thought that matters:
At least she’s avenged now.
The memory shudders out of me and I nearly sway. My knees wobble. My stomach rolls. For half a second my hands still feel wrong, and I have to curl my fingers into fists just to convince myself they’re mine again.
