I watched Edge’s face as the first video began playing without sound.
I couldn’t see the screen from where I stood, but I saw his reaction.
Nothing.
Again, nothing.
A terrifying, dead nothing.
Regan rose and stepped beside him. Her bloodstained hand found his forearm.
He didn’t look at her, but his fingers opened, and she slid hers into them.
Together, they watched their daughter break on a screen.
No parent should have to do that.
No child should have to be strong enough to hide the reason.
Tarak came forward slowly.
“Edge,” he said.
Edge didn’t answer.
Tarak’s voice cracked. “I didn’t know.”
Edge looked at him then.
For one second, old history stood between them. Mandy. The engagement. The betrayal. The car wreck. The secret daughter. Every wound that had been stitched badly and called healed.
Then Edge said, “Neither did I.”
That was worse than blame.
Regan’s face crumpled.
“She was protecting us,” she whispered.
Nobody contradicted her.
Because it was true.
Destiny Rourke, seventeen years old, almost eighteen, bullied bloody by rich kids and haunted by a dead mother shenever chose, had swallowed years of torture because she thought the people who loved her had already suffered enough.
Then tonight, the weight had gotten too heavy.
And she had dropped it on the whole damn desert.
Tris wiped her face and gave a shaky, awful laugh. “She really blew shit up tonight.”
Jake looked at her like now was not the time.
Tris laughed harder, crying through it. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I just—she said they wanted a desert fire. So she gave them an inferno.”
Regan let out a broken sound that might have been a laugh if it hadn’t hurt so much.
Edge did not laugh.
