Page 58

“Give it time.”

“You’ve had years.”

“And somehow you keep getting worse.”

Flux pops the bacon into his mouth, still wearing Calder’s face, and gives him a smug smile with his own fucking features.

I press my lips against the rim of my coffee mug, but it’s useless because the laugh slips out anyway.

Two days ago, Coil dragged me through these gates while I kept one hand close to the knife in my boot and worked out how many bodies stood between freedom and me. Now I’m sitting in the middle of them while Wreck steals food off Maul’s plate, Ruckus tries to make money from the inevitable consequences, Thorn threatens anyone stupid enough to touch the last piece of toast, and Flux is still wearing Calder’s face purely because it pisses him off.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped watching the doors. That realization should bother me more than it does, but before I can think too hard about why, a familiar vibration moves beneath my ribs. My fingers tighten around my mug. Everything else keeps going around me. Ruckus is still talking shit. Calder is threatening to stab Flux with a butter knife if he doesn’t give him his face back. Someone reaches across me for the syrup and nearly knocks my coffee over in the process.

But my siren has already turned her attention toward the doorway.

That deep frequency reaches through every other supernatural pulse crowded into the room, brushes against mine, and the answering hum inside me comes so easily now I don’t even have to think about it.

Carnage.

I turn my head, and he’s standing in the doorway beside the angel, broad shoulders filling out his cut, amber eyes fixed across the crowded table.

Straight on me.

The second that connection catches between us, warmth spreads beneath my ribs, and my siren pushes toward him, answering that deep vibration before I have any chance to stop her.

Fuck.

Breakfast just got a whole lot more complicated.

Carnage steps into the room with Sentinel beside him, and I make myself turn back to my coffee even though I can feel him moving closer. His presence tracks through the room with him, tugging at my siren with every step as he makes his way around the table, stopping once when Maul shoves a plate out of his path and again when Ruckus says something that earns him a hard smack to the back of the head.

I keep my eyes on my mug.

Mostly.

One glance catches Carnage pulling out the chair at the end of the table, his gaze finding mine again before he sits.

The distance should help.

It fucking doesn’t.

That low vibration stays right there beneath my skin, my siren answering in soft pulses that make concentrating on anything else increasingly difficult. I curl my fingers tighter around the mug and drag my attention back to Roxy before I embarrass myself by staring at him across the breakfast table like last night didn’t end with his mouth a breath away from mine.

A chair scrapes somewhere behind me.

“Morning, all.”

Raze walks in, and the conversations around the table start dropping away. Ruckus finishes whatever he’s saying to Wreck, Maul reaches for another piece of bacon, and somewhere behind me a fork hits a plate before the room finally settles.

I tighten both hands around my coffee.

I’ve been turning this over since I woke up.

Everything Roxy told me about Malgrave. What I felt in that fracture when I found it in the woods. Carnage’s frequency reaching for mine last night when there shouldn’t have been enough of his voice left to answer me at all.

The pieces keep coming back to the same place.

And sitting here pretending they don’t isn’t getting me anywhere.