Page 172 of Fallacies

“I don’t know, Pax,” I snort. “Hopefully some godsdamn peace.”

“With Streatham as it is?” he counters, capturing my attention. His gaze lingers on the shadowed city ahead. “It won’t change once we take our people back. It will still be dark, and it won’t belong to us.”

“It will always belong to us,” I correct him. “But the people matter more than the place does. If we can get them out and take them⁠—”

“Home?”

I suck on my teeth, dropping my gaze to my drink. It’s too much, thinking about the next step. I’m hardly surviving the current mission.

When I lift my head, there’s a glimpse of defeat in his eyes. “Somewhere safe,” I amend. “For now.”

Pax exhales a heavy breath before taking a generous sip of his coffee. “I don’t want any more Solian children being raised in hiding, Cal. They deserve life. A good one. The kind we were promised before everything went to shit.”

I nod. “I want that too.”

He’s quiet after that, and I’m content in the silence. For a moment, I actually find it pleasant. Pax has always had that way about him. The calm, grounded, perfectly balanced energy. After so long being trapped in my own head, it’s refreshing to be surrounded by it.

“I like the plan,” he says after a while. “And I think it will work.” Pax finishes off his coffee and reaches out to pour himself some more. “But I don’t want you to get your hopes up.”

I raise a brow. “With?”

Pax sits back with his mug. “There will be no godsdamn peace, Cal.” Dread coils in my stomach when his gaze drifts to the dark cloud over Streatham. “Not for a while.”

40

Lucina

Light burns into my closed eyes, and I sit up with a wince, my head pounding and my throat dry.

I crack my eyes open and squint against the glow. It takes a second for my vision to focus, but when it does, I realize with slight embarrassment that I’m on the couch in Salem’s room.

Worse, there’s a blanket thrown over my body and a trash can on the floor beside me.

I groan at the sharp pain in my neck, a consequence of falling asleep on one of the round, frilly throw pillows. I’ve made it all the way to a sitting position before realization dawns.

The sun?

There’s a beam of it searing me right between the eyes. Upon further inspection of the open window, it’s the only stream of light through the overcast sky smothering Streatham. I’d be more grateful for it if my brain wasn’t throbbing.

Pulling the blanket back, I scan the table beside me, noting the empty decanter and what I’m assuming is my glass tipped over on its side.

When I see the silver medallion beside it, a dread settles in my stomach, worsening my hangover with nausea added to the mix.

At the grating sound of curtain hooks scraping metal rods, I whirl around, watching with a grimace as the Hound pulls back the rest of the drapes.

He’s already overdressed and ready for breakfast—his all-black ensemble wrinkle-free and tailor-fit. I’m not even sure how he found suits with the sleeves and pant legs as long as they’d need to be.

There isn’t a morsel of exhaustion beneath his blue eyes even though we stayed up most of the night working out the kinks of our plan.

The end of our discussion is a bit blurry, the details swimming somewhere in my whiskey-riddled brain, but in the end, we ended up with something solid.

Risky, but doable.

“Good morning,” he drawls out, knowing it’s anything but.

I grumble something incoherent, a curse probably, then swing my legs over the side of the couch.

I’d slept in my boots and all my weapons. Though I suppose that’s better than waking up without them. Squinting in his direction, I press my palm into my forehead, stupidly hoping it will settle the pounding there. It doesn’t.