Page 167 of Pucked Around and Found Out

It's a shrine.

Built by a grieving, furious boy who refused to accept what had been taken from him, and maintained by a man who used revenge as a substitute for healing.

She's gone.

The grief hits differently when you stop fighting it, quieter somehow, and so much heavier. No amount of blood spilled in her name will bring her back. Not Steven. Not Meekan. Not Masen, Fiona, Kellan or Frank. I kept every promise I made in the dark over her memory. I called it justice. I told myself it would close the wound.

It didn't.

The wound is still here, gaping, infected with something revenge was never going to cure. I've crossed every name off a list and I'm still standing in the wreckage, wondering why I don't feel anything close to whole.

I drop onto the edge of the bed and press my face into my hands, and the darkness behind my palms is the most honest thing I've felt all night.

“Why doesn't it feel as good as I thought it would?”

The question falls into the empty room and finds no answer. Just silence. And somewhere beneath the silence, the faint, terrifying echo of tail lights disappearing around a corner.

“Because there is no one there at the end of the victory.”

I snap my head up.

Cas is standing in the doorway, leaning on his crutches, looking at me the way no one else in my life has ever dared to, like he can see straight through the armor and isn't impressed by any of it. Like he never was.

“Why are you awake?”

He shrugs, but it's not a casual shrug. There's weight behind it. “Similar reasons to you. Too many demons to fight when I close my eyes.”

I grunt and nod. Yeah. I know that particular hell.

Silence stretches between us thick with everything that still needs to be said and everything I don't have the capacity to say tonight. The betrayal is still there, sitting between us like a shard of glass neither of us wants to step on. He broke something I don't know how to rebuild, and the anger is still present, still burning low and constant beneath my sternum.

But he's here.

That's the gutting part. Out of every person on this earth, billions of them, entire cities full of people living their ordinary, uncomplicated lives, it's Caspian Vought standing in this doorway at whatever ungodly hour this is. One person. Just one. And even with the fracture between us, even with the mistrust still raw and unresolved, he's the only one who came.

That reality lands harder than any hit I've ever taken.

I slowly lift my head and look at him. Whatever he finds on my face in that moment, whatever I've failed to lock down and conceal makes him break my rule. Without a word, he crosses the threshold, hobbles over on his crutches with the quiet determination of someone who's decided the rule doesn't apply tonight, and drops down onto the edge of the bed beside me.

I don't tell him to leave.

I hang my head and let my arms rest uselessly on my thighs. I stare at my hands, really stare at them, like I'm seeing them for the first time. These hands have done things most men couldn't survive knowing about. They've carved flesh, broken bones, rebuilt an empire from the rubble someone else left behind. They've done every brutal, necessary, unforgivable thing I ever asked of them without hesitation.

And they couldn't do the one thing that actually mattered.

Make her stay.

“I think the fairy is finally flying away for good.” The words come out low and hollow, scraped from somewhere I don't usually let anyone near.

“I knew I could smell sex on you.” The attempt at levity is so classically Cas that under any other circumstances it might have landed. Tonight it just echoes. “Why do you think that?”

I turn my head and look at him. Really look at him. “She said goodbye.”

His brows draw together. “And?”

A sound rises in my throat, low, warning. “It was how she said it.” The words come out sharper than I intend, but he holds his ground. He always holds his ground, even when he shouldn't. It's one of the things I've always hated and needed most about him.

His brows lift, then something shifts in his expression, confusion bleeding in at the edges. “She won't leave. She has nowhere to⁠—”