Page 54 of Pucked Around and Found Out

Away from him.

For now.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

TOREN

There are people in your life who arrive quietly and stay loudly.

Carnage De Santis arrived like a footnote and became the whole page.

He doesn't speak for the first ten minutes.

Neither do I.

That's the thing about Carn, the silence between us has never been the uncomfortable kind. It's never been the silence of two people who don't know what to say to each other. It's the silence of someone who knows exactly what to say and is giving you the time to come down from whatever height you were just at before he says it.

He does that. He reads the room and then he reads me, and he waits.

I watch the road unreel in front of the headlights and press my knees together and hold very still, because if I move too much or think too hard or stop looking at the road for long enough to think about the beach and the cold water and the look on Xaden's face when his hand grazed my stomach and everything fractured, I'm going to cry. And I am not going to cry in the car. I have done enough crying tonight to last a season and I'm putting a moratorium on it, effective immediately, until I am somewhere private with a door I can close.

The USB drive is cold in my hand. I've been holding it since we collected it from the old house we were staying at when I came back to town.

Fiona Williams.

Everything on that drive. Everything Kellan gathered and hid, then handed to me in pieces across the months between his handler threatening him and his brain meeting the floor of the rink. The hard copies of the files are hidden away safely, only in a place I know. I can’t give those to Xaden, they implicate Cas. I also refuse to give him any of the files on the Denver King’s, Filthy Few or The Butcher. If Alex decides to reveal who Cas is to him, then that is his choice but I won’t be the one to rat anyone out.

I curl my fingers around it.

Win the war, Tor. That was always all I needed from you.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Carnage asks.

His voice is low and even, the particular register he uses when he already knows the answer but is giving me the dignity of choosing it myself.

“No,” I say.

A pause.

“Do you want to not talk about it while I pretend I'm not watching you hold that USB drive hard enough to crack it?”

Something that is almost a laugh moves through my chest. “Yes. That one.”

“Okay.” He shifts his grip on the wheel. Not a big movement. Just the adjustment of someone changing weight, someone whose left side is making demands he's choosing to ignore. “We're ten minutes out. He’ll have all his men there, Alex is on standby in case we need him.”

“Carn.”

“Tor.”

“Your side⁠—”

“Is fine.”

“You keep saying that.”

“It keeps being true.” He glances at me briefly. Pale blue eyes in the dark. “More or less.”

I look at his profile. The easy set of his jaw, that isn't easy at all if you know him. The way his left arm is resting just slightly too close to his body, the angle of it too careful to be natural.