Page 58 of Pucked Around and Found Out

“He knows enough to want her dead. He doesn't know all of it.” I look at the amber light from the wood burner, moving on the flagstone floor. “I need him to know all of it. I need us both pointed at the same target before she figures out we're coming for her.”

“You're trusting him,” Carnage says.

It's not an accusation. It's just the observation he's been sitting with since the parking lot, probably since long before that, turned over and examined and now laid gently on the table between us for me to look at.

I think about it honestly.

“I'm trusting that he wants her dead more than he wants me dead,” I say finally. “That's not the same thing, but it's enough to work with.”

Carnage looks at me for a long moment.

“He kept the scan,” he says.

I go very still.

“In the parking lot. When he was walking away.” Carn's voice is measured, careful, giving me the information without the weight of what he thinks it means. “I saw him put his hand in his pocket. The way a person touches something they're checking is still there.” A pause. “He's kept it.”

I stare at the USB drive on the table.

I don't say anything for a long moment.

“Don't make it something it isn't.”

“I'm not making it anything,” Carnage says. And there it is again, the echo. Him giving me back my own words, the quiet suggestion that maybe I should hear what I'm saying. “I'm just noting the facts.”

I look up at him.

He's watching me with those pale blue eyes and I see something in them that is so carefully restrained, so deliberately contained, that for a moment I feel the weight of everything it's costing him to hold it there. To be this, this constant, this steady, this present for me. Night after night and the warehouse, parking lot and dark road.

“Carn,” I say quietly.

“Don't.” His voice is gentle. Certain. “Whatever you're about to say, Tor, don't. Not tonight.” He picks up the mug he made for himself, black coffee of course. He doesn't have a soft drink in his body and sits back in the chair. “Tonight you go to the apartment, you hand over the file, you plan the war. Tomorrow you sleep. The night after that we figure out the rest.”

“And in between all of that?”

“In between all of that,” he says, “you drink that honey water and eat something and stop trying to process everything at once.” The ghost of the smile again. “One crisis at a time, darlin'.”

I look at him.

“Is that what you do?” I ask. “One crisis at a time?”

Something moves through his expression. Fast, almost too fast to catch, and then it's gone.

“I try to,” he says.

I don't push on it.

I pick up my mug, drink the honey water and let the warmth of the farmhouse kitchen do what warmth does, which is not fix anything but make everything slightly more bearable. The wood burner ticks. The fields beyond the window are dark, flat and empty. Somewhere in Stormsend, Xaden Devlin is driving toward his apartment or away from it or sitting in the dark with an ultrasound in his pocket, doing whatever it is Xaden does with the things he can't bring himself to put down and can't bring himself to acknowledge.

He kept it.

I don't make it something it isn't.

I just note the fact.

Forty minutes later I'm standing in front of the mirror in the small bathroom off the hall and looking at myself and trying to decide who I am tonight.

This is a question I've been asking myself since I came back from Walter House. Some days the answer is easier than others. Some days I am Toren Kellar, nineteen years old, blonde hair and blue eyes, with a baby the size of a lemon growing in my body that I didn't plan for and cannot stop feeling fiercely, irrationally protective of. Some days I am the girl from the bonfire, the one who used to love freely and trust blindly and look at the world like it had something good to offer if you walked toward it.