Page 119 of Never the Same

Off near the SUVs, Jesse and Griffin guided my mother to safety, her steps unsteady.

“You came to me asking if I had the book,” Tristan said on approach. “When I admitted I did, you requested I come up with a way to reverse engineer the memory-wipe drug to help others.”

“And did you?” I whispered.

“I had to first make it work for our bloodline before I could extrapolate the data to see if I could use it on other people. And I, uh, tried both drugs on myself, and that’s how my protector found out about it. I trusted Waylen. I asked him to inject me. Gave him the instructions. You’re a stubborn pain in the ass”—he half smiled—“and I knew you’d have insisted on testing the drugs on yourself, so I had to beat you to it. I never had the chance to work on it further, because the book and all my research was stolen. We met at your place in France a few weeks ago, assuming there was a traitor among us.”

That’s why they tossed my place in France. London. The hotel. They were searching for any evidence I may have gathered.

I hung my head, guilt taking hold of me.

In a way, I truly did trigger all this, but ultimately, Cassian clearly had an evil side and so did his brothers, and they were bound to betray us eventually.

“Waylen told me the truth while I was here as a prisoner.” Tristan twisted around and pointed toward the dead bodies, and I took that to mean Waylen was now one of them. He faced me, shaking his head. “After the first experiment, Waylen realized I didn’t recall anything that happened during the time between when the first drug was administered and the antidote. That gave him and his brothers the idea to use the mind control drugs from the book on us in that in-between time period, to get us to do what they wanted. We’d never know about it. But we screwed up their plans before they could even start by closing in on who the hell stole my book in the first place, forcing them to rush and change things up.”

“Wait, rewind.” I stared at him in the downpour, trying to make sense of what he’d just said. “Do you mean that I’m going to forget—” I let go of my words as thunder cracked, shaking the earth, and the spotlight above us spun wild.

“We’ve been hit,” Easton barked out over comms, voice strained. “Brace!”

A screech cut through the storm, followed by a burst of fire overhead.

The world pitched sideways, and before I could react, Jason slammed me and Tristan to the ground, shielding us from the falling sky.

Chapter Forty-Six

Hollis

Jason’s weight crushed me down until the last chunk of debris hissed out in the rain. The metallic tang of jet fuel burned my nose; branches cracked under boots and shouts tore through the storm—calls for Gwen, for Easton.

The clearing was chaos. Flames licked at twisted metal, rotor blades stuck in the muck. I caught the faint sound of coughing over static in my comms.

Jason hauled Tristan and me upright, and we sprinted toward the wreckage. The helo had taken out one of the SUVs, but my mother was alive, lying on the wet ground off to the side of the crash.

We clawed through smoke and splintered branches, the world redacted to static, until we reached the team fighting to pull Easton and Gwen free.

Please be okay. Please, God, please.

Jason kept me from collapsing at the sight of Jesse and Griffin pulling Gwen out, her body bloodied and limp. He banded his arm across my chest, an iron bar against the shaking, as Gideon and Ryder helped Easton out next.

Easton had one arm hanging at the wrong angle, blood streaking down his temple, but he was making sounds, trying to lift his good arm as though to reach for Gwen. Then his head dropped forward like he’d had a delayed knockout, and his body went limp, nearly pulling the two men down with him.

“Gwen has a pulse, but it’s weak,” Jesse said, and Alex swapped places with him to help with CPR as Jesse called to the second pilot for an immediate medevac assist.

I covered my mouth and watched as both Gwen and Easton received CPR, and Jason kept me pinned against him.

“You get the son of a bitch?” someone yelled out.

“He’s down. It was Cassian’s dad. An RPG,” another voice hollered back.

The next movements bled together—sirens, stretchers, oxygen masks, a blur of faces and wet ground littered with traitors—until somehow Jason got me out of those woods and up to the seventh floor of a hospital.

One call from my father to the prime minister had the entire wing cleared out for only our family.

Forty-five minutes had crawled by since Gwen and Easton disappeared behind closed doors into surgery. No updates yet.

My mother was in the next room, unconscious, waiting for Tristan’s antidote. Dad hadn’t left her side. Julian paced the hall with the rest of Falcon Falls. Even Carter was wearing down the floors.

Jason and my father had insisted I stay in bed until I also received the antidote, though I was perfectly fine aside from a few scratches and bruises.