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Our bus. He’d been telling the truth. He had kept it.
But then my eyes caught something, and I stopped, spotting Martin.
He stared at me. I couldn’t move.
Something crawled on my skin, fear snaking its way through me as my feet sprouted roots and dug into the ground. Frozen, I stared at their faces, knowing.
And then . . . one turned his head, and my heart leapt into my throat. I screamed, knowing it might not be one of them, but it could be. Shit.
But someone grabbed me and pushed me into the seat.
“Will,” I called to them, unbuckling myself. “We left Will! Aydin was back there!”
“He won’t fail,” Rika told me, looking at me dead-on. “He won’t fail, Em. He’ll be here.”
“I’ve seen what your species likes to do to women down at that cave on the beach,” she told him.
“We’ll fight our way out of here,” Michael told me as we ran, “search for my father, and take care of both him and Scott.”
Blackchurch. He wanted to send my brother and his father to Blackchurch.
Memories washed over me, hearing almost the same words he last said to me all those years ago at the police station. It seemed like yesterday.
“You think that scares me?” he asked. “That was small potatoes compared to the decisions I’ve made since. And I’m not the only one with shit to lose if I go down.”
He’d killed Trevor. Was he going to kill his father, too?
“But he told me after he did it. He knew it would serve me if Katsu, Gabriel, and the Graysons lost credibility with some orchestrated familial troubles.” He smiled to himself. “Some of it worked in my favor, other things didn’t.”
“Rika became mayor, Kai’s been revitalizing Whitehall, Damon is Rika’s heir, not to mention he’s grooming Banks for national politics . . .” he listed off all of his concerns. “And Will discovered Coldfield, and now controls the underground transit system between Thunder Bay and Meridian City. I mean, if you had a playbook of how to make me sweat, that would be it.”
He wasn’t getting away with it. Unless they killed us all, Martin was on the losing side.
“Who do you think cut the brake lines?” Evans asked Rika. “Altered the police report? Destroyed the vehicle before it could be inspected?”
“I promise you,” Michael said. “I won’t tell my mother any of this after you’re gone. She’ll never have to know.”
Christiane Fane stood on the left, tears filling her eyes, as Delia Crist, Michael’s mother, stood on the right, her light brown bangs hanging in her eyes.
She stopped in front of him, both of them locking eyes, and then . . . she whipped her hand across his face, sending him stumbling to the side.
“Chin up,” he bit out. “And stop being a mouse. You’re my mother, for Christ’s sake.”
“You never could keep your attention focused on the long game, could you? Friends and girls were more important, and the immediate gratification was what mattered most, when you should’ve always realized that you could trust no one. Crists don’t build.” He looked to Michael. “We win.”
Senator Grayson smiled, looking lovingly at his grandson. “Because he asked me to,” he said.
Will broke into a chuckle, both of them with the same bright green eyes as they dove in and embraced each other, laughing and smiling as they hugged.
“Missed you,” Will said to his grandpa.
CHAPTER 40
I looked over, seeing both Martin and Evans, the realization of how they’d been double-crossed playing in their eyes.
He thought my grandpa had teamed up with him, sent me to Blackchurch to screw over Graymor Cristane, and inserted himself to help protect all their financial legacy, but he failed to realize that I was my grandfather’s legacy, and William Aaron Paine Grayson, Sr., would always choose family.
“I sent me to Blackchurch,” I told her and then drifted my eyes around the group. “To make . . . friends. To see if I could find others just like us—sons needing a home and a fight to live for.”
And proving them right, I couldn’t handle. Recruiting Micah and Rory wasn’t the only hurdle at Blackchurch. I was also getting sober.
But she stopped me. “I had to fight back,” she told me. “Now he knows. Now he knows it will never go unanswered again.”
She was like us. I would say the exact same thing, and even though I hated to risk losing her, she wasn’t a flower. And now I understood why Michael let Rika be at his side in everything they did. She wanted to feel this, too. That didn’t mean I couldn’t defend her honor, though.
He charged, and I didn’t have time to move out of the way before he rammed his body into mine, sending us both flying over the edge.
I almost closed my eyes, but I refused. I was going to look that fucker in the face, not giving him the satisfaction of my fear.
I love you, Em. I love—
He wasn’t giving himself up, and he was taking me with him.
I won, and the first thing I was going to do with her when the weather warmed up was to take her out to sea on Pithom. I wanted to swim.
Ripping open the back door, I saw Emmy lying on the back seat, but trying to pull herself up as she rubbed her head.
I almost laughed. She didn’t know about Pithom or the crash in the river—both times I’d almost drowned seeming like some sort of destiny I was putting off or some shit. But tonight, I won.
CHAPTER 41
Broken, dead, and small. God, he looked so small.
It still muddled my brain, though, and all I saw when I looked down at his body was my parents’ son. The brother I watched grow up.
I felt like stepping in and helping him, but part of me knew they were right. He cared, but did he care enough? How long would he stick around? She didn’t need the hurt anymore.
“And if I marry her?”
Damon stepped in, grabbed Aydin’s collar, and shot a fist right into his gut. I flinched, having had enough violence for one night.
He knew what would happen to him if he broke her heart. He had to know that now, and he was still here.
“If she says yes,” Michael told him, “and you don’t come through, we will kill you.”
“And you don’t touch her until the wedding night,” Michael told him.
“I’ve never even kissed her,” Aydin gritted out. “I want to hold her. I want to—” “When you’re her husband,” Michael clarified.
