BLOOD AND HEART

97 | HOME? HOME.

Z A Y N

Getting everyone out of that manor and back home was the only thing that mattered after the fight ended. No debrief, no standing around in the wreckage running numbers on what had gone wrong and what had gone right. I gave the orders for cleanup to the men staying behind, made sure Adrian was secured somewhere he wouldn't be found until I decided what to do with him, and then I got my people into the vehicles and I drove away from that building without looking back at it once.

Nyx stayed against my side the entire ride home. Not unconscious, not fully alert either, somewhere in the middle, drifting in and out with her head on my shoulder and her breathing slow and uneven. I kept one hand on the steering wheel and one arm around her and I didn't move it. Ace rode in the passenger seat and said nothing the entire drive, which from Ace was its own kind of loudness. He stared out the window with his jaw set and his hands still in his lap, and I knew without asking that his mind was somewhere between the fight we had just left and the mansion we were driving back to, back to Andrew. When Adrian had stood in our home and made his move and Nyx had made hers.

She had gone with him to keep Andrew safe.
That was the part that sat in my chest like something with weight and edges. Adrian had come into our house, into the place that was supposed to be the one place none of this reached, and Nyx had made a decision in seconds that had put her on the wrong side of a door with a man who had already chosen betrayal.

The gates opened as we pulled up and I drove through without slowing.
When we got inside the house Ace was moving before the car fully stopped, out the door and down the hall toward the sound of Andrew, toward wherever the staff had kept him safe through the night, and I let him go without a word because there was nothing to say. He had left that child at home and gone to war and now he was back and nothing else existed for him at that moment and it shouldn't have.

I got Nyx inside and into a room and into the hands of the doctor I trusted, and then I stood in the hallway outside the closed door and I put my back against the wall and I stayed there for a long moment doing absolutely nothing.

Levi found me there. He came from the main hall, Octavio and Hunter behind him, and the three of them stopped when they reached me and nobody said anything for a beat. They had been here. In this house. When it happened. That was written on all three of them differently, Levi in the set of his jaw and the thing behind his eyes that he was working hard to keep controlled, Octavio in the quietness he was wearing which wasn't his natural state, Hunter in the way he was standing slightly closer to the corridor that led toward Andrew's room than he needed to be, like part of him was still running perimeter.

They had been here and they hadn't been able to stop it and they were all carrying that.
"She's going to be fine," Levi said. His voice came out steady but it cost him something.

"I know," I said.

"You don't look like you know."

I looked at him. He looked back at me with those eyes that were too sharp for someone his age, too old in a face that still had youth in it, and I thought about every decision I had ever made that had shaped what he was standing in front of me. Every year he had grown up inside Phoenix, inside everything that Phoenix meant, watching what I did and learning what it looked like and deciding somewhere along the way that it was what he wanted too.

I looked at all three of them. At the people who had been inside these walls when those walls had failed to hold. "Come find me later," I said. "All of you. Dining room. A few hours."
Levi read my face the way he always did, looking for what was underneath the instruction. Whatever he found there made him nod once, slow and serious. Octavio gave a short nod. Hunter simply turned, and the three of them moved off down the hall, and I turned back to the closed door and I stayed.