I WOKE UP THE NEXT MORNING looking for a fight. Muscles ached that I didn’t know I had, and my feet screamed bloody murder when I slid my tennis shoes back on. All the sleep had done was process my stifling sadness into pure, unflinching anger. I had energy to burn. I opened the door and shut it behind me as quietly as I could, so as not to wake up Zu.
The manual clock in the hallway said 4:45 A.M. It would be another hour before anyone else was up and ready for the day. Plenty of time to work out the lightning zipping through my body, and return to some state of calm.
The light in the gym was already on, and my whole body tensed in anticipation when I saw who was running on the treadmill, taking quick, confident strides. Cole must have seen me out of the corner of his eye, but he kept running and didn’t acknowledge me until I was standing right next to the machine and its whirring belt.
“Not in the mood, Gem.” His voice was flat, edged with warning.
“Too bad,” I said, walking over to retrieve two pairs of gloves. “I am.”
I waited for him. Gloves on my hands, stretching, trying to warm my body up for this. Finally, after a good five minutes, he let out a grunt and hit the STOP button on the machine. Cole scooped up the gloves from the floor, his face flushed from the run, his eyes overly bright. I had half a second to drop back into a fighting stance before his knee rose up toward my stomach; I jumped back, but was caught by yet another obvious swing he made to my sternum. That, at least, sent the thoughts shooting out of me, along with every last ounce of air in my lungs. It was a distraction—he had me pinned against his chest in the space of a single heartbeat.
I twisted out from under his arm, trying to use the momentum to flip him over onto his back. Like that was ever going to happen. The best I got was a stomp to his instep. He didn’t back off, though, not the way he normally would have. I felt the temperature in the room spike dramatically, and then—
He pulled back, letting me drop onto the floor with a sound of disgust. No. The word shot through my mind as he turned his back to me and started to remove his gloves. The sparring may have started as a way to release some of the heat that was boiling me alive from the inside out, but my head had hooked into the rush of it in a way I hadn’t expected. I needed more. I needed to get the black thoughts of Cate and Jude and what was waiting for us at the end of all of this out of me. And that required sweating or bleeding it out.
I lowered my head and charged toward him. I saw his expression darken in the mirror in front of him just before he slammed into it. This time, momentum actually did its job, sending us both sprawling back onto the edge of the mat. Without a single word, Cole dragged me by my neck further onto the mat, and then he showed me just how pissed off he really was.
Trying to roll or kick him off did nothing. He had me pinned beneath him, his whole crushing weight settled on my chest. One hand pinned mine over my head, and the other arm came across my neck, applying just the right amount of pressure there to dwindle my oxygen supply down to nothing.
He eased up on my windpipe, but not by much. I thrashed under him, knees kicking up to try to hit his lower back. His skin seemed tight against his skull, his face set with fury.
I choked in a shallow breath, but he didn’t pull back—my mind was floating away from my body, drifting into that same pool of black forming in my eyes.
“Cole—” I choked out. “Stop—”
He didn’t hear me. Wherever he’d gone inside, I wasn’t going to be able to touch him. And I knew that the only way out of this was in.
I drove into his mind like I was throwing a punch. I should have landed the hit and bounced back out, let it register like an electrical shock to his system. But his thoughts had hooks; they caught my mind, dragging it back down, drowning me in the scene melting into place around me. Light swirled around me, bending into shadows that became a small kitchen paneled in dark wood. There was dim, warm light coming through the curtains that masked the window above the sink. I smelled something burning—food. The trail of gray floating around me was smoke drifting from the closed oven door. Pots and pans popped up on the stove, appearing one at a time. The faint sizzling sound came from the brown sauce that had boiled over the lip of the metal pan.
A woman appeared in front of me, wearing a simple blue dress. I had a low vantage point from the floor, I couldn’t see anything besides her long blond hair and the hands that kept pushing me back, back, back. A surge of anger flooded me and I saw, rather than felt, my own arms up, straining to reach for something—for—
The man was the last to materialize, facing the woman. His face was in shadows, but there was something familiar about it, the shape of the nose, the set of the jaw—I knew this face, I’d seen two younger versions of it. He had gone a shade past red and was screaming, screaming, sweat and fury pouring off him, clouding the room, making everything feel slow and heavy. My gaze shifted down, taking in his dark, wrinkled polo shirt, the squirming toddler he held like a sack in one arm, slowly going pink in the face as he cried, trying to wriggle free, reaching for my arms. His hair was lighter, curling at the ends. The first sound that broke through the muffled din of the memory was his piercing wail of terror as the man picked up the steaming iron from the board and brought it up near his face, as if he was going to press its tip against the baby’s cheek.
The woman in front of me fell onto her knees, begging. “Put him down, please, I’ll fix it, I’ll fix it, it’ll be all right, don’t you know I love you? I won’t have anyone over again, I promise. Just—please give him to me, please give him to me—”
The iron was lowered, set back down on the board, singing the shirt left there, waiting to be smoothed out. The man’s expression transformed, a sickening look of triumph crossing it as he shifted the sobbing boy, holding him under his other arm. He reached out to touch the woman, to stroke her face. The man was so fixated on her bowed head that he didn’t see the skillet she’d pulled off a nearby low shelf, not until she stood and swung it up in a clean arc toward his face.
The baby fell to the floor and I rushed toward him, the sound of gurgling and pain and metal striking flesh and bone drowned out by his hysterical tears. I turned his soft weight over and picked him up. There was a cut at the corner of his lips, where one of his new teeth had caught the tender skin. It was bleeding profusely, but the boy stilled and quieted, looking up into my face with these wide eyes, rimmed with big tears. His thumb slid into his mouth as I tried to wipe the blood away. He didn’t start bawling again until he saw the woman, his mother, crying too, reaching down to pick him up and clutch him to her chest.
She snatched up my hand and dragged me away from the man’s prone form on the floor, the mess of his blood on the black-and-white checkered tile. He shuddered and coughed and we only moved faster, toward the door. She swiped her purse off the counter, then doubled back for the keys when she realized they’d fallen out.
The door led to a garage, and the light that flooded the cramped, dark space dissolved the memory once and for all.
I surfaced at the exact moment the weight came off my chest. I was breathing, coughing, choking on the flood of air that filled it. I rolled onto my side, curling into as small a protective ball as I could. It was several agonizing minutes before fear released its claws from me.
The small, breathy sobs I heard weren’t my own. I propped myself up on my elbow, looking for the source.
Cole sat at the edge of the mat, his back to me as he hunched over his knees, struggling to master his breathing. The section of the mirror in front of him was a spiderweb of cracks, stained with blood. I forced my feet under me and stood on shaking legs, taking one halting step toward him, and then another. He clutched his right hand to his chest, ignoring the way it bled onto his shirt. I walked to the towel rack and returned with a small cloth, pulling his hand toward me so I could clean the blood away. His skin was hot, boiling to the touch as he shook.
“Fuck,” he breathed out. “I’m sorry—we shouldn’t do this anymore. Fuck.”
“Okay,” I said softly, and stayed anyway.
I was in the bathroom, still dripping from my shower, when I heard Chubs’s voice carry down the hallway. With one last glance to make sure my hoodie covered the worst of the new bruising on my neck, I dashed out of the room, calling after him.
He spun on his heel, clearly relieved. “There you are. You missed the others—they had to leave. Apparently it’s an eight-hour drive to Gold Beach and the idiots want to do it in one day.”
“They found a truck to carry the supplies?” I asked.
“Yeah, which you would have discovered for yourself, had you made an appearance at breakfast—ah, sorry, that came out wrong. I didn’t get to tell you last night, but I’m sorry about Agent Conner. I want to tell you everything will be all right, but I’m afraid you’ll punch me.”
It was the first faint smile I’d managed all day. “Was Vi okay about going?”
He let out a long sigh, deflating somewhat. “She was trying to find you last night to run ideas by you, but it’s probably for the best she didn’t. She had a million ideas of how the two of you could sneak off to find Agent Conner.”
There it was, the now-daily sensation of being the biggest asshole in the world. I hadn’t even tried to talk to her about this last night. I’d promised her that we would talk about these things, work through them together, and what had I done? Gone off alone to run my head clear.
“Are we still going to talk to Clancy?” he asked.
“Wait—how did you—?” I didn’t remember mentioning it to him, but that was exactly why I’d come out to catch him.
“We talked about this yesterday afternoon, when you were going to lie down for a while,” he said.
I gave him a look that must have registered how blank my mind felt. “We did?”
“Uh, we did. For at least ten minutes. You nodded. That’s generally a sign that you, you know, understand and agree.”
“Oh...you’re right. Sorry.”