But she had to get the beloved.
Stumbling, slipping in her own blood where it had pooled on the floor, she went back to where he’d stabbed her. Where the fuck was it?
She checked over her shoulder. The Dhavos was where she’d left him, curled in and coughing.
Getting down on her hands and knees, she patted around the mess on the floor. It must have been kicked aside. Into the chaos of chairs.
“Goddamn it—”
The crash came from overhead, part of the ceiling breaking free, something enormous dropping through and bringing with it all kinds of ductwork.
Duran landed like a superhero, boots planted, body ready to fight, half of a section of venting falling off his huge shoulder and clanging as it hit the floor.
The sound he made was that of a T. rex, shaking the very foundation of the compound.
Behind him, his father jumped up and disappeared, leaving through a hole in the wall that appeared like a hunting dog summoned, the escape closing up in his wake as if it had never been.
“Your father!” She pointed across the room. “He went through there!”
28
DURAN’S BRAIN TOLD HIM to bolt after his father. Get his revenge. Tear the male up into pieces and eat some of them.
But his body refused to move the instant he caught the scent of Ahmare’s blood in the air. “You’re hurt!”
She dropped down to the ground. Like she had passed out.
“You’re dying—”
“The pearl!” She looked up over her shoulder. “I’m trying to find the beloved! It fell out while we were fighting—”
“He stabbed you!”
They were both yelling in the silence, her while she patted around, him while standing over her. And she became more frantic the more she looked without finding it while he got more enraged.
Duran knelt and captured her hands, bringing her focus to him. With a pounding heart, he measured her pupils, her skin tone, her breathing. “You’re bleeding.”
“I can’t feel anything—”
“You’re in shock—”
“I have to find the pearl!” Her voice vibrated with urgency. “I can’t go back without it. Go after your father!”
Duran looked across the storage area.
A ragged path had been cut in stacks of chairs, like a body had careened through them. Streaks of red painted the floor. There was a trail of blood drops as well, one that ended at the wall.
His father. Escaping.
“Go,” she said urgently. “I’ll find the pearl and get out. You told me how—follow the spokes, not the curved corridors, and I have the code that works. If you go after him now, you can catch him—maybe through the ceiling again?”
He thought of his mother’s bones on that cot, and the way her skull had seemed to look at him.
“Duran, go—it’s what you came here to do. I’ll be okay.”
His eyes returned to Ahmare. Blood from that shoulder wound was dripping out the bottom of her windbreaker. What the fuck had his father stabbed her with? The hole in that light, waterproof fabric at her shoulder was too big for a dagger.
“I’ll be okay,” she repeated with sudden calm. Along the lines of that being the only outcome she could contemplate.
For as long as he could remember, he had always assumed his life would come down to one moment, one crucial, all-encompassing moment . . . where he plunged a knife into his father’s black heart. Or snapped the male’s neck. Or shot him in the face.
The method of killing didn’t matter, and in his fantasies, it was often different. But that point of no return, when death took his sire unto Dhunhd, that was always going to be Duran’s defining moment, what his life’s toil boiled down to, his seminal event.
It was a shock to realize he’d been wrong about all that.
His defining moment actually came down to whether he helped a female he’d known for barely twenty-four hours . . . or left her to fulfill the destiny he had declared was his own.
It turned out to be no contest.
Duran dropped down beside her. “You search that way, I’ll head over here. We’re not leaving until we find the beloved.”
She hesitated only a moment, but he couldn’t read her expression. He was too busy patting around on the pale linoleum, trying to find a pearl that was almost the exact color of the flooring, in a room where there was debris all around and blinking fluorescent lights overhead.
He didn’t think about his father. There would be time for that later.
Right now, he cared only about the pearl. Only what Ahmare needed to get her brother free.
Sweeping his vision from left to right, using his hands to feel around, he moved fast but with care, searching . . . searching . . . searching. When he came to a tossed wooden chair, he picked it up and put it behind himself. And then he arrived at a hole in the floor.