The Girl Who Dared to Endure (The Girl Who Dared #6)

My heart fractured. “Alex, no… You’re good for me,” I told him. “You help me. You’ve always taken care of me and loved me, even when I was being a colossal brat. Please don’t give up hope. We’ll figure this out; we’ll work through it. It’s my turn to take care of you.” I shifted my weight, my legs numb below the knee from the kneeling position, and he straightened up.

“I think I’ll go lie down now,” he told me. “You have to check on Eric and…” He paused long enough to swallow audibly before adding, “Leo.”

I slowly got to my feet, and helped my brother into bed, getting him out of his uniform and under the blanket. I sat down next to him and continued to stroke his shoulder and arm. “I’m going to go check on Leo,” I whispered to him. “But I’m sure he’s going to be just fine. You try to get some rest, and I’ll be back soon. I love you.”

My brother didn’t reply, and after a moment, I realized he wouldn’t. I felt conflicted as I got up, as a part of me wanted to stay and continue to comfort my brother.

But I had to check on Leo and Eric. They were my responsibility, too.





15





I was halfway to the war room when Grey appeared at the other end. I stopped in my tracks, blinking at him and wondering who I was looking at. “Grey?” He shook his head, and relief poured through me. Still, I wanted confirmation. “Leo?”

He nodded, and I shot off like a bullet toward him, needing the feel of his arms around me. I barely even gave him time to open his arms before I was in them, wrapping my own around his waist and pulling him tight to me. “Are you okay?”

He hesitated a second before returning the hug, and then slowly smoothed his arms over my shoulders and back. “I’m okay,” he told me. “Your brother didn’t hurt me.”

Something inside me started to break, and I gave a little cry. “What about Eric? Is he?”

“Grey gave him all the blood he could,” Leo said. “Quess recovered the bullet, but it punctured a lung, ricocheted off a rib, and nicked his liver. He stopped the bleeding internally, but he lost a lot of blood, and what Grey was able to give him wasn’t a lot. He’s stable, but it’s now a waiting game.”

“But what about Grey?” I asked. “Is he okay? He was so scared and confused before, and—”

I stopped as my shoulders started to shake, a sob catching me unawares, the terror of the last five—ten?—minutes finally starting to hit me. Leo’s hands pressed me closer, one going up to stroke my hair lightly. “Grey’s… fine,” he hedged. I started to question his hesitation, but he cut me off. “I know you are upset, and I understand why, but we’ll have to talk about Grey later. There’s something more important that needs our attention first.”

His words gave me pause, and I looked up at him, blinking back my tears. “What is it?”

Leo’s mouth turned down into a frown. “We have to get rid of Baldy’s body. Cornelius’s sensors were shut off in regard to undoc alerts, but not in regard to death, and I can’t access Cornelius with Jasper and Rose’s programs in the state they are in—they might interpret it as an attack and try to take control of his systems. We have only a few minutes to get it out of here before he automatically syncs with the council server and informs them that there’s a corpse in your quarters. As long as the body isn’t here when he syncs, he won’t be able to inform them.”

I blinked, not comprehending. I truly didn’t understand. “Won’t he be able to tell them we moved the body?”

He pulled away from me. I had expected him to take my hand, as he always had after something traumatic happened. But he didn’t, and a wave of disappointment crashed into me. Instead, he turned away and began walking back to the war room, talking to me from over his shoulder. I had little choice but to follow, or stand there looking like an idiot over the fact that he hadn’t taken my hand.

“No. He’s a computer program and can only follow the protocols set up for him as they are laid out. No body equals no report. It’s an oversight in his programming, but one we plan to exploit. But it only works if we get Baldy out of here as soon as possible. I just can’t figure out where to put him. The escape hatch would work, except ours leads straight up to the roof, so there’s no place for us to leave him in there that wouldn’t have him falling back down on top of us.”

I heard the dangerous undercurrent of his words and realized that him not taking my hand was definitely the least of our worries. We had to remove the body, but to where? It had to be a place no one could find it; we had left forensic evidence all over him, and if his remains were discovered, the trail would lead back to us—and mostly right back to Alex. Even if it wasn’t the legacies that found him, the consequences would be the same. Imprisonment and death.

If the escape exit hatch was out, then almost everything else was as well. Nothing ever remained hidden inside the Tower: there were dozens of places to hide a body inside of it, but they would be discovered eventually, and the jig would be up. Alex’s DNA was all over Baldy’s face, from hitting him over and over again. His rank had dropped and risen in a matter of minutes, and even if no one had seen it when it happened, a quick check of his performance log would show them the truth. They’d know we had found a way to mask our ranks, and they would immediately try to figure out what it was, so they could put a stop to it. I’d be immediately implicated, because it had happened under my watch.

I’d be arrested and executed as a dissident and enemy of the Tower.

We entered the war room and saw Quess and Maddox already lifting Baldy’s body and setting it inside a black body bag. I had no idea where they had gotten that from, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Cornelius had procured it from one of the nearby supply rooms. The request would be recorded, but I was betting Leo could go back in and delete it later, once everything calmed down. Eric was still on the floor, using Zoe’s lap as a pillow, his eyes closed and his lashes dark against his pale face.

She looked up at me, her blue eyes bleeding with hopelessness. “Quess won’t let me move him,” she whispered. She reached down and tugged at his bloody uniform where Quess had unzipped it, trying to cover him up. “He needs to be under a blanket.”

I moved over to my best friend and wrapped my arms around her, while Quess grunted out, “I’m sorry, Zo, but I can’t be sure that moving him won’t kill him yet. I told you, go get a blanket from the room, and I promise, we will clean everything up as soon we figure out what to do with this.”

I heard a rattling thump that told me they had dropped Baldy’s body into the bag, and I gently pulled away from Zoe. “It’s going to be okay,” I told her in a soft whisper.

Her face broke, and her shoulders shook as she took a breath. “He’s the light of my life, Liana. How did this happen? You said we were coming here to be safe!”

Her last sentence was an accusation, and my heart plummeted into the pit of my stomach. I looked over at Leo and saw horror and guilt written all over his face.

“Everything was fine,” he said, his voice twisted with raw emotion. “Everything was fine. I was learning about him and who his people were, what they had done, what they were planning. But then he just… woke up, and somehow jerked control from me. I’ve never felt anything like it. And I couldn’t do anything to stop him. He shouldn’t have been able to keep me from reacting, from putting his body out of commission, but… he did.”

My face paled at his description, and I swallowed convulsively. Either Leo was arrogant about his skills, or Baldy had a much stronger mind than either of us had given him credit for. Either way, it scared me, and I worried about whether Grey could do that, now that we had woken him up before putting Leo back inside him. I wondered suddenly how Maddox had managed to handle Grey, but there wasn’t time for that now.

I had to help the others move a body and figure out where to put it.

“We’ll talk about it later,” I instructed everyone. “Zoe, go get Eric a blanket. We’ll move him together when we get back.” I stood up and turned to the others. “Where can we put the body?”