“When were you going to tell me?”

My heart ached. My eyes stung with unshed tears. My throat burned from holding back words that needed to be said. “What was I supposed to say? You already knew. You beat the shit out of him for it.”

“No.” He stood and stomped away from me until he got to the wall, then turned abruptly, anger flashing behind the gold specks in his eyes now. “I beat the shit out of him for being careless. It’s his fault Miguel got to you.”

I could have argued that point all day, but we’d honestly already beat it to death, so I kept my mouth shut.

“I knew he had a crush. A stupid, little boy’s crush on the unattainable. But this is different, Faythe. This is dangerous.” He rubbed his forehead as if he was fending off a headache. “Does your dad know?” Then, before I could answer. “He knows.”

I shook my head, but Marc ignored me. “That’s why he sent him. Sent both of us. He knows we’d die to protect you.”

“I don’t want that.” My tears finally overflowed, and I wiped my cheeks with my scarred left arm.

Marc watched me, and I saw the very moment when his expression went unreadable. He’d closed me out and the room was colder from his silence.

We couldn’t go on like this. I had to tell him as soon as Kaci was safe—assuming we survived the next day…

Twenty-Six

The sun was warm, but the northern wind was cold and bitter, even on the short walk to the rental car. During my last Shift, Marc had scrubbed blood from my jacket so the scent wouldn’t attract unwanted attention, but that left my sleeve damp and my arm cold.

As Marc drove, my thoughts raced, circling the risks we were taking like buzzards around a fresh kill. If anyone spotted us, we were dead. We were deep inside enemy territory, and both sides had long since dropped any pretense of polite politics or manners. Jace’s mother seemed to be the only one still clinging to such fragile reassurances, and I think that was solely the product of her own denial. She could not believe that her husband would order one of their sons to kill the other. And if she couldn’t face the truth about Brett’s death, she couldn’t possibly understand what Jace was risking by coming to visit.

Even if he wasn’t really making a social call.

I held Marc’s backpack on my lap, fingering Jace’s duct tape through the thick material. I was already wearing the brace on my right wrist, and it smelled like him, just because he’d taken it out of the package for me. The rest of the car smelled like Marc, and like the unseen traces of my own blood, still lingering in the backseat.

Neither of us spoke. We’d both said so much already, and the confession I still held inside was so staggeringly awful that I could hardly grasp the consequences of voicing it. Yet keeping my secret was unbearable. It had turned to acid in my gut and was surely consuming me from the inside out.