LOGINRAINEWe sat on the edge of her bed in the dark.Cole had taken the whole compound's worth of Reapers, marshals, and wounded out into the yard, and Doc was stitching someone up in the infirmary, and the war room was empty. Isla's room was the smallest in the house, a narrow cell off the kitchen with a single window, a quilt her mother had made, and a stack of cookbooks beside the pillow. I sat with my knees touching hers. She had her hands pressed to her stomach."I was going to tell you," she said."I know.""The day after the funeral. I took a test in the infirmary bathroom. Doc didn't know. Nobody knew." Her voice cracked. "I've been eleven weeks and I've been sick every morning and I couldn't, Raine, I couldn't, you had Dad and the Circle and Cole and... and Sean was dead, and I was so afraid if I said it out loud it would stop being true.""Isla.""It's his. It's Sean's. It's the only..." She was crying now, without sound, shoulders shaking. "It's the only piece of him I've got l
RAINEI had the crosshairs on his heart.From the infirmary roof, flat on my belly in the afternoon sun with a borrowed rifle against my cheek, I watched Gordon Pryce hold out a pistol to the man I loved. Ghost lay beside me, so still he could have been a shadow. Below us, on the porch, Tillman lay playing dead with a blood pack warming against his ribs. Hale's marshals crouched inside the vans along the south wall, waiting for a signal. The Revenants had the north. Isla was in the war room with her hand on the radio and Eli beside her.It was supposed to be simple."He knows," Ghost murmured. "Pryce knows.""I see it.""If Cole doesn't fire, they'll know too.""I see that.""If he does—""Ghost." I didn't breathe. "Shut up."Through the scope Cole's face looked like carved stone. I knew every plane of it. I knew the exact muscle in his jaw that moved when he was frightened, and it wasn't moving. He looked at the pistol. He looked at Pryce. He looked, for a single tiny second, directl
COLE"You'll want to lead from the front," Mace said.It was Sunday at eleven-forty, and the road to the Serpent compound looked like any other country road at noon, flat and gold and empty. Six Reapers rode behind me in a tight wedge. Mace sat in the pickup beside Deke, and behind them, at a polite distance, rolled a black SUV with tinted windows. Lucía's. I hadn't seen who sat inside. I didn't need to.By Sunday noon, I'd like him dead.Every minute of the last three days had been a rehearsal. Raine and I had walked the whole thing in whispers through the back of the shed. Tillman would stand on the infirmary's front porch in a hospital gown, leaning on a crutch, like a man too stubborn to stay in bed. I'd shoot him from sixty yards with a rifle loaded with a blank. A blood pack under his shirt, a small charge for the squib. He'd drop. The Reapers would whoop. We'd ride out with their proof, and Ghost would put a tracker on the black SUV the moment it left.It was a good plan. Every
RAINEI'd spent three weeks being brave. It turned out to be exhausting.I ran two clubs and half a Conclave on four hours of sleep. I rebuilt a wall. I buried Jonah Ames's mother, a small gray woman who'd stood at the grave with her hands knotted, saying thank you, thank you, as though I'd given her something. I ate Isla's cooking and tasted none of it. Isla herself looked worse each day, pale and green around the mouth, jumping up from the table twice a week to throw up in the sink. I put it down to grief. I should have known better.And every night, I lay on my cot in the bunkroom with my fist around a pair of empty dog tags that weren't there anymore, and said one word to the ceiling.Persimmon.On Thursday, at midnight, a black motorcycle rolled into my garage.Ghost had spent two hours sweeping it first. He'd found a GPS tracker the size of a coin stuck under the seat, grunted, and left it exactly where it was. "Let them watch it sit in your garage all night," he said. "It's a b
RAINEI'd spent three weeks being brave. It turned out to be exhausting.I ran two clubs and half a Conclave on four hours of sleep. I rebuilt a wall. I buried Jonah Ames's mother, a small gray woman who'd stood at the grave with her hands knotted, saying thank you, thank you, as though I'd given her something. I ate Isla's cooking and tasted none of it. Isla herself looked worse each day, pale and green around the mouth, jumping up from the table twice a week to throw up in the sink. I put it down to grief. I should have known better.And every night, I lay on my cot in the bunkroom with my fist around a pair of empty dog tags that weren't there anymore, and said one word to the ceiling.Persimmon.On Thursday, at midnight, a black motorcycle rolled into my garage.Ghost had spent two hours sweeping it first. He'd found a GPS tracker the size of a coin stuck under the seat, grunted, and left it exactly where it was. "Let them watch it sit in your garage all night," he said. "It's a b
RAINEI never even actually saw the dot.I wish I could say I felt it, some prickle between the shoulder blades. I didn't. All I knew was a mountain of leather and chain coming at me out of the floodlights, the whistle of a spiked ball past my ear, the reek of wintergreen and sweat. And my mother's locket bouncing against my chest."Come on, little girl," Corbin panted. "Come on."He was fast for his size. Fast, and mean, and patient. The chain lashed out and caught my forearm, tore my sleeve, left a line of fire from wrist to elbow. I rolled, came up, and swung. The wrench cracked off his ribs. He barely grunted."That all you've got?""Not even close."I was losing. I knew it by the third minute. He didn't tire, and I did. My side was a bonfire where the old stitches had torn. My arm bled into the gravel. Around us the ring of headlights hung white and endless, and out in the dark four hundred faces watched me die.Think.My father, years ago, in a garage that smelled of oil. Everyt
COLEThe second hit came immediately after the first, right across the side of my face. My ears rang so hard that I lost the sound of the rain, the workshop, the mechanic woman, everything. I staggered forward with my hands out, trying to catch myself, but whoever swung at me wasn’t done.A strong
COLE“Great!” she muttered somewhere near me. “Perfect timing.”I could barely see her outline, just the faint shape of her shoulders in the dim glow from outside. The rain roared even louder now, hitting against the roof like it wanted to get in.I was angry and dripping from head to toe, and very
COLEDahlia wasn’t awake just yet, and I wanted to keep things that way. She’d been pissed when I told her what I’d heard yesterday, and how I’d had to send money to the girl from Iron Serpents. I had no idea why she was so riled up, anyway. I was the vice for the president of the Revenants, so the
COLEI rode out of that garage and down the road, feeling every muscle in my body tense with anger. Vex Mercer was a complete asshole, everyone knew that. I myself had known that in theory, but actually meeting the man… that was a whole other level of irritating. The way he’d towered over me, all







