Page 115 of Princes of Carnage

I walk in, and she glances up at the sound of my footsteps. Our gazes meet, and a flurry of emotions flash in her eyes. Anger, heat, distrust. She doesn’t say anything, but it’s all there to see if you know how to read her. And I do.

I don’t say anything either, but she’s used to that by now. Instead, I just put the bag on the table in front of her.

“What’s this?” she asks, frowning.

I don’t answer, just nod to the bag for her to open it.

She sighs, rolling her eyes before opening the bag and peering inside. She sucks in a sharp breath as she sees the contents, and when she looks back up at me, her eyes are wide.

“What is this?” she asks again. “What did you…”

“It’s the hands of everyone who touched you that night,” I tell her simply. “I know it won’t banish the darkness of what happened—nothing can do that. But I thought it might help to know that they’re in an even darker place now.”

My tone stays even, but I can tell from the way Quinn leans back in her chair that she gets my meaning.

Her gray eyes don’t move away from me as she stares at my face, clearly caught off guard by my actions. She licks her lips, but before she can say anything, Nico and Atlas stride into the kitchen, speaking in quiet voices as they finish up whatever conversation they were having on the way downstairs.

Atlas glances at Quinn’s bowl and nods approvingly. “Is there more milk?” he asks, and Quinn just nods back, clearly still at a loss for words.

Nico frowns at her and comes over to the table.

“What’s this?” he asks, unknowingly echoing her question from a moment ago.

She doesn’t answer, and neither do I, so he peers down into the open bag himself. He reels back when he sees the contents, his eyes flicking between Quinn and me. Of the two of us, it’s probably not hard to determine who brought a bag of hands into the house.

“What the fuck, Killian?” Nico grimaces. “On the table?”

“What?” Atlas comes over and looks into the bag as well, then makes a disgusted face. “I didn’t think I was ever going to have to say that disembodied hands don’t belong in the kitchen, but here we fucking are.”

“We eat at this table,” Nico continues. “Who the fuck knows where these hands have been?”

“Killian knows,” Atlas says. “Not that that makes it better. I don’t think anything is going to make ‘bag of hands for breakfast’ better.”

“Do we need to have a designated place in the house for miscellaneous body parts?” Nico asks. “Is this going to be a thing?”

“Please, no. I don’t think I can handle that,” Atlas groans. “I’m all for chopping someone’s hands off if they deserve it, but can we leave them outside?”

I’m barely listening to them as they bitch about it, my focus only on Quinn.

She looks like she’s trying to process this, and I can’t tell if she’s pleased by the gift or just confused.

“Why?” she finally asks, her voice soft.

“I did what your father would have done if he had known,” I tell her. “I gave them what they deserved.”

36

QUINN

I feel rooted to my seat as Killian speaks, and I just keep staring at him, so thrown by this gesture. His words reverberate through my head, and I’m caught up in emotions that I can’t hold back.

I swallow hard, my eyes prickling with unshed tears.

It’s hard to know how to react to this. No one has ever brought me a bag of fucking hands before. If my father had known, he would have killed those men, and he would have made it painful, but he probably wouldn’t have brought me a trophy from it. There’s something about this gesture that’s uniquely Killian.

“I… thank you,” I finally say.

It feels… I don’t know. Like maybe not the right thing to say in this moment, but it’s all I’ve got. I’m still pissed at him, but this goes a long way toward softening me a bit in his direction.

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