Page 85 of Beyond Reason

“You were there?” Those last moments of my life, the ones that I wasn’t even sure I wanted back… he held them behind his curious stare.

“I was too late to do anything about it even if I’d wanted to, but I was there. You gave me a necklace and begged me to give it to him. After that, you were muttering nonsense.”

I waited for the pain, for it to hurt as he spoke the memories… but they were blossoming behind my eyes in perfect tandem with his words.

“I gave you a message for Axel.”

“Yeah. You said his name, then you started spouting nonsense. Here. Everything and nothing. The sky, the stars. Look. Wait.” Kade finally turned toward me, his head slightly cocked to the side. “Then you pressed my fingers closed, and you died.”

The tattoo… Axel’s tattoo. It struck me as familiar when I’d seen it, but it made no sense because Kade hadn’t understood what I was trying to say. Everything and nothing, a whole galaxy on his back. Every star. Every star.

“I’ll still be here. In everything around you, even when you feel nothing at all. I’ll be every star in the sky, watching over you. I’ll never be so far away that you can’t see me if you look. Just… wait for me.” The words fell softly from my lips, and my hand came back to my throat. To Axel’s necklace.To my necklace.

Everything was different. Because in all the time I’d been alive, in every memory I had now… I never remembered the sharp sting of hot tears, the pain that rocked through me.

I never remembered crying.

It made the vision of Kade and Seth standing side by side blurry. “Please?” I said again, my fingers tightening on the necklace. “Please, help me get him back.”

“It’s not safe—”

“Either help me find him or kill me, Kade. Because I can’t do this without him. I can’t be here without him.” I took three quick steps in his direction, and sure enough, there was a gun pressed to the center of my chest. It didn’t stop me from looking up at him, from letting him see the raw, naked emotion on my face. “Tell me you don’t feel the same way about Seth. Tell me you don’t understand.”

“I—”

“We’ll help you.” Seth’s voice was soft but determined, and Kade turned a hard expression to him. “Kade, if something happened to you, I’d want to know that there was someone out there who would help me get you back.”

“Nothing is going to happen to me.” The answer came automatically, but Seth’s hand in his seemed to quell the more volatile part of his response.

“This is what we wanted, what you promised. This is our chance to finish this. You won’t let anything happen to me.”

Seth sounded so sure, like he could easily place every bit of faith he ever had in Kade without question, without worry, without thinking for even a second if he should do anything else.

And more than that, Kade turned to look at him like he was the most precious thing he’d ever seen… and like he really would do whatever it took to keep him safe.

“You do what I tell you to, when I tell you to. And if I tell you that it’s too dangerous and you need to stay behind, you stay behind.” His voice came out hard and uncompromising, and I wondered if he realized that giving in to Seth was a compromise.

I wasn’t going to argue, especially when he swung around to stare at me.

“And if there’s any point in our little rescue mission where it comes down to you or Seth, I pick Seth. You pick Seth. Everyone picks Seth. Do you understand?”

I swallowed hard and nodded. “As long as you understand that you still do everything you can to get Axel out of there.” I stepped closer to Kade, close enough that, for a second, I felt lost in the ring of copper that burned so intensely in his eyes. I wondered if mine were burning the same, a halo of green foxfire. “We aren’t doing this to save killers, Kade. We’re doing this to keep them safe… because he isn’t, is he? As long as that place is still up and running, you’ll be worried about him.”

He didn’t say anything, but the slight narrowing of his eyes was all the answer I needed.

“I’ll help you hunt every last one of them down. I promise. I’ll keep him safe if anything happens.”

It was a powerful promise, and we both knew it. Kade was capable, but his paranoia about something happening to Seth made it obvious that he wasn’t infallible. And I think it was a revelation for both of us that having someone there who could watch over Seth or Axel if something happened was…

A small comfort. We both knew what it was like to die, and I think we were both learning what it was like to really want to live.

“Fine.”

Even though it was exactly what I’d been working toward, I was shocked when he reluctantly gave in.

Seth just smiled.

Chapter 26

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