Page 76 of The Contract

“What led to this?” Noah asks when I finish. “Why would he have followed you here?”

That’s when I can’t breathe anymore. It’s happened a lot over the past two days.

“Count to ten, Dante. Out loud.” When I’ve done that, he asks, “What did you fight about?”

“I don’t know.”

“Walk me through the day.”

I close my eyes as everything tries to sweep in at once. My father. Tristan coming to my office. Tristan on top of me during sex. The fact that I came like that, with himon top of me. Fucking Tristan after, trying to forget, trying to sleep. Then the nightmare. Then waking up to the sense of someone in the bed with me.

I can’t walk Noah through all that. Not because he can’t know, just because I can’t talk about it, not yet. He might get it out of me later. But I do tell him, “I had a nightmare. Two days ago.”

Noah is silent for a moment, trying to fill in a whole lot of blanks, but he only asks, “And Tristan was present for this?”

“Yes.”

“He tried to talk to you?”

“Yes.”

“You chased him off?”

I close my eyes, and that’s answer enough. Noah takes a deep breath then asks, “What have you been doing since?”

I barely know. I’m so fucking exhausted that everything is hazy. All I know is that when a lead on Evan’s handler popped up, it was like a goddamn blessing. Something to focus on.

I tell Noah, “Tracking down Evan’s handler. I have …” I press my fingers into my eyes. “Fuck, I’m supposed to be meeting him tonight.”

“And you’re going to kill him?”

“Of course I’m going to fucking kill him! He’s the reason Evan was already gone from the Island when you arrived! He’d already fucking taken Evan!”

“I know, Dante.”

“Evan never escaped.”

“Iknow.”

“So his handler, that mob shithead Giovanni Fiero, needs to go in the fucking cell!”

“I know, Dante.”

“And before he dies, he needs to tell me everything he knows about the Society.Everything. He can put more names to my descriptions—”

“You’re not stable enough right now.”

“Fuck that—”

“You’renot. It’s against the rules.”

“Fuck the rules—”

“The rules existbecauseof this, Dante. They exist for moments precisely like this one, and I exist to enforce them. I have no other reason to be on this earth anymore.”

It makes me pause. I know that. Noah has given his life over to it. It’s why I knew I could tell him to fuck off. He let me say it because I needed to say it. It wasn’t the first time I said I was done with him. It didn’t mean anything because Noah will never, ever be done with me. Or Rafael. Or any of the other boys he rescued from hell.

“And you called me,” Noah goes on in a softer voice, “because you know you need me to do that.”

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