Page 56 of The Fire Went Wild

God, I have to stop thinking about earlier.

I slide on my bra and pull on my sweater and say, “You can look now,” and he does, turning around and then drinking me in.

Now it’s my turn to shift uncomfortably. Though I wouldn’t say I’mthatuncomfortable.

“Warmer?” he asks.

“I will be. What do you want to talk to me about?”

Jaxon goes still, his eyes dark and intense. He’s looking at me like it doesn’t actually matter that I’m dressed—like he sees right through my clothes, through my skin, into the most secret parts of me.

“I have to do something,” he says. “And you’re going to come with me.”

Fear suddenly twists through my body, violent and jarring.Realfear. Like what I felt when those two men pointed their guns in my face. Like what I felt when I saw what Jaxon was capable of.

“Y-you’re going to have to tell me more than that.” I swallow, my mouth suddenly dry. “What do you have to do?”

He takes his time answering, although when he does, his response is both shocking and completely expected. “I have to kill someone.”

“So why do you needme?” I spit out, taking one reflexive step away from him. I swear he flinches a little.

“Can’t leave you here,” he answers, a beat too late.

“So let me go.”

The look he gives me could have withered roses.

“I won’t tell anyone what you’re going to do.” I’m pleading and I know it, but I don’t care. “Look, I just want to find Edie. Even if you won’t tell me where she is, let me go and I’ll just try to find her and let you do—” I wave my hands around. “Whatever it is you need to do.”

“No.”

I slump, fear worming through me. “Won’t I just fuck up whatever you need to do? Won’t this just make me a liability?” I try to keep my voice steady. “Is that the idea? Once I see you kill someone, then you’ll beallowedto kill me? That’s wha?—”

“No!” He says it even more forcefully this time. “I’m not going to kill you. But you have to come with me.”

“And if I refuse?” I cross my arms. Raise an eyebrow. Challenge him.

Jaxon just shrugs. “Refuse all you want. I got you from your car on the highway to that bed.” He tilts his head toward the hallway. “You think I can’t drag you along on a kill?”

The way he says it sends chills shooting through every nerve in my body. He’s so calm. Like it’s all so ordinary.

“Won’t it just—make things more complicated for you?”

Jaxon’s eyes glitter. “Of course it fucking will,” he says. “But I’m afraid I don’t have much of a choice.”

Thatreallychills me. Because in this moment, I see Jaxon as what he is—as something not fully human. Some quality in him seems to shift in front of me. A shadow moving across his face. A predatory flatness spreading through his eyes.

My skin prickles the way it did in my bedroom earlier.

“I don’t understand anything about you,” I say coldly.

And Jaxon only replies, “I know.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

JAXON

Ambrose isn’t wrong. This is an awful damn idea, but my whole life I’ve been told you can’t question the gods.They gave us these gifts,my MeeMaw told me when I was twelve or thirteen, not long after my first kill. I think I was helping her in the kitchen, stripping meat and skin from bone.This long life. This strength. When they ask something of you, you best listen.

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