Page 132 of Inside the Wicked

I slip my volatile sight to him, which has him shrinking away from me a fraction and leaning on the bar.

“What? We have some time to kill, and I’m jittery with the nerves,” he defends.

“I’ll take what you’re having,” Rix says.

Adam orders another.

I keep track of Ana, and if there’s even the slightest note she wants to back the fuck out of this, I’m not hesitating to kill every man in my path to get to her across the room.

“You’re practically vibrating, man,” Rix comments, taking a drink.

I’m reeling from earlier tonight. Getting blindsided by Lanshall thanks to being double-crossed by Silas. But we never should have given him an ounce of trust. Ana was so certain, and though I never trusted Silas, I trusted her intuition about him. I know she’s hurt by the revelation of his true colors, but that’s the thing about a chameleon like Silas, who can shift his colors to make people see what he wants them to.

He truly lives up to the Balenheizer name.

“C-can I offer you a drink?” a voice says from behind us.

It’s so uncannily familiar, but I hope to be fucking wrong.

“You littleshit,” Rix hisses, but his face is awash with relief, and he moves toward his younger brother.

“S-stop,” Jeremy says.

I’ve never seen this look of panic on him. Pale, sweaty terror. He’s seen unimaginable horrors and been on the front lines of some very dangerous shit, but I’ve never seen him like this, and it spears my chest with ice.

He’s trying to keep his composure, dressed in a server’s uniform and carrying a tray of three champagne flutes, which trembles. I scan him once, twice.

“What the fuck are you doing here, man?” Rix rambles on. “I’ve been out my mind worried! How could you do this to me? This is the last time?—”

“Rix,” I say.

He stops talking. I think I might stop breathing.

I reach as if to take a flute, but instead I shift the platter an inch, then I confirm the worst possible fucking thing.

Jeremy’s other thumb is taped over a detonator.

“Oh my god, is that?—?”

I squeeze Adam’s shoulder to cut him off, and he nearly folds under my unavoidably tight pressure.

“Shit,” I mutter. NowI’msweating. There’s no telling how powerful the bomb strapped around him is, but it would be enough to kill him, and I’ve never experienced this type of all-consuming, frozen fear before.

“How fast can Dean get here?” I ask Rix.

He’s my best explosives specialist.

“He’s on the squad. He should be in the vicinity.”

Thank fuck.

“Get him in here somehow.Now.”

I only took my sight from Ana for a moment, but now she’s gone.

FUCK.

We anticipated Jacob would keep her here for at least a few hours. Yet never could we have predicted this stunt, and now it makes sense he would slip out. It licks a new trail of tensiondown my spine to wonder if there could be a timer or a second detonator and we’re all minutes or seconds away from being blasted to shit.

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