Page 120 of Cherish

As the last note of the song slowly fades, the entire arena goes silent.

Hudson shifts awkwardly in front of the mic stand, but he doesn’t need to be worried. Because the audience wastes no time bursting into wild applause. Cheers and whistles and shouts fill the air around us, and Hudson turns to give me a slow, perfect grin.

I smile back as more bras flood the stage, and just as Hudson reaches for the microphone again, he freezes—and his face shifts from joy into an expression so lethal and laser-focused that I shiver. He gives me a quick nod—our signal that it’s started—and I watch his gaze swing to the front of the stage, to the hundreds of young wraiths down below crowding as close as they can get to him.

Then everything goes black.

Even Macy’s twinkly lights are gone.

Seconds later, a group of guards swarms backstage. Macy shrieks as one of them grabs her and slams her face-first into the closest wall.

“Hey!” Flint shouts as he tries to intercede and ends up getting an elbow to the nose for his trouble.

Eden growls, starts to respond by kicking the guy’s feet out from under him, but I finally manage to get her attention.

“Stop!” I whisper urgently, and though she looks like she wants to argue with me, she doesn’t. Because the goal here isn’t to fight a bunch of guards, even if we can take them. The goal is to get captured and taken to the Shadow Queen with as little fuss as possible. The last thing we want is for anyone in the audience to get hurt.

I manage to keep my resolve as they slam me face-first into the wall, too, but when they rush the stage and grab Hudson, it takes every ounce of concentration I have not to fight back. Especially when he just lets them throw him to the ground and kick him a few times.

The audience starts screaming as they realize what’s happening, and some even try to rush the stage, which is now filled with guards. It’s my worst nightmare, the thing I was terrified would happen, but before anyone gets close to the stage—or the Shadow Guards—members of Nyaz’s underground converge on the front of the stage and start herding everyone out of the makeshift arena.

I nearly sob with relief, even as one of the guards yanks my arms behind my back and marches me past the stage and down the stairs to the rocky ground below.

They push Heather down right behind me, and she cries a little, just enough for me to hear.

“Are you okay?” I ask, trying to see her over the guards between us.

“Close your mouth!” snarls one of them. “And get your hands up. We’ll tolerate no disobedience from any of you.”

“Can you define disobedience?” Flint asks as they shove him down the steps as well. “Just so that I don’t make a mistake and accidentally—”

He breaks off as the tip of a dagger is positioned precariously close to his neck.

“I’m guessing that counts as disobedience,” Hudson mutters on his way down the steps.

“Can you two just take this seriously?” Jaxon snarls. “You’re going to get yourselves killed because you don’t know when to quit.”

He glares especially hard at Flint, who rolls his eyes back at him. But the dragon doesn’t say anything else to the guards.

“You’re all coming with us,” the guard who appears to be in charge growls as he—and his sword—guide us into a line in front of Hudson’s tent. Aspero is running back and forth in front of us, wringing his hands and demanding to know the meaning of all this.

“I’ll find help for you, Hudson,” he promises as he tries to put himself between my mate and the two guards who are standing over him. “I’ll call someone, and we’ll figure out what to do. They can’t just come in here—”

“It’s all right, Aspero,” Hudson tells him. Then he lowers his voice to say something else, but I can’t hear him over all the shouting of the guards, no matter how hard I try.

Aspero is dragged away before he can say anything else, and while this is exactly what we want—exactly what we’ve been angling for since we got to town—it still feels strange to just stand here and let them take us. It feels stranger still to let them treat people who have been kind to us this way.

Especially when I’m pretty sure we can take them, even without any of our extra powers. These guards don’t seem like they’re particularly skilled at what they’re doing.

But escaping isn’t the point of the plan, so I leave my hands behind my back and try to look as unthreatening as possible as they line me up between Hudson and Macy.

“Nice hat,” my cousin tells me as she eyes the I <3 the Vega Brothers beanie I’ve got on.

I grin back. “It’s a statement.”

“That’s really what you want to be wearing for your mug shot?” Hudson asks with a shake of his head. But I can see the smile lurking in the depths of his blue eyes.

“Don’t worry about my mug shot,” I tell him. “You should be thinking about your own, considering it will probably be plastered on fifty different types of merch in less than a week.”

---