Page 7 of Entangled

They blew the whole place up, themselves inside it.

Little spiderwebbed cracks fan across my fragile heart.

Mateo stands and grips Logan’s arm, but his face is dark as he looks at Sam. “We’re staying here until we areallstrong enough to travel, and if any more of our friends die because of you and your vision,cabrón? Then you will pay for their blood with your own.”

Sam is breathing hard, but I hardly notice. It’s half as hard as I’m breathing. No matter how I suck in air, I can’t seem to get any oxygen. Dizziness blurs my vision.

Themselves inside it.

The words don’t fit inside me. They’re too big, too full of implication.

“Fine.” Sam clears his throat, then says more firmly, “We stay. Of course we’ll stay. We want a full recovery for Alastair and Jorge.”

They’re dead.

Sam pushes me again toward the narrow-featured man, but I pull back hard, shaking my head frantically. Maybe I can shake those words out of my memory.

“He wouldn’t have done that,” I blurt, panicked, spinning back to Mateo and Logan. I catch a few surprised, evaluating looks around me but focus on those two, on their faces. I need to see the lie there. “Domwouldn’thave— He was going to save them. Save all of us. He wouldn’tdothat. He?—”

The grim look in Mateo’s eyes cuts me off. It taps against those taut, brittle feelings inside me, and my breath catches. I open my mouth, maybe to say something—maybe to scream?—but nothing comes out. Everything strangles in my throat.

“There was no surviving. He blew the barn, and the lodge was destroyed. I saw it.” He looks down at Alastair, and there’s an ache in his voice as he adds, “Your man did the most damage he could on his way out.”

It’s only when my knees hit damp earth that I realize my legs have gone from under me, but I’m done fighting it.

They’realldead.

Every brittle, suppressed feeling I have erupts, splintering into a thousand shards that rupture my organs. I let my body go limp, and I crumple, curling up like a dying bug in the dirt. A low, raw keening hits my ears. It’s soft, barely audible, but it whines out of my throat with grating force. My nails dig into my forehead, then into my hair, as if I can dig my grief out by the roots.

Lucky. Jaykob. Dom. Jasper. Beau.

Dead.

My keening breaks into a long, pained moan. Tears fog my eyes and then there’s a boot crunching into my ribs. I wail, but reach out to the boot, wanting another one, wanting all the pain, because anything they can deliver is better than thisgrief. I’ve lost people before. I’ve never stopped losing people.

Why did it never feel like this?

Someone grips me by my hair and slaps me hard across the face. It stuns me, making me gasp. I can taste salt and snot on my lips. I laugh, and through blurry tears, I see the narrow-featured man. He slaps me again, harder, and then again as I laugh and laugh and cry, every part of me shattering.

“Crazy bitch,” he mutters, but he sounds hungry, like he likes it.

I spit blood onto the ground. It might be the first time I’ve spat since I was four.

But who the fuck cares now?

He yanks me back, dragging me by my hair to the bank. It hurts. It’sexcruciating, and I scream, twisting. It’s freeing, to let loose like that, and every part of my body screams with me. It reminds me of shattering plates and yelling at Beau, of how good that branding anger felt to be unchained.

I should have kissed him then. Kissed all of them. A thousand times, or maybe a million. It was only such a short time, but I could have kissed them more.

The narrow-featured man flips me onto my front in the dirt, then kicks me again as I cry out. He’s cursing me—to be quiet, I think.

A blurry face stares back at me, pressed into the earth beside me. She’s gagged, her red hair coated in filth; she gives me a fierce frown, and her eyes are full of messages I don’t care to understand right now.

I press mine closed and tears squeeze between my lids as I cry, letting him hurt me. I don’t care about that. I don’t care about her or about any of this.

Suddenly, in the dirt, I feel thin, strong fingers clutch mine, then cling hard. It anchors me, just a little, but it’s like trying to stop a sea tide with a life raft. It’s hardly enough to keep me afloat.

But I don’t let go.

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