Page 168 of Entangled

“I’ll shower you myself, if necessary.”

My eyes cut to Jasper as he appears in my door, leaning against the frame with studied elegance. I point to him, exasperated. “You, control your subbie.”

Jasper arches one cool brow at me, then looks Heather over. A small, vicious smile lights his lips as his gaze lingers on her blue hair. He spreads his hands. “Heisa brat. Alas. WhatamI to do?”

For fuck’s sake.

Heather glares at them, but at least she’s stopped trying to attack Lucky.

My headache returns with a vengeance. Funny enough, it seems to come back every time these three are in proximity.

“Are you here for a reason?” I ask him tiredly. Five days of hard labor to get Bristlebrook in shape after two weeks of relentless foot travel will do that.

Jasper nods. “It appears Jaykob has the last camera we agreed upon online. He and the others should be back here in about two days. They looked well.”

“Good.” I rub a hand over my head. That’s one less thing to worry about at least.

“Two days?” Lucky glances around at us, and the light fades from his blue eyes. “That’s the anniversary of Day Death. It’s been five years.”

We all fall still.

Day Death.

The night of the strikes was the worst night of my life. Not that I’m special—it was the worst night of most people’s lives.

The guys and I were all at Darkside, the kink club we used to frequent. All of us... except for Beau, who was out of town visiting his family.

That night, I was on monitoring duty—I was watching over a primal hunt in the gardens while everything went down. When the hunt was done, I came back in to a nightmare. The usually dim club was lit up in fluorescents and the emergency broadcast was blaring over the speakers, reciting every city and town and military base that had been hit by the initial ICBMs.

That list included Beau’s hometown.

For a full ten minutes, I thought my whole life was over. We were getting dozens of messages from my father, Colonel Slade, to return to base, the civilians at the club were in hysterics, Jasper and Lucky were trying to call their families—and I couldn’t focus on any of it.

Not until Beau just waltzed his oblivious ass right into the club.

By pure fucking luck, he’d left home early that morning and drove through the day to get back to town, listening to some stupid-ass unsolved mysteries podcast so intently that he hadn’t turned on his goddamned radio.

My soul left my body when I realized he was okay.

And part of his died when he realized his family wasn’t.

The rest of that night is a blur of fighting and fire and returning to base only to find it already destroyed... the Colonel and my mother with it.

I try not to think about it—the whole thing was a shit storm anyway—but every year on the anniversary of Day Death, we always do something.

I didn’t realize it had come up so fast.

Lucky swallows hard. He shifts toward Jasper, then hesitates, glancing at him.

Jasper gives him a look under his lashes, and Lucky relaxes. Jasper hooks a finger in his belt loop and draws him close.

“We should hold a bond-fire,” Lucky suggests as he settles in.

Bond-fire?

“You mean a bonfire?” I give Lucky a flat look. “Don’t you think we have enough to do without adding a party to it?”

“That’s exactly why we should do it,” Lucky argues, and the red creeps up his cheeks as Jasper keeps watching him in that same heavy-lidded way. “Everyone needs to blow off some steam. Things are too tense. We should shake it up—give them something tobondover, beyond all the shitty memories. And I don’t know a quicker way to bond people than drunken fireside shenanigans. So, abond-fire.”

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