Page 106 of Burned

Bayne’s men fan out across the property, dark shapes moving fast against the paler dark of the rock, their breath torn away by the wind before it can even show. New York Bachmans will soon arrive to replace them. I’m relieved they can go—Bayne’s been away from his wife long enough, and his men must be ready to be home.

We stand to the side so Mack can get Cass and Ryan inside first, his body angled between them and the night to shield them from the wind. Lucian and I enter, and Blaze follows with one hand near his gun and a joke already dying on his tongue because that’s how exhausted we all are.

Isobel is brought in behind us. I notice because Lucian notices. Not openly.

Not with a look he would admit to.

But his shoulders tighten by half an inch, and that is the problem with loving Lucian Bachman. The man is made of tiny tells wrapped in terrifying control, and I have become far too fluent in both.

He wanted to ensure she was safe.

Honestly, would I want to be with a man who didn’t?

Inside, the wind disappears so completely it startles me. The glass here is triple-layered, I would guess, and thick enough that the storm becomes something you watch instead of something you survive—waves breaking against rock far below, soundless behind the pane, lit orange-black by floodlights bolted into the cliff. It should be peaceful. It is not. There are too many men moving about, bringing in supplies and weapons and securing every corner of the already impregnable fortress.

The entry floor is raw stone, bringing some of the outside in — slabs of black rock left rough and unfinished where they meet the wall, jagged in places, more sculpture than floor. I am tired in the specific, bone-deep way that comes after fear finally lets go of you, and my boot catches on a lip of stone I never see coming.

I go down hard, and some animal instinct throws my hand out to catch the fall before my body can.

It is not the floor that catches me.

It is a spur of raw basalt jutting up at the edge of the stone, sharp enough that whoever designed this room clearly never imagined anyone touching it. Pain opens across my palm, bright and immediate, and when I pull my hand back, there is blood, a lot of it, welling fast and dripping onto the black stone where it barely shows until it catches the light.

“Erin—”

Lucian is on the floor beside me before I have even registered that I fell, one hand cradling the back of my head like the groundmight still be coming for me, the other already closing around my wrist.

“Let me see it. Let me see it. Look at me. Let me see your hand?—”

“It’s fine. It’s just a cut?—”

“It is not fine.” His voice has dropped into something low and clipped, the register he uses right before he becomes genuinely frightening. He turns my hand over with a gentleness that does not match the tension in every other part of him, and the sight of the blood seems to cost him something physical. “Someone get a cloth.

Now. Bayne?—”

“Lucian. It’s fine.”

“On it,” Bayne says, already moving.

“Damnit, what was the designer thinking? I’ll have their head,” Lucian hisses.

“I tripped, Lucian. It happens.”

“Not to you.” He takes off his coat, pressing the sleeve against my palm, his jaw tight enough to crack. He is not looking at the cut anymore. He is looking at me like I nearly disappeared.

I glance past his shoulder without meaning to.

Isobel is standing near the wall, an Icelandic statue of a Norse goddess, watching the two of us with an expression I do not have a word for. Not jealousy. Something sadder than that. Something that looks like memory.

And it lands on me, unwelcome and immediate — this is not new.

This exact posture, this exact voice, the diehard protection, the misplaced anger because he’s so fearful you’ll break…

He’s been like this before. For her. Probably more than once.

I hate how much pain that thought brings.

She is still in love with him. You can read it on her face. Not that we need to.