Page 56 of Gravehouse

I don’t snap. I don’t argue. Especially not with them.

Jord’s eyes glass over, but he stays quiet because he knows the same thing I do. There’s nothing worth fighting over.

Daniel steps forward from the shadows, hands loose and ready at his sides. “We have to remember protocol.”

He dangles a set of keys from his jacket, placing them on the table. “There’s a car waiting through the clearing on the other side of the cellar. Black sedan.”

Luce lifts her chin, doing her best to mask the pain. “Route?”

“Punk drives.” Daniel’s eyes find Punk on the windowsill. “Straight to the airstrip. No stops, no detours, nonothinguntil you’re wheels up.”

She slides off the sill, catching the keys Daniel tosses without looking. Her fingers close around them. “And you?”

“I stay.” Daniel’s gaze sweeps the room, landing on each of us in turn. “I’ll handle the house and await contact.”

Handle the house means handle Nonna. Means clean the blood off tiles. Means erase every trace of what happened here tonight so that when the sun comes up, this place looks like nothing more than a neglected Château. Means ensuring Nonna is buried with her family.

Means this is it.

My stomach drops.

“Let’s move.” I push off the table, heading for the cellar door.

Jord grabs a bag from behind the trunk, and Luce rises without a sound. Leon falls into step beside me, close enough that his shoulder brushes mine.

Punk pushes through the heavy door at the far end of the cellar, and we all file out through the back door.

I pause when I reach the edge of trees, turning to take one last look at the house. Yellow light spills from the kitchen window where Nonna taught me to make her grandmother’s cassoulet. Where she bandaged my split knuckles after Emeric’s training sessions left me bleeding out with a bruised ego. Where she held me the night I came back from my first kill and couldn’t stop shaking.

Luce touches my elbow. “We have to move.”

I nod, swallowing the questions and launching forward.

We cut through the first scatter of trees, nearing the old well shaped by stone.

Fresh blood glistens at its base, and I slow to a walk, following the trail. Too much to be from an animal, wrong color for deer. Drag marks lead from the pool into the undergrowth, heading east.

Away from the house.

My pulse picks up.

Asher was outside for twenty minutes after the shooting, checking the perimeter with Sinead and Daniel.

He said they were gone. If he killed him himself, why lie?

“Ivy?” Leon stops on the trail ahead, half-turning back to me. “You coming?”

I step over the blood. “Yeah.”

Punk’s already visible near the clearing where headlights cut through the dark. If I mentioned what I found, how would it play out with everyone right now?

Luce would want to investigate. Pull samples, run analysis, build a timeline that would eat up hours we don’t have. Leonwould insist we confront Asher directly. Punk would spiral into theories, each one darker than the last, connecting dots that may not exist until the paranoia triggers her back onto her meds.

And Jord... Jord is barely holding himself together. One more fracture and he breaks in a waynoneof us can fix.

I tell them nothing.

Asher lied to my face. Looked me in the eyes, held me in the shower, put me to bed, and lied.