Page 4 of Ruin

She shook her head. “You have to. I just found you and figured out what I’m supposed to be doing, and I can’t keep doing that if you don’t survive. Come home to me, Knight. Promise that you will.”

I shook my head, trying to keep up with the rapid jumps in her thoughts, and opened my mouth to reply... but found that I didn’t have any words.

She wanted to hear something that I couldn’t say. She’d asked for the one thing that I couldn’t give her, and no matter how badly I wanted to tell her that everything was going to be okay, I knew that I couldn’t.

I wasn’t going to lie to her.

Saraya watched me for a moment and seemed to realize that I wasn’t going to answer her, because instead of asking for anything else, she got off her bike and came to mine, sliding into my lap and wrapping her arms around my neck.

The kiss was soft. Gentle. Almost sad. And it drove right down into my bones and settled there, like some sort of armor.

When she drew back, her eyes were sad as well. “Promise me that you’ll come home,” she whispered.

And heaven help me, I promised, because I couldn’t bear the thought of not coming back to her.

CHAPTER 3

SARAYA

I WATCHED THE MEN MOUNT their bikes, Mandy on the back of Knight’s, and start their engines. Knight looked back and met my eyes, and then gave me a slow wink, like this was all just a colossal prank.

Of course the things he’d said to me in the garage not too long ago told me that he was lying. He was worried that he was going to die, and I knew, somewhere in my mind, that he might be right. This wasn’t just a jaunt across the countryside. This was them going right into Devil’s territory and making themselves targets.

I might never see him again.

As the group started to pull out onto the road, I leaned on the railing of the clubhouse’s porch, my knees weak and my stomach roiling. Those men, who had somehow come to mean so much to me over the past couple of days, were going to war, and it was my fault. Going to try to draw Devil out so they could kill him... because Knight had said that he wouldn’t give me up.

I hated the thought that they were going there—putting their lives and their bodies at risk—because of me.

“Because of Devil,” I reminded myself. It was his fault they were going, because he’d thought he could abuse me when I was with him, and now that I’d escaped, he thought he could demand to have me back. He thought I’d just come marching along like I didn’t have anything better to do, and like I actually agreed with his demands.

He was in the wrong here, not me. He was the one who’d broken so many rules.

But if Knight hadn’t decided to protect me from Devil, his men wouldn’t be putting themselves on the line right now. Knight himself wouldn’t have tried to tell me goodbye himself, convinced that he might die.

The situation might be Devil’s fault, but the Banshees were risking their lives because of me, because Knight had grown attached to me.

I watched the man in question check with Mandy to make sure she was secure, then cast another glance in my direction. I lifted one hand and put it to my lips, blowing him the kiss that I wished I could give him. Shit, if I’d had the choice, I would have wrapped my arms around him and kept him here, refused to let him go. I couldn’t stand the thought of him putting himself in harm’s way. Didn’t even want to consider that he might not come back.

I couldn’t stand it if he didn’t.

The problem was it had occurred to me an hour ago that this entire plan might be a bad idea. Sure, Knight hadn’t wanted me to go to Devil and turn myself in, and this was a direct response to that, but something about the whole thing made me edgy. Devil calling me to him like he did, when he must have known that Knight wouldn’t allow me to go. Him setting this meeting in the middle of the night when it would be impossible for the Banshees to see what was going on. The idea that they were going right into his compound, where he was strongest.

Something about it didn’t feel right. I mean, a lot of things about it didn’t feel right, and that was the problem. I’d been with Devil for long enough to get to know his brain, and this felt like a trick. He’d known Knight when they were younger, and though Knight might have grown up since then, Devil still knew the man he was, deep down. He knew how Knight’s brain worked.

He had to know that Knight would take this opportunity to strike at Devil and his men rather than turning me over.

And hell, what if the whole thing was a trap? Some insane situation set up just to lure Knight there with his crew, onto enemy turf and without any backup? With Devil himself as the bait?

A prize that Knight couldn’t pass up. A challenge that he’d never ignore—and a chance to demonstrate to Devil once and for all that I now belonged to him.

It made so much sense that the moment I thought of it, the moment I fleshed it out, I knew it was true. But when I took it to Gemini, thinking he might be the best voice of reason in the entire building, he’d scoffed at me.

“Knight knows what he’s doing, girl, and it’s not your place to question him,” he told me gruffly. He turned away a moment later, writing me off as nothing more than a silly girl who didn’t know what she was talking about.

Which was how he’d been treating me ever since I arrived.

Instead of making me feel ashamed of the thought, though, his actions had brought my pride to the forefront and made me furious. I’d gone right out to the garage, intent on telling Knight what I was thinking, and found him looking like his mother had just died. When he tried to tell me that he might not last the night, I got so distracted with not accepting it that I forgot to tell him what I suspected Devil was doing.