Page 106 of Wraith

I’m already moving, pushing past Mayhem, past the body on the floor that used to be Hawk. “Wraith! Dylan!”

Nothing.

“Dylan!” My voice cracks. Breaks. “Please answer me!”

Then, so faint I almost miss it: “June?”

Weak. Barely there. But alive.

I follow the sound like a lifeline, through the kitchen where bullet holes have turned the cabinets into Swiss cheese, down a hallway where family photos smile from frames that are now dusted with plaster and blood. The bedroom door is half-open.

I push through.

And stop.

Freeze.

My stomach twists and my heart drops. The amount of blood shouldn’t be possible. It pools on the hardwood floor, spreads in tributaries along the cracks between boards, soaks into the rug near the bed. In the center, barely recognizable as human, is Wraith. His face is hamburger. One eye swollen completely shut, the other a slit that finds me as I stand frozen in the doorway. His shirt is gone, his chest a canvas of bruises and cuts and things I won’t identify. One arm bends at an angle that arms shouldn’t bend. When he breathes, something in his chest rattles and gurgles.

“Bishop!” The scream tears out of me. “Bishop, get in here! He needs a doctor! NOW!”

Then I’m moving, dropping to my knees beside him, my hands hovering over his body, wanting to touch him, to comfort him, but unable to because I don’t know where I can touch without causing more damage. Tears blur my vision. They drip steadily from me, mingling with his blood. My hands shake so hard I can barely function.

“Dylan,” I whisper. “Dylan, stay with me. Bishop’s coming. You’re going to be okay. Just stay with me.”

His working eye focuses on my face. His lips, split and bleeding, try to form words.

I lean closer, my hand finally settling on his chest where his heartbeat flutters like a dying bird.

Fear and worry flood my chest, drowning everything else — the anger, the betrayal, the hurt. Right now, in this moment, all I can feel is terror that I’m going to lose him before I get the chance to decide whether I can forgive him.

“Please, Dylan. Please don’t die.”

Chapter Forty-Five

Wraith

The world comes back in jagged pieces.

First there’s pain, then sound — too loud — and then the pressure of hands on my chest. Someone’s crying. The sound is familiar, cuts through the ringing in my ears and the wet rattle in my lungs. June. That’s June’s voice, June’s crying, raw and broken, calling my name between sobs. I try to open my eyes, but only one responds, the other stays sealed shut by swelling and blood. Through the narrow slit of vision, I see her face above me, streaked with tears and terror, and the first coherent thought I can manage is that she shouldn’t be here.

She should have left me.

She should have let me rot.

I don’t deserve her.

Everything hurts. It is a deep, consuming pain. Like every cell in my body has been systematically destroyed and what’s left is just meat and bone held together by stubbornness. My ribs grind against each other when I try to breathe. Something in my chest bubbles and wheezes. The taste in my mouth is copper and salt and the ghost of my vomit.

But June is here.

She came for me.

There’s a gun on the floor next to her.

She didn’t just come; she fought for me, risked her life for me.

The realization hits harder than any of Midnight’s fists. She’s kneeling in my blood, her hands hovering over me as if she wants to touch but doesn’t know where it’s safe. Her face is so close I can see the amber flecks in her eyes, can smell the fear-sweat on her skin mixed with something floral from her shampoo. She’s wearing different clothes than when I left her. Someone got her out of that motel room. Someone freed her from the restraints I put her in.