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Sentinel gives me a small smile. “Sure looks that way.” My breath catches. “He’s never had someone look at him the way you do, Echo.” Sentinel’s voice drops, stripped down to something plain and unguarded, brother speaking for brother because his brother physically cannot. “Like he’s not something to survive. Like he’s not a headline waiting to happen. I’ve watched that man walk through fire, literal fire, without his pulse moving an inch, and the first time you smiled at him across that kitchen table, I watched his entire chest stutter like his heart forgot how the job worked.”
Heat rushes up my throat, and I have to look away toward the half-stripped engine because if I keep meeting his eyes, I’m going to do something embarrassing, like cry in a garage that smells like motor oil.
“Don’t waste it,” Sentinel says.
Three words, quiet enough that the garage swallows half of them, but I feel every one.
“I won’t,” I tell him, and I mean it with a certainty that surprises me, settling into my bones like something finally finding its rightful place.
Sentinel studies me a long moment, and then the corner of his mouth finally tips back into that familiar, easy tilt. “Good.” He picks the wrench back up, already turning toward the bike like the last five minutes never cracked him open at all. “Because I really don’t want to be the one explaining to Raze why the hellhound started howling again for entirely different reasons.”
A laugh punches out of me before I can stop it, and for the first time since I walked into this garage, the knot in my chest loosens just enough to breathe around.
Somewhere down the hall, Carnage is still asleep in the wreckage we made last night, probably sprawled across that mattress like destroying half a room with me was nothing worth losing sleep over.
Except now I know more about the man lying in that bed.
Rhett. The hellhound who refused to be Hell’s weapon. The stubborn bastard who made Raze come back for three fucking weeks before he finally accepted a beer. The man who found a brother in an angel when neither of them should have worked, then found a family in the Kings when he’d spent most of his life expecting everyone to want something from him.
And somehow, he’s letting me see him too.
Not all at once. Not with some big-fucking-declaration neither of us is ready to make. He gives me pieces, sometimes without realizing he’s doing it, and apparently, I’ve been memorizing every single one.
I came into this garage trying to understand why the thought of leaving suddenly feels so fucking hard.
Now I know.
I’m done pretending I don’t know exactly who I’m falling for.
Chapter Eighteen
CARNAGE
Three Days Later
Scar, Coil, and Thorn got back from Savannah this morning with fuck all to show for the trip.
Well, not fuck all.
They confirmed the phoenix was real. They found enough buried records to prove Malgrave took her fire almost three hundred years ago, and nobody has seen so much as a spark of it since. She was immortal while that fire burned inside her. Without it, she wasn’t. She lived for years afterward, getting weaker as time caught up with a body that had never been built to die, until eventually, it did.
That part has been sitting like shit in my gut since Scar told us.
Malgrave didn’t just steal power from people. He took pieces of them they couldn’t survive without.
The rest of the trail is dead. No record of where the phoenix fire went. Nothing showing what Malgrave did with it after he took it. Scar couldn’t even figure out how Malgrave collected the shit he stole, because apparently Hellwardens don’t leave handy-fucking-instruction manuals behind.
Which leaves us with the question I can’t stop chewing on.
Who the fuck is he collecting it all for?
Three hundred years ago, he took a phoenix’s fire and left her mortal. A few days ago, he put his hand around my throat and took every sound I had.
And he’s still out there.
Still collecting.
Still ripping pieces out of supernatural beings and disappearing with them.
