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But Everly was the same woman who had jumped in a car and driven all the way to Alaska to find a boy she’d once known who was supposed to have turned into a warrior. She could stand tall. If she wasn’t going to live to see the sun go down, she could do the next best thing.
She could go out the way he would have if he’d had a choice.
Because she’d just discovered that on the other side of terror, when there was no time for grief, there was something else. It was tough and it was hard. It felt impervious to anything and everything—the aches and pains in her body, the anguish sitting heavy on her chest, every step she took with this gorilla wrenching her arm.
She couldn’tquitefeel it. And that was just numb enough.
Everly had a confused sense of big rooms as she was marched through the house, lined in marble with dramatic chandeliers. There were portraits on almost every wall, every single one of them featuring Annabeth in a different pose. At any other time, it might have creeped her out, but she had other things to worry about, like her swiftly approaching death.
She concentrated on the stone inside her, granite and dark and blessedly numbing. She didn’t try to move it.
She tried to become it.
The man at her side dragged her into a room on the ground floor. It boasted lovely French doors that opened to a terrace set high above the backyard, but before she could try to see if she could spot Blue in that pool, he shoved her forward.
So hard and abrupt that she tripped over her own feet and landed on her knees.
She caught herself on her hands, thinking it was too much like that memory. Her palms stung. Her knees felt stiff through her jeans, like they were roughed up, too.
“The boyfriend’s dead,” the man was saying.
“About time.”
Everly looked up. Annabeth was lounging on an ornate chair, a pot of pungent tea at her elbow and a small plate with a selection of berries fanned out across it. She was eating the berries with a sharp cocktail fork, one by one.
Blue was in that pool, and this psycho was eating berries.
The unfairness nearly tipped Everly over.
But if he was gone, if he was really and truly gone, Everly couldn’t break down now.
He wouldn’t want that.
Blue had taught her how to fight, and that’s what she would do.
Using whatever weapons she could.
For as long as she could.
“You can stay right there,” Annabeth said, her cold blue gaze on Everly. The goon who’d manhandled Everly in from the backyard went to stand beside Annabeth’schair, facing Everly with the sort of blank stare that made her knees feel wobbly.
So it was a good thing she wasn’t standing up.
Everly shifted her weight so she could sit back on her heels and look her death in the face.
“Why?”
“Why can you stay where you are?” Annabeth pursed her full lips, then popped another berry between them with that sharp little fork. “Because you’re vermin. And I don’t like vermin on my furniture. Everything in this house is perfect. And mine.”
She sounded completely at her ease. Almost bored, in fact, which made it even scarier that there was a thick-necked man standing beside her, still holding on to his gun.
“You killed your own daughter, didn’t you?” Everly asked, and was distantly amazed that she kept her voice so calm. But then, she was nothing but stone inside. It helped. “Why would you do that?”
Annabeth blinked. “Are you trying to make this about you? Don’t bother. All you are to me is more collateral damage.”
“I don’t get it,” Everly said, because she had nothing to fight with here but this.Time.If she could keep Annabeth talking, maybe something else would come to her. “Is it because she was younger? Prettier? What?”
She didn’t know which of those hit the mark, but something did. Annabeth dropped her cocktail fork against her plate with a loudclink.