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But she couldn’t go there.

Jonas didn’t reach for her. He didn’t wrap his arms around her, put his chin on the top of her head, or do any of the things he had done what felt like a lifetime ago in her cabin. And still, the way he looked at her, that pressure on her throat eased. She managed a decent breath.

“We have a situation,” he said into his comm unit, his eyes still on her. “Bethan and I have been potentially exposed to SuperThrax. We’re going to need a containment unit, medical personnel, and if I’m making a wish list, an antidote.”

There was a long silence. Not unlike the one that had followed the explosion earlier.

Bethan refused to let herself think about that. She couldn’t afford it. Not now.

“On it,” Blue said eventually, his voice forbidding.

Bethan knew that if she stayed where she was, looking at Jonas like this, she would do something they would both regret. Right here in this sterile death lab where Dominic Kerrigone, or whoever he was, was clearly watching their every move. But this was no place for emotion, so instead, she went over to the door to see if it had sealed them in when it shut. She studied the latching mechanism as best she could but didn’t pull the door open, because there was no need to expose everyone else in the house.

“I don’t think we’re actually locked in here,” she told Jonas. “But I don’t want to take the risk.”

“Understood.”

For another moment, their eyes seemed to catch. Bethan could feel her heart speeding up, that grip at her throat, but she knew there was no point in acknowledging it. Anything she said would only make this worse.

“Okay,” Jonas gritted out, his dark gaze flashing. “Let’s see if we can find anything in here, since we’re not going anywhere.”

A task was good.

They each took a separate side of the lab space and explored. They opened drawers, rifled through notes. Looked for anything and everything that might give them a clue as to what had gone on here.

While they were at it, they disabled the monitoring system. And once that was done, Jonas picked up a wastebasket from under a desk and shook out a few balled-up pieces of paper. He spread them out on one of the lab tables between them, ironing out the crinkles in the paper with his big hands, forcing Bethan to remind herself that the point was the paper and what was written on it. Not his hands.

She ordered herself to focus. One looked like some sort of scientific equation. The next was an address in New York City. The third was a little bit of doodling. The longer Bethan stared at the curly little doodles, the more she thought that they were actually numbers. She reached over and traced them with her finger, and Jonas’s gaze sharpened as he took pictures of each of the three papers and sent them to Oz.

“Threes,” he said.

“Could be a clue.” Bethan traced one of the bigger ones. “Or it could be a doodle.”

“A containment unit is mobilized,” Blue said into the comm unit in a brisk, furious voice that was almost as bad as something sentimental. “ETA is forty-five minutes or less.”

“Let’s hope for less,” Jonas replied.

Bethan didn’t expect an immediate response from Oz, not with so much else going on. But that left the two of them, standing here. Locked in this room. Maybe already halfway dead, though she still felt fine. She took another breath, to test it.

Nothing was happening. Nothing was wrong, yet, and still she felt as if she were being squeezed too tight to breathe.

Because she wasn’t sure SuperThrax was something she could fight off. She couldn’t shoot it. She couldn’t disarm it. She couldn’t strike it in the face and bring it to the ground. She wouldn’t have let herself think such a thing before the explosion, but it was possible she was really done this time.

“Jonas,” she said very quietly. “Everything is terrible. But I want you to know—”

There was a loud, shocking noise.

It took her a panicked moment to realize that it had come from him. That Jonas Crow had pounded his fist into the lab table between them.

“Don’t,” he belted out, a harsh one-word command.

“I only want—”

“I have spent my entire life more than ready to die,” Jonas told her, not raising his voice. But then, he didn’t have to raise it. Not when it seemed to fill the room. “I signed up for it. I courted it. And I would have been perfectly happy to go at any time. But not now.” His gaze was so dark it made her heart kick at her. “In three days you can tell me anything you want, Bethan. But not here. Not now.”

And Bethan thought that her sister and all her sister’s friends, or her mother for that matter, might not appreciate those words. They might not understand them for what they were.

But she did.