Page 165 of Crave

Should.

The word hit harder than it should have.

I leaned back, heart pounding, my fingers curling into the fabric of my jeans. The silence between us stretched, heavy and taut.

“I don’t get it,” I murmured, mostly to myself. “Why split up?”

Gabe didn’t answer immediately. When he did, his voice was tight.“Because if they can hit us like that, we can’t risk staying together. We’re better spread out.”

“But that makes us easier to pick off.”

His jaw tightened. “Not if we move fast.”

We passed a row of shuttered shops, their windows covered in metal grates. The world outside felt abandoned. Like we were driving through the bones of a city already lost.

I looked down at my hands. The blood under my nails wasn’t mine, but it might as well have been.

“I didn’t see Penn,” I said suddenly. “At the end.”

Gabe looked at me then, really looked. His eyes were tired. Angry. But under that, something softer. Sadder.

“They took him and he messaged me. Did you know that?” I lifted my gaze meeting Gabe’s stare. “He messaged me days ago and I never responded. This is…” my pulse thundered in my ears. “This is all my fault.”

“No.” Gabe shook his head. “It’s not. You don’t need a fault. You carry the Ares name. That wasalwaysmore than enough.”

“But they took him, Gabe,” my throat tightened, choking the words. “Why him?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think it was about him at all.”

I swallowed hard. The car turned sharply, tires screeching as Marco took a side street. We were moving fast now, too fast. I could feel the tension ramping up again, the sense that we were being chased even if no one was there.

I glanced behind us. Empty road. Nothing.

And yet…

“Something doesn’t feel right,” I whispered.

Gabe didn’t argue. He just nodded once. “I know.”

Up ahead, the city fell away into a stretch of overgrown industrial land—forgotten buildings and cracked pavement swallowed by weeds. It looked empty. Dead. But so had the warehouse.

We were running.

But I still didn’t know if we were getting away.

We didn’t speak for the next five minutes. The silence in the car wasn’t just heavy—it was strangling. My gaze flicked between Marco’s eyes in the mirror and Gabe’s rigid profile beside me.

We were driving deeper into nowhere. The city had long since given way to industrial sprawl, and even that had bled out into long stretches of cracked concrete and rusted fencing. There was nothing here but silence and shadows.

And yet?—

My heart wouldn’t stop pounding.

“Something’s off,” I said.

Gabe looked over at me, a flash of surprise in his eyes like he hadn’t expected me to speak. But then it shifted, and I realized he’d been thinking the same thing.

“I know,” he said. “But we’re too exposed to change routes now.”