Page 11

Eden

Shoot first.

I’m yanked into hard arms, and the forest spins dizzily, shuddering with chaos all around us. My head is still whirling when I realize I’m on the ground with Dom crouching over me, his rifle drawn and ready. Beau is still in the open, his weapon up, and muffled shouts ring from all directions.

“What the hell was that?” Ava yells from somewhere ahead.

Katherine snaps, “Was that a bomb?”

Another boom sounds somewhere to our distant right, and Beau and Dom both swivel to face it. With shaking hands, I lift my glasses from where they’ve fallen around my neck and shove them on. Even then, I can’t see any immediate danger.

“Are you okay?” I push myself up between Dom’s legs, looking him over while my heart storms against my throat. He’s still smeared with sweat and dirt, but I can’t see a mark on him.

He glances down at me with an unreadable expression. “Still fine, pe— Eden.”

The hairs on the back of my neck prickle to life.

Beau looks back, urgent divots between his brows. “It’s Bristlebrook. Someone’s set off the tripwires.”

Bristlebrook? My heart stalls.

Jayk is at Bristlebrook.

Dom lowers the tip of his gun. “We need bodies over there now .”

Beau nods once, like they haven’t just been bickering like school children.

Up ahead, Sloane shouts for orders. Dom brings his whistle to his lips. It’s piercingly loud, and moments later there’s a crunchy rush of boots on dying leaves.

Suddenly, a rapid pelt of blistering gunshots echoes through the forest, and my breathing picks up. It has to be Jayk firing. He’s so quick to shoot. It’s almost certainly nothing. A deer skating too close to the property, maybe.

Beau’s eyes flick to me, and for the first time in days, they linger, clouded with worry. “Get up, darlin’, we need to move. No one fires like that unless they need backup.”

Dark and grim, Dom starts moving toward the trees. “Or unless they’re the problem.”

It’s not Jayk.

I scramble to my feet and chase after him, my stomach hitting my feet. Not again. For a moment, the trees are clogged with smoke, and I’m watching the barn glow black and orange.

Fear makes it hard to breathe. Not Jayk. I can’t. Not again.

A second round of shots explodes up ahead, thudding with my erratic heartbeat, and I’m fighting memories of Jayk’s barn being lost to flames when Lucky’s voice splits the air.

“ Eden ?”

I pull up hard, looking back frantically, but the rapid gunshots swallow the sound. I can’t tell where it came from, but he sounded raw . He’s on edge already; he can’t take much more.

I take a few steps back in the direction I last saw him, and Beau curses. “Lucky!”

“Eden? Eden, where are you? Fucking answer me!” Lucky’s fear tears me apart, even as more shots pump panic into the air.

Dom hesitates, his molten gaze torn between me and the echoing firefight. “Eden, move . He can handle himself.”

No. He can’t.

“ Lucky ?” I call again.

Beau stalks back to me and grasps me around my waist, but I shove off him, searching the greenery. It’s too loud. There’s movement everywhere. I just need them to stop and breathe, and I need to think , and?—

Suddenly the gunshots stop entirely.

The answering silence is thunderous.

Uneasy goosebumps shiver down my arms as the leaves fall too still around us, and Beau’s jaw squares worriedly.

“Lucien, perhaps we should listen to Dominic?—”

Tension rushes out me, and my heart lifts.

“Don’t even try me right now, Jasper. Get your weapon up and hit five o’clock,” Lucky snaps.

Is he closer? He sounds closer. Beau pulls me along again, but I still can’t see Lucky.

Our group starts appearing through the trees, and Dom’s screaming whistle spurs them to speed on at a ground-eating pace.

He shouts orders as they pass us, like ‘due west to Bristlebrook’ and ‘hold cover’ and ‘hang fire—only on command.’

I yank out of Beau’s grip again, straining for any flash of golden blond. “Lucky?”

“Eden?” There’s a sharp note of relief in his voice this time.

Lucky shoves through a copse a moment later, his eyes black with fear. When he sees me, he drops the nose of his gun into the dirt and bends at the waist to suck in air. “Fuck. Fuck .”

I rush over to him, and he drags me into a fierce hug.

“I couldn’t see you. You weren’t there, and?—”

“I know. I’m okay. They had me. We’re okay,” I whisper to him.

A cool hand squeezes my arm, and I glance up to see Jasper’s intense eyes.

“Eden, stay with Lucky. Lucky, bring up the rear—you have our six. Everyone else, move ,” Dom snaps.

They tear through the trees at speed, and Lucky lets me separate enough to jog in front of him. I don’t have a gun anymore, not since the Sinners dumped us outside of Cyanide with only a single weapon each, but my little knife is squeezed into my palm, and my demon is starting to wake.

If Jayk has so much as one scratch on him, I’m carving out eyeballs for my next soup.

My thoughts are a furious, fearful jumble, and I can’t make sense of any of it. It doesn’t make sense. We left the Sinners back in Cyanide. Alastair couldn’t be here so soon, and I’m not sure why he would be.

For a moment, I wonder if it’s Red Zone, as if my earlier thoughts summoned them, and they’re here already to demand a solution to the problem we made, but I shake the thought off as soon as it comes. There’s no way they could have arrived ahead of us, either.

So who the hell is attacking us?

Lucky starts to slow, whistling for us to follow suit. Jasper keeps close to my side, his face set and cold as winter.

Split, ravaged soil spills from the ground ahead of us. Trees are collapsed in haphazard heaps with blackened trunks and missing chunks, and round blast wounds scar the bark up ahead.

Arrows pepper the trees alongside them, and I squint in the dusk light.

Arrows mean Bristlebrook. Arrows mean the Valkyries are here.

“Stay low and keep behind cover where you can,” Lucky mutters.

Our group seems to be following that advice. Whether by instinct, instruction, or training, Jennifer and Sara are almost crawling up to a dense thicket. Ava is crouching behind a decaying, obliterated log, and Sloane is beside her. Katherine and Jo are rounding the far left, farther back.

Dom and Beau are only a few feet in front of us, arguing in low voices.

Dom breaks to gesture to Jennifer and Sara to.

.. go around the blast site? I’m not quite sure, and I only spare a moment to curse the fact I never advanced far enough in my training to learn their shorthand.

Jennifer did, though, and she and Sara change direction.

Dom looks at us and gestures sharply to Lucky. Lucky shakes his head, and Dom gestures again, his eyes blazing with more life than I’ve seen from him in a week.

“I have her, Lucien,” Jasper begins, and Lucky’s jaw hardens.

“I have both of you, right here. Safe .” He gives Jasper a fierce, cold look. That edginess is back in him, ground into something brittle and sharp. “I’m not going anywhere without you. He can go fuck himself.”

I glance at Dom, feeling his impatience, the frustration. “Lucky?—”

Lucky punctuates his speech by flipping Dom off, but his gaze is already back to anxiously tracking the trees around us.

Dom stares at the gesture, and I watch the fire inside him slowly suffocate. Then he nods to himself, his face draining again into that same stony calm.

“It’s okay, Eden,” Lucky whispers, as I try to work out why Dom’s expression unsettles me so much. “Just keep your head down for me, okay?”

Beau continues arguing. I can’t make out a word from here, but Dom doesn’t say another thing. His gaze drops to his gun. It doesn’t take long before Beau throws up his hands up with a disgusted scowl and...

Ice slams into my veins.

Beau is climbing on top of a thick, fallen oak, utterly exposed.

I push up from my hiding spot, but Jasper grasps me around my throat and yanks me back into his chest. In my ear, he murmurs, “I’m afraid you’re staying here, darling girl. I’ve grown rather fond of you.”

I’m sure he means it as a joke, but the implication that being exposed could mean death while Beau is doing a perfect impersonation of a human target outline is enough to stall my heart.

Beau glances down at Dom from his vantage, and I wait for Dom to make a move, to take over, but he.. . doesn’t. He’s still staring at his gun—grim, dark, and resolute. Waiting.

Beau gives him an impatient look, then swings his wary attention back to the trees. His grip on his rifle is loose, deceptively casual, as he calls, “I think you’d best introduce yourself, stranger.”

A bullet shreds the air, and I strangle a scream as it hits a tree high above his head, gouging a violent hole in the bark. Beau doesn’t flinch. Instead, he turns in the direction of the shot.

“What the hell is he doing?” I hiss.

“He’s pinpointing where they are,” Lucky says distractedly, edging up to peer in the direction of the bullet. “So the others can close in from behind.”

“Do they know to do that?” Jasper asks, and Lucky shoots him a guilty, stressed look before shifting forward, his rifle up.

My heart hammers in my chest. This is why Dom wanted Lucky to go—to cover Beau.

Instead, he’s here. Protecting me.

“Lucky . . .” I whisper shakily.

A rough, twangy voice chases the bullet before Lucky can respond.

“Well now, we got another country boy. You always welcome guests into your home with explosives? And arrows ?”

His accent is suffocatingly thick.

Snorts and whistles accompany the question, and my muscles tense into stones. Something is wrong here; this doesn’t feel like the Sinners.

In quick reply to the stranger’s complaint, an arrow slams into a tree somewhere near the voice. My heart leaps viciously. Yes!

Maybe our people don’t have military training, but they have brains.

“Identify yourselves, or those tripwires will be the least of your trouble,” Beau drawls back casually.