Page 266 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

And we have so many people we’re sharing that life with.

My attention skims over the framed photographs set along the mantle: the six of us with Nadia at her high school graduation and another when she finished her college degree, with Ajax and Devon at their graduations, with a bunch of the younger shadowbloods as well as Pearl and Billy on a trip to Greece, all of us cheering on Pearl and Toni at their wedding, and later giving victory Vs in front of the newly redesigned Quinn Moody Academy for the Shadowkind.

The last of those brings me back to Rollick’s house and the pale-faced woman Dominic tried to heal a few days ago. I swallow hard.

My gaze returns to the photo from the wedding. I pick it up, studying Pearl’s wide grin and Toni’s more reserved but no less genuine smile as they gaze into each other’s eyes.

Do they ever worry if they’re holding on tightly enough? In that moment, they look like they’ve never had a doubt about how they’re living their lives.

I feel Griffin’s presence before he reaches me. His gentle warmth washes across my back as he sets one hand on my waist. “What are you thinking about?”

“I don’t know,” I say automatically.

We both realize that’s a cop-out.

He tucks his head next to mine from behind. “You’ve been spending more time with the rest of us than usual in the past couple of days. Catching up on everything we’ve been doing. But there’s an impression I keep getting that you’re looking for something and you haven’t found it yet.”

A lump rises in my throat. I set the photo back on the mantle and lean into his embrace, wishing it was enough to melt all my anxieties away.

“Seeing Quinn—seeing how upset Rollick was about the possibility of her health deteriorating—it got to me,” I admit. “If I had to lose any of you…”

Griffin pulls me even closer. “We’re out of danger now. Nothing’s going to happen to us.”

“We don’t know for sure there won’t be something else. New people wanting to control us. Our weird genetics acting up as we get older. Anything. I just…” I exhale sharply. “It all feels precarious, and I don’t know how to fix that.”

Griffin hums, the sound reverberating from him into me alongside a caress of soothing emotion. “Let me think about it. Maybe we can come up with something. You can always count on us to be right here with you.”

For more than a week, none of the guys mentions the anxieties I’m grappling with. I act as normal as I can, going back to my regular routine, pretending the uncertainties aren’t still nibbling at my gut.

Possibly they each hug me a little tighter than usual, kiss me a little more soundly, make a point of complimenting me more often—but that might just be my imagination. It’s not as if I measured their affection before or there was ever any shortage of it.

On a Saturday morning, Dominic comes into my bedroom with an unusually buoyant air. As I stretch off the dredges of sleep, he steals a quick kiss and then grins at me. “We’re going on a trip.”

I blink into sharper alertness. “What? When? Where are we going?”

“Right now, and it’s a surprise. Get dressed, something it makes you happy to wear. We’re taking care of the rest.”

Curiosity itches at me while I peruse my closet.

It sounded like this was more of a date sort of thing than a work thing or a saving the world thing.

I pick out a casual knee-length dress in green cotton that always leaves me smiling and not self-conscious when I glance in the mirror.

Then I slip on a pair of ballet flats and head out.

The guys have all dressed up a little too, confirming my suspicions. They haven’t gone full tux like when Andreas arranged his fancy party for me years ago, but even Zian has a collared shirt on and his short, spiky hair tamed with gel.

“You’re not even going to give me a hint?” I ask.

“That’d ruin the fun,” Andreas says in the cajoling tone I can never say no to. “Just come with us, Tink! It’s a bit of a trek, but we promise it’ll be totally worth it.”

He isn’t lying about the trek part. The taxi takes us to the usual private airfield, where a jet one of the guys must have talked Rollick into lending carries us for a couple of hours across the country.

The guys put a new rom-com I’ve secretly been wanting to watch on the cabin’s screen and lay out all my favorite snacks along with a bunch of their own.

When I make more attempts to pry about where we’re headed, they always manage to change the subject.

So after a few tries, I sit back in the cushy seat and enjoy my chips and flick.

Once the plane has touched down, the atmosphere in the jet shifts. Dominic takes my hand, and Jacob comes up at my other side to rest his fingers on the small of my back.

Griffin catches my gaze with an unusual intensity in his eyes. “This is going to seem a little strange at first, but it’ll all make sense soon. Do you trust us?”

Does he really need to ask?

“Always,” I say automatically.

When we step outside, the reason for the question becomes clear. The forest around the air strip sends a prickle of instinctive apprehension through my nerves. The trees, the scents drifting through the air—they’re uncomfortably familiar.

It feels almost like…

I can’t bring myself to focus on that thought to its conclusion. But as the guys lead me along an overgrown path through the brush, my heart keeps thumping faster.

When I spot the metal fence through a gap in the trees, my legs stall in their tracks. “Why are we here ?”

Dom squeezes my hand. None of the guys argue, so I must be right.

We’re back at the facility—the first one I really remember, the one where we spent almost all of our years in captivity together. Where the guardians forced us into tests and experiments that stretched our bodies and powers to their uncomfortable limits.

The one we tried to escape from twice: the first time ending in failure and Griffin’s apparent death, the second a success except for the venom my guys aimed at me afterward.

We haven’t been back here since our confrontation with the rogue shadowbloods several years ago. At least, I haven’t.

“It’s where we started,” Andreas says in a low voice. “Where we grew up together. Where we fell in love for the first time. There are a lot of good memories from those days mixed in with the bad, aren’t there?”

“Yeah, but we can remember them without being here.”

Zian ducks his head, looking so adorably awkward that the pressure on my lungs eases a little. “We wanted to make this as meaningful as possible.”

I drag in a breath. “Make what meaningful?”

Jacob tips his face toward mine, his nose grazing my temple. “Come with us, and you’ll find out. There’s nothing that can hurt any of us here now, Wildcat.”

Girding myself, I push onward between them.

It only takes a few more steps before the gate comes into view—wide open and draped with flowers. My jaw goes slack, letting a thicker waft of the rosy perfume fill my lungs. “What...?”

Andreas’s sly smile comes back. “You’ll see.”

We walk together through the gates and along a strip of silk that’s been laid out all the way to the burnt shell of the old ground-level building. Sorsha consumed most of the structure in her phoenix-fire, but somehow the charred ruin looks almost… beautiful.

More roses and other flowers dapple the grass on either side of our pathway and hang from nooks in the broken walls.

Past the doorway where the door fell from melted hinges, more silk covers the warped floor tiles, sprinkled with so many rose petals you could stuff a pillow with them.

Candles in fancy sticks glow all around the edges of the scorched room.

Someone must have stopped by a little ahead of us to make the final preparations.

Dominic twines his fingers with mine. “We know how much you enjoy a dramatic scene. Does this fit the bill well enough?”

Like something out of my soap opera—except with a very unusual slant. No genetic engineering labs in the fictional storylines I’m used to.

A laugh spills out of me, slightly choked. “It’s… It’s kind of amazing. But you didn’t have to go to this much trouble just to make an extra-romantic date.”

Griffin’s voice turns even softer than usual.

“It’s more than that. Moonbeam, you know we’ve been devoted to you our entire lives, as far back as any of us can remember.

I know all of us would have given anything to stay by your side every minute of every day, since all the way back in those early days here, even if no one was brave enough to talk about it. ”

His twin makes a slightly disgruntled sound, but when Jacob speaks, his tone is equally gentle, if a little raw.

“There was a lot of awfulness about how we got started—both times. But we’ve taken the awfulness and made something amazing out of it, just like we did with this place.

No matter how hard the guardians and their bosses tried to beat us down, we fought through it to carve our own way. To live the lives we wanted. With you.”

Andreas picks up the thread next. “Out of all the stories I’ve written and the ones still to come, there isn’t any I’d rather be living than this one. There aren’t any memories I treasure more than the ones with you. I’d take the painful parts a thousand times over to keep the joy.”

Zian clears his throat, his posture still awkward but his gaze steady.

“They made us into something that wasn’t totally human.

You let me see that because of that, I could do more good instead of dealing out more hurt.

Every moment you’re around, my day gets brighter. That’s all I want for my future.”