Page 19 of The Castle (Endgame 3)
The truth is I’m not ever really alone.Chapter Eight“Avery!” The shaking jolts me back to reality, to the dark interior of the limo, to the swerving motion of the vehicle, usually so smooth. To Gabriel’s fierce golden eyes. “Are you hurt?”
I swallow past the lump in my throat, struggling to get myself under control. “Is Candy okay?”
“She’s fine,” he mutters, but his attention is on his hands. He runs them over my arms, down my body, my legs. He’s touched me a hundred times, but never like this—impersonal, efficient. Like he’s trying to find an injury.
“I’m fine,” I tell him. “Not hurt.”
His eyes glow with a ferocity that seems otherworldly. “Where did you go?”
He doesn’t mean physically. I went somewhere in my mind, someplace dark. A memory? A dream. “I think…I don’t know. I went into shock or something.”
“I’m taking you to the hospital.” He drops his fist onto a panel of buttons. “Ben. St. Mary’s.”
The thought of being tied down with tubes makes me cringe. I still remember the smell of disinfectant from taking care of my father for months. “No. Please. I promise I’m okay.”
His nostrils flare. “Avery.”
I press my forehead to his, the way he did in the restaurant. “I’m fine. I’m one hundred percent fine.”
“You scared me,” he admits gruffly. “I thought you’d been hit.”
My hands run over him without thought, driven by the same instinct that made him examine me. “Are you hurt? Do you need the hospital? Gabriel!”
He grunts when my fingers brush over something wet on his neck. “It’s nothing. A graze.”
“A graze from a bullet? Oh my God.”
He presses the button on the door again. “The Den.”
“No! You were going to take me to a hospital, but not yourself?”
“There’s supplies there. Not that I need much for a scratch.”
I hold my fingers up to the flicker from the streetlights passing by. Red flashes under each glare, turning dark and inky when we reach downtown Tanglewood.
An inch. That’s all that separates life from death. The only reason he’s alive.
“What happened?” I ask softly.
I can’t shake the dreamlike feeling from when I was on the floor, huddled beneath the dinner table like it was my mother’s vanity. Even before that, walking the halls of Gabriel’s mansion like it was a place that exists only in my mind. The only thing that grounds me is the hard, heated body beneath me. He’s holding me in his lap, his grip strong enough that I don’t think he’ll let me go anytime soon.
“We’re still figuring it out,” he says, clearly furious. “He got the drop on an ex-SEAL on the left side of the building.”
My stomach clenches. “Is he—” Dead?
“Unconscious.”
I shake my head, uncomprehending. “Are you sure this was Jonathan Scott? There were a lot of important people there. A lot of people with enemies. Someone else could have been the target. And how would he be able to knock out someone trained like that?”
“He could have had hired help, but he likes to get his hands dirty.”
“I don’t understand.”
Gabriel sits for a moment, the secrets almost tangible in the air. “Jonathan Scott—he’s not really a man. Not an animal, either. That’s what makes him so hard to pin down. He’s like a shadow.”
“You make him sound supernatural.”
“Most people believe in God. Would it be so hard to believe in the alternative?”
I think of the myths that I study. They’re just stories to us now, but the ancient Greeks believed them. They meant something then. They mean something now, because stories are important.
“Yes,” I say honestly.
He gives a low laugh. “He’s real enough, Avery.”
“I know.” And that knowledge sits deeper than I’m willing to admit.
I curl into Gabriel’s arms, shivering at the words. Maybe it would be more comforting to think of him like a ghost. Maybe he could haunt us without actually hurting anyone. The slick blood against my temple, dripping from the wound on Gabriel’s neck, proves the threat is real.
“He knows this city better than anyone, every crack, every corner. And he’s fearless. Other people behave in certain ways, even when they’re well trained. Instinct. Human nature.”
“Then how will you find him?”
Gabriel doesn’t answer, but maybe that’s answer enough. How can he find something he can’t see? How can he fight a force that doesn’t breathe or walk or eat, at least not like any regular man does? At least that’s how he sounds.
In that way maybe the myths are true.
There could have been a man powerful enough to seem like a god, calloused enough to play with humans like they were toys, strong enough to defy death.
A sense of inevitability overcomes me, the same as watching the moon rise in the sky. There’s no way that we can change the tides. All we can do is cling to the mast, the way that I’m clinging to Gabriel now. He’s my ship, my center. My only hope for surviving the night.
