Page 89 of Villains Never Die

“Fuck. What happened to you?”

“veilknight…she…and then…”

He pulled me inside gently by my arm, his hand the warmest thing I’d felt all night. He closed the door softly and guided me to the couch. I sat on the cushion that had worn thin from him sitting on it.

“Slow down. Breathe.” I did as he told me, his voice coaxing my lungs to work again. “What’s veilknight?”

“I—” I had nowhere to start but the beginning. “A few months ago, when I was negotiating the Prague collection, I received a message on a forum in The Looking Glass from a stranger—veilknight. She’s the one who told me about the ritual and the knife.”

“What did she want in return?”

“She claimed to have her own reasons, but it washer. She was prying for information, trying to see how close I was.”

“Her? Death?”

“Yes!”

He dropped down next to me on the couch and blew out a breath. “You’re sure? You were chatting with Death on the internet?”

“She knew things about me—things only she would know—and she told me to stop looking for her.” I rubbed both hands over my face and sighed, wondering if I was completely unraveling. “She burned down the warehouse. She killed Gray, and then she took him.”

“What do your dead friends have to say about this?” Rook pulled my hands away from my face and held them in his lap as he angled himself toward me.

“I scared them off,” I admitted. “I haven’t heard from them since Gray died.”

“Shit,” he said, wearing the same look he had when I told him about my mother, about the extra lives. He was processing. One of us had to. One of us had to not be falling to pieces.

“What are you going to do?” My hands were still curled inside his, and he gripped them when I tried to pull away, tightening, then loosening when I surrendered. He stroked his thumbs over my palms.

“I’m going to kill her. I’m going to fucking kill her!”

“I’ll help you,” he said. “But we have to deal with Avalon—with the man in that owl mask—too. If he didn’t burn down the warehouse, he’s playing his own game.”

“He’s toying with me. They’re both fucking playing with me.” Like a mouse caught between two cats.

“Then you figure out the next moves, just like in chess.”

“Which I’m terrible at, apparently.”

Rook huffed a laugh. “You’re not bad, you’re just not as good as me, and I said I’d help you.”

“You said you needed space,” I said, “and I’ll go. I just needed to tell someone who wouldn’t think I was completely mental.”

I rose to stand and he tugged me back down. “Don’t go.”

He scooted down the couch and pulled me into his lap, my head resting across his thighs. His fingers traced patterns in the strands of my hair.

“You have the grimoire, you have the knife. What do you own that you love? Do you have anything of your mother’s?”

He squeezed my shoulder with his other hand when I shuddered. I had photos of my mother tucked away in a drawer, but I didn’t love them. I avoided them, skirted around the way they made my heart ache and my rage boil when I looked at them. I had only one item of hers I’d brought to America with me.

“You’ll make fun of me.”

“I promise I won’t.”

“When I was little, she made me a rabbit, a small, stuffed, patchwork thing. He’s beaten all to hell. One of the buttons for his eye is gone, but I couldn’t let him go. He’s the only thing I kept. Stewart is his name.”

Rook hadn’t stopped the lazy way he stroked my hair, his fingers pressing my scalp in a way that made my shoulders finally relax.