“How can you be sure?” Ryan asked. He was breathing hard, panic behind his eyes.
“What if something changes, and I don’t cross paths with you?” Bex asked Allison.
She pressed her lips together, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Anything is better than you spending eternity in Hell. If I have to be without you, I’d rather it be this way.”
Bex shook his head. “No.”
“I trust Eli,” Nina said, her gaze locking with her husband’s. “And I trust your love for me. I vote yes.”
Jared wiped a tear from her cheek.
“We started this,” Nina said.
“I did,” Jared answered, his brows pulling in.
“Shax did,” Allison said. “It’s possible we could all still be together.”
“It’s possible we won’t,” Bex said. “I vote no.”
“I vote no,” I said immediately.
“I vote yes,” Allison said. “If I … if I can vote.”
Claire looked to Ryan. “I’m sorry, baby. I vote yes.”
“I vote no,” he said, hurt.
She hugged him. “I’ll fall in love with you again, I promise.”
He pressed his wet cheek against hers. “No, Claire. It’s still no. You’re pregnant. I won’t risk losing you and our baby.”
Everyone gasped.
“You’re pregnant?” Lillian blurted out with a half-cry, half-laugh. She stood to hug her daughter and son-in-law.
“That changes things,” Eden said.
“It changes nothing,” Cynthia said. “I vote yes. Eli, Ramiel, Abel, they know what they’re doing.”
“How?” I asked. “They’ll reverse, too. Then how will they get what they want? It will reset everything for my mother, too.”
Cynthia shook her head. “A sacrifice is a sacrifice. There are no loopholes for that. They’re absolved. Eve and Cain are gone forever.”
“With all due respect, that makes no sense,” I said.
“It doesn’t have to. Some rules can’t be broken.”
“But some can?” Eden asked.
“I vote yes,” Lillian said quickly. “I’m sorry, Ryan, and I’m sorry, my son, but I can’t let you go to that place. I won’t watch you go to Hell. I just can’t.”
“Daddy?” Eden said.
He looked to Bex.
“Jared,” Bex warned. He shook his head. “It’s too risky, and you know it. Eden might never be born. If it even works, she won’t exist. She won’t be needed. Claire is pregnant. You have to know it’s not the right thing to do.”
“You don’t know that,” Nina said. “Eden may just not have the same powers, or any powers, but we’d have children. This all hinges on Jared speaking to me, and he will. I know he will.”
“What if it’s not Eden?” I asked. “What if Ryan and Nina end up together? Bex is right. There are too many risks involved. If even one thing changes, it all changes. We all lose far more.”
“I vote no,” Jared said. He tried to smile at Bex, but his grief took over. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry, Bex.” A grunt came from his throat before he took a breath. “I’m so sorry.”
Bex hugged his big brother, whispering words of comfort.
I looked to Eden, and then everyone else did, too.
“You’re The Keeper of the Balance,” Nina said. “It’s your decision.”
“If I vote no, we’re tied,” Eden said.
“But if you decide it’s right, then the yeses have it,” Nina said.
“Please don’t,” Ryan whispered. “Please.”
Eden’s breath picked up as she met eyes with everyone in the room.
“This was your purpose all along,” Nina said. She hugged her husband tight. “I trust you.”
Claire grabbed her mother and husband and held them tight.
Bex hugged Allison tight, closing his eyes.
“No!” I said, grabbing Eden’s arms. I touched her cheek. My throat felt like it was closing in. “You can’t leave me again. I won’t let you.”
She cupped my cheeks with her soft palms. “We always find our way to each other. I’ll find you, or you’ll find me. But eons later, and look at us. This time will be no different.”
“You don’t know that!” I said, panicking. “What if I’m not sent to Earth because you’re not needed for The Balance?”
She grinned, tears in her eyes. “Then I’ll find you, anyway.”
She pushed up on the balls of her feet and pressed her lips to mine, letting them linger. When we parted, our gazes met for just a few seconds before she closed her eyes.
Chapter Nineteen
Nina
The average daughter respects her father. She might regard him as her hero, or she may place him so high on a pedestal that no object of her affection could ever compare. To me, my father deserved more than respect, loyalty, or even love. I had a reverence for him. He was more than Superman; he was God.
One of my earliest memories of him was watching two men cower before him in his office. I didn’t understand the purpose of their castigation, but I knew Jack Grey’s verdict was always final and never argued with. Not even death could touch him.
I knew the gentle side of him: the man who left important meetings to take my trivial phone calls, kissed my scrapes, and rewrote fairy tales so that the princess always saved the prince. Just a few months before, my father had watched with pride as I’d graduated from Providence High School and then begun my freshman year at Brown University. Now, I wondered if I knew him at all.
I shivered against the cold, turning the ring my father had gifted me for my sixteenth birthday on my finger while I waited for the bus. The gold caught for just a moment, and then I took it off for the first time in almost three years, putting it inside the pocket of my jacket. I’d already given back my car. It didn’t make sense to keep the ring.
The bench beneath me was painfully cold, but after what I’d seen and heard, it was a welcome distraction. My father wasn’t the successful businessman who ruled Titan Shipping with an iron fist. I’d learned in the last two hours that he was a criminal, a thief, a liar, and—if he was behind the deaths of the small group of police officers who’d been found near the Narraganset—a murderer.
My throat tightened, and my chest heaved. I’d hoped to get home before breaking down, but Jack’s pleas for forgiveness kept ringing in my ears.
The families in the area had little need for public transportation, specifically so late in the evening, and those who used it at all were the hired service employees who worked in the colossal residences nearby. No one was working this late at night, except for Alec, of course. I wasn’t sure what 160-pound lawyer in his five thousand-dollar suit and loafers would do to protect me, but in my father’s eyes, at least I wasn’t alone.