Tinnitus, identified a voice inside her head. Brought upon by significant emotional shock. And of course she could still hear that—the one thing she’d always wanted to escape. The endless ghosts echoing in her head.
Movement out of the corner of her eye drew her attention. It took forever to turn her head, and even that gentle adjustment made the world swim.
Rafe was striding out of the building, carrying a dazed child in each arm. Nina took one and carried her across the parking lot to where Dani was parking a windowless van she must have stolen from somewhere.
The children would be fine.
Gray wouldn’t.
Maya looked back down. Gray was stretched out on a thin strip of dead grass, paler than death and just as still. She reached for his wrist, distantly terrified when she couldn’t find a pulse at first. She adjusted her fingers until she felt it—weak, too quick, unsteady.
Mace couldn’t do anything for him. That was why he’d left and gone back to Conall’s side. It was simple triage. You didn’t spend time on people you couldn’t save. Instead, you moved on to the people you could.
Gray was dying. But he wasn’t dead. Not yet.
Not yet.
We ran an op down near the Gulf once.
Maya squeezed her eyes shut as Gray’s voice drifted up out of her memories. But closing her eyes only made it worse—her grip on reality was already so tenuous. She fell backward into the past.
A shitty bar outside a shittier town. A cage fight. The sound of flesh on flesh. The panic—her panic—
And then Gray had been there. A solid wall. Her protector. Cutting a path through the crowd, guiding her out into a night pulsing with the promise of a vicious storm.
His voice. Soft and warm, curling around her to speak of nothing more demanding than the weather. He’d soothed her panic with his words, and in doing so he’d slid beneath her defenses. It had taken her months to admit the truth, but she’d fallen a little in love with him that night.
While we were there, a hurricane hit, and we had to hunker down.
His pulse fluttered under her fingertips. So fast, so weak. The ringing in her ears felt like the roaring of violent winds.
A hurricane had slammed into Maya’s life. Not so many hours ago, she’d been in bed with Gray, breaking apart under the bliss of letting herself feel. So vulnerable and yet still so safe—Gray had given her that.
In the middle of the storm, everything got quiet. The whole sky was the strangest green I’ve ever seen.
Gray had given her peace.
She had given him pain.
She’d given him torture at the hands of a monster, because that was the lot of anyone who got too close to her. Did it matter that Richter was dead now? There would always be another TechCorps executive who wanted the secrets in her head, because Birgitte had left so many. So many.
Maya’s love was poison.
She’d be the death of Gray, just like she’d killed Simon. Just like she would no doubt kill Dani and Nina someday. Knox and Conall and Rafe, too. Probably even Mace.
Maybe Maya should have died with Birgitte and her revolution. Maybe she never should have crawled off the Hill, trailing peril and death in her wake.
I thought it was all over, but Mace said no, it was just the eye of the storm. The middle.
The world spun on around her.
The world spun on without her.
She felt a thousand years old, a million miles away. Nina drifted into her field of vision, her lips moving, her arms gesturing. Confident and strong, directing the rescue mission because that was what Nina did. She saved people.
She’d taught Maya to save people.
Instinctively, Maya rejected the thought, clinging to her broken numbness. But it drifted up again, nagging and insistent. Forcing her to remember.
She had saved people. Sometimes it was big and obvious—rescuing kids or shutting down bullies or arranging medical help in the nick of time. But the little stuff mattered just as much. The food she helped preserve. The knowledge she shared. Every heater or air conditioner she fixed, every generator or engine. The books and the music and the tools and the hope.
Nina could have done some of it without her but not all of it. Maybe not even most of it. Five Points would have been colder and darker and sadder if Maya had never been a part of it.
Maybe it was a good thing she’d crawled off the Hill, after all.
And Tobias Richter had been the worst the TechCorps could throw at her. He’d hurt her. He’d bruised her. Maybe he’d even broken her a little.
But he hadn’t beaten her. He was the one lying dead on a floor, not her.
And not Gray. His heart was still beating. Too fast, too weak, but it was beating.
Sure enough, after that, it started right up again.
Tobias Richter was dead.
Tobias Richter was dead.
It was too big a thought to absorb all at once. Trying to process it hurt, like the pins and needles of a limb waking up, only everywhere. The numbness cracked as she let the full impact wash over her.
Tobias Richter had gathered power into his own two hands for decades. His lieutenants were nothing but glorified henchmen. He’d never trained a replacement because he hadn’t trusted that replacement not to supplant him. It would take five people, minimum, to even attempt to do his job—five people working at cross-purposes, jockeying for position and power.
Maya had evaded discovery by Richter at the height of his influence. No one left at TechCorps HQ had a chance of outthinking her. Cara had escaped, and if she was smart, she’d keep running. But if she wasn’t, Maya would be facing off against an enemy she knew all too well. A grim part of her savored the challenge. A more vicious part anticipated certain victory.
No one left at the TechCorps scared her the same way Richter had.
And she knew those bastards’ secrets. Oh God, so many secrets. The vices of Board members. Their hidden vulnerabilities. Their second families. The sins they’d do anything to keep private. The people who were hungry to betray them.
Push a few buttons—the right buttons—and she could have half the Board at war with the other half.
Maya wasn’t poison. She was power. That’s why they wanted her so badly.
She could ruin their sweet little world.
Like it had never stopped.
The world snapped back into place, vivid and bright. Painful. Maya scanned the furious activity around her, her mind absorbing the chaos and sorting through it as if hungry for stimulation after its brief deprivation.
The ringing faded. Sound came back in patches. Her own breathing first, harsh and unsteady. Then Mace, calling out a command to Ava. “Keep him steady.”
Gray was still silent. Someone had wrapped the worst of his wounds, but there was nothing else Mace could do for him. Conall had problems the medic knew how to solve, so he had prioritized.
Maya had to prioritize, too.
Gently, she released Gray’s wrist and folded his hands over his chest. His too-long hair had fallen over his forehead again, so she tenderly stroked it back before leaning down to brush a kiss to his forehead. “You protected my heart,” she whispered to him. “Now it’s my turn.”
She let go of the world again, but this time she wasn’t in the eye of the hurricane.
This time, she was the hurricane.
Somewhere inside her vast and endless memories and her sprawling network of contacts was a chance for Gray. Maybe a remote one. Maybe a desperate one. But she’d scour the earth bare and sweep away anything in her path on her way to finding it.