“Leena!” he screamed, fury and terror mingling in his voice.
It was enough to distract her for a moment, and even as her face contorted, she tried to turn toward the sound of his voice.
“That’s it,” he said when their eyes finally met.
Her expression was wild with the pain and shock of the Brink’s devastating effect, but she wasn’t dead yet. As long as her heart beat, there was a chance, Dolph told himself, pushing away the truth.
People didn’t come back from the Brink.
Still, Leena was different, he told himself as she tried to focus on him. Dolph thought for a moment he saw her there, his own Leena, somewhere behind the agony twisting her features.
“I need you to come to me, Streghina. I need you to try,” he pleaded.
And because she was the strongest person he’d ever known, she did try. She forced herself to move, reaching for him, her limbs trembling with effort as she pulled herself back to safety.
“That’s it, my love. Just a little more,” he told her, struggling to keep his voice from breaking into the animal-like wail he felt building within him.
With the last of her strength, she inched along. Her face was drawn tight, but she kept going. His Leena. His own heart.
“You can make it. Just a little farther.”
But she looked up at him, her once-beautiful eyes now a lurid bloodred. Her expression was determined as she tried to whisper something, but before she could finish, she collapsed beyond his reach.
“No!” he screamed. “You can’t leave us. You can’t give up now.” He knelt as close to the Brink as he dared get, willing her to keep moving.
But Leena only blinked up at him, barely able to focus with her unbruised eye.
No, he thought wildly. He wouldn’t accept her fate. Couldn’t accept it. Not his Leena, who had stood by his side since they were children. Not the woman who had been his partner in every way, despite all the mistakes he had made. He couldn’t leave her there. No matter what it meant for him.
Dolph forced himself to reach out to Leena, to press through the searing cold bit by bit. To ignore the excruciating pain. Breaching the Brink was like putting your hand through glass and feeling the shards tear through skin and tendon. Or like dipping yourself in molten metal, if liquid steel could be colder than ice.
But even that pain didn’t compare to the thought of losing her.
Finally, he grabbed Leena’s hand. She blinked slowly, vacantly, at the pressure of his grasp, but with his fingers now wrapped securely around hers, he found that he didn’t have the strength to pull her back. The Brink was already wrapping its icy energy around his wrist, burrowing deep beneath his skin to seek out the heart of who and what he was.
Then, suddenly, he was moving. Jianyu had taken him by the legs and was pulling him and Leena both back, away from the invisible boundary. With the strength he had left, Dolph took Leena into his arms and settled her across his lap, barely aware of the numbness inside his own chest.
“I wasn’t fast enough,” Jianyu said. “I tried to get her before they took her, but . . .”
Dolph wasn’t even hearing him.
“No,” Dolph whispered, tracing the lines of her face. Her breath rattled weakly from her lungs as he clutched her to him, rocking and pleading for her to stay with him. “I can’t do this without you.”
But she didn’t respond.
“No!” he screamed when he realized her body had gone limp in his arms. “No!” Again and again, he wailed into the night, hatred and anguish hardening him, sealing him over, like a fossil of the man he’d once been.
A SLIP THROUGH TIME
December 1926—The Upper West Side
Esta froze as the blond trained the gun on her. His expression was a mixture of disgust and anticipation as he shifted his aim between her and Logan.
“I told you,” he growled at Schwab. “I warned you something like this would happen.”
“Jack!” Schwab yelled, grabbing for the man’s arm again. “Put that gun down!”
Jack shook him off. “You have no idea what they are, what they’re capable of.” He turned to Esta and Logan. “Who sent you? Tell me!” he screamed, his face red with fury as he continued to swing the gun back and forth, alternating between the two of them.
Esta glanced at Logan and noticed the dark stain creeping across the white shirt beneath his tuxedo jacket. His eyes flickered open and met hers. He didn’t look so cocky anymore.
“I won’t be ruined again,” the blond said as he cocked the hammer back again and steadied his aim at Logan. “Not this time.”
Never reveal what you can do. It was one of their most important rules. Because if the Order knew what she was capable of, they would never stop hunting her. But they’d already seen her. ?And the stain creeping across Logan’s shirt was growing at an alarming rate. She had to get him out, to get him back.
It seemed to happen all at once—
She heard the click of the gun being cocked, but she was already pulling time around her.
“Noooooo!” Logan shouted, his voice as thick and slow as the moment itself had become.
The echoing boom of the pistol.
Esta rushing across the remaining length of the hallway, putting herself between Logan and the gun.
Grabbing Logan tightly around the torso, she reached for safety . . . focusing all of her strength and power to reach further . . . and pulled them both into an empty version of the same hallway.
Daylight now filtered in through an unwashed window at the far end of the hall, lighting the dust motes they’d disturbed in the stale air of the completely silent house.
Logan moaned and shifted himself off her. “What the hell did you do?”
She ignored her own unease and took in the changed hallway, the silent, unoccupied house. “I got us out of there.”
“In front of them?” His skin was pale, and he was shaking.
“They’d already seen me.”
“You didn’t have to come barging in like that,” he rasped, grimacing as he shifted his weight. “I had it under control.”
She should have been irritated that he’d reverted to his usual pain-in-the-ass demeanor so quickly, but Esta was almost too relieved to care. It meant his injury probably wasn’t killing him. Yet.
Esta nodded toward his bloody shirt. “Yeah. You were doing great.”
“Don’t put this on me. If you hadn’t gone after a diamond, you wouldn’t have been late meeting me. We could have already been gone before Schwab showed up,” he argued. “None of this would have happened.”
She glared back at him, not giving an inch. But she knew—and hated—that he was right. “I got you out, didn’t I? Or maybe you’d prefer being dead?”
“They’re going to know.”
“I know,” she said through gritted teeth.
To Schwab and the other man, Esta and Logan would have seemed to disappear, and people didn’t just disappear. Not without magic—natural magic. Old magic. Even Schwab would have understood that much.