Heart of Venom

Finn and Bria watched me stalk back and forth in front of the trunk. Finally, Finn spoke up.

“Well,” he drawled. “I guess your plan to draw M.M. back to Ashland worked.”

“And I think we know that this person isn’t here for anything good,” Bria added. “There’s only one reason you buy that many guns, at least in Ashland.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Because you’re planning to start your own little criminal enterprise. Or not so little, in this case.”

“It looks like M.M. plans to follow in Mab’s footsteps after all,” Finn said.

I stopped pacing. “Please tell me that there’s some way that you can track these guns back to whoever ordered them.”

Finn shrugged. “I can try, but it won’t be easy. Grimes doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who kept meticulous records.”

“Yeah,” Bria said. “And the weapons that I’ve looked at already all conveniently have their serial numbers filed off, so I can’t trace them in the system that way.”

I bit back another round of curses. It wasn’t their fault that we’d just killed off our best—and only—lead about M. M. Monroe.

As I looked at the guns, I couldn’t help but think that I’d just traded one enemy for another.

Soon after that, Finn and Bria took off together, promising to check in with me later, both of them eager to work their sources and see if they could find out anything about the guns and M. M. Monroe.

I waited until Sophia had packed the last body into Roslyn’s car and went inside the house with her, where we found the others in the den. Phillip was sitting in a chair in the corner, while Jo-Jo and cooper were both sitting on the coffee table in front of the sofa where Owen was lying. I perched on the arm of the couch and watched Jo- Jo instruct cooper on how best to use his magic to heal the remaining burns on Owen’s body. Jo-Jo had taken care of the worst of the damage earlier in the yard, but it had quickly exhausted her, leaving cooper to finish patching up Owen.

“Feel the Air around you,” Jo-Jo said in a soft, patient voice. “Imagine it flowing through Owen’s wounds, like a gentle breeze that takes all of his pain away with it.”

cooper gripped Owen’s hand a little tighter and leaned forward, his eyes glowing a bright copper in his lined face.

“Good,” Jo-Jo said, once he’d followed her instructions. “Now, picture the Air flowing through his wounds again, this time slowly smoothing out all of those nasty burns and pulling all of those cuts and scrapes together the smallest fraction. You need to do that again and again, until the wound is completely healed . . .”

cooper listened to Jo-Jo’s instructions, and I watched as the remaining burns on Owen’s body slowly grew soft and pink, then scarred out to white, then faded away altogether. I looked at Owen with a critical eye, but if I hadn’t seen it for myself, I wouldn’t have realized that he’d body-slammed himself into a couple of Fire elementals.

With Jo-Jo guiding him, cooper had done as good a job on Owen as she would have. He’d even fixed Owen’s hair and eyebrows. No trace remained of his fight with Grimes and Hazel.

Jo-Jo nodded. “Good job, cooper. We might make a healer out of you yet.”

He beamed at her praise. Jo-Jo smiled back at him, but she couldn’t hold back the tired yawn that escaped her lips. cooper jumped up and took her arm. He helped the dwarf out of the den. Sophia followed them, and I heard their slow, steady tread on the stairs, then one of the doors of the guest bedrooms opening and closing. Sophia and cooper would see that Jo-Jo was comfortable for the night, so I turned my attention back to Owen.

Phillip cleared his throat and got to his feet. “I need some fresh air. All this postbattle, rah- rah-we-lived senti-mentality is a bit cloying. I’ll call you tomorrow, Owen.”

“Thanks, Phillip,” Owen replied.

I arched an eyebrow at Phillip, but he grinned and left the den. A moment later, the front door of the house opened, then closed.

When I was sure that we were alone, I went over and dropped down on my knees on the floor in front of Owen.

He started to sit up, but I put a hand on his shoulder.

“Just lie there and rest a minute. You’ve definitely earned it.”

Owen sighed. “I won’t argue with that.”

I took his hand in mine. “How are you feeling?” I asked, searching his face for any sign of pain or discomfort.His lips curved up. “Like your barbecue, roasted low and slow.”

His words made me chuckle, but the more I stared at him, the more I flashed back to how he’d looked lying in the yard, burned, bruised, and battered. The mere memory made my heart squeeze tight with pain and fear.

“You didn’t have to do that,” I finally said in a soft voice. “You didn’t have to throw yourself into the middle of my fight with Grimes and Hazel. You could have shot one of them with your gun instead. What were you thinking? They could have easily killed you . . .”

“I wasn’t thinking about my gun or shooting them,” Owen replied. “I was thinking that I couldn’t stand by and watch you die, Gin. That I was going to do whatever it took in order to save you.”

“Well, I appreciate that, but I’m pretty good at taking care of myself.” I tried to keep my voice light, but it didn’t work. “More important, you don’t have to prove anything to me. I know that you care about me. That was just a foolish risk to take.”

This time, I couldn’t stop Owen from getting up. He slid off the couch and onto the floor so that we were sitting side-by-side. Then he turned to face me.

“That’s where you’re wrong. I do have to prove something to you: that I’m as committed to you as you are to me. That I would do anything for you, anything.”

I sighed. “You don’t have to make up for what happened with Salina. That was a difficult situation. An impossible situation. I’m not going to hold it over your head.”

Owen let out a breath. “I know you won’t, because that’s not the kind of person you are. But I’m holding it over my own head. I need to make up for it. Because you were only trying to help, only trying to protect me, Eva, cooper, and Phillip, and I let you down in the worst possible way. I’m going to spend the rest of my life making up for it, if that’s what it takes to win you back. To undo the damage that I did to you— to us.”

It was more or less the same thing that he’d told me that night in the forest by the fire. His violet eyes locked with mine, letting me see how serious and earnest he was—and just how much he loved me.

Fletcher had always said that pretty words were all well and good, but people’s actions were what really mattered in the end. In the past few days, Owen had climbed a mountain to help me rescue Sophia, searched miles of forest for me, fished me out of the river, and kept me safe from Grimes’s men. Then he’d thrown himself into the middle of my fight with Grimes and Hazel, with no hesitation and no thought to the damage that he might do to himself. I hadn’t asked him to do any of that—not one single thing—but he’d done it all anyway.

That told me everything that I needed to know, especially about how he really felt about me.

“I asked you before on the mountain, and I’m going to ask you again now,” Owen said, his eyes still searching mine. “I want to try again, Gin. Please?”

My heart swelled with love for him, and this time, I didn’t try to fight it, and I wasn’t afraid of it, or him, or even of having my heart broken again. I might have lost sight of it in the forest, but if there was one thing that all my years as the Spider, all the battles, all the brushes with my own death, had taught me, then it was this.

That this was what was important. This moment right now and all the ones that we were lucky enough to have after it. Today, tomorrow, hell, maybe even forever.

Me. Him. Us. Together.

Yeah, we’d hit a big bump in the road, and we still had some work to do. I needed to learn how to trust him fully again. He needed to forgive himself for Salina’s crimes.

And we both needed to learn how to let go of and move past the pain that we’d caused each other, learn how to work on our problems together.

“Gin?” Owen asked a third time, his eyes burning into mine.

I leaned forward so that my forehead was touching his.