House of Earth and Blood (Crescent City #1) by Sarah J. Maas

Hunt glanced to where Bryce walked beside him, silent, glassy-eyed. Barefoot, he realized.

How long had she been barefoot? She must have lost her shoes in the explosion.

He debated offering to carry her again, or suggesting that he fly them to her apartment, but she held her arms so tightly around herself that he had a feeling one word would send her into a rage-spiral with no bottom.

The look she gave Ruhn before walking out … It made Hunt glad she wasn’t an acid-spitting viper. The male’s face would have melted.

Gods help them when the prince arrived at the gallery tomorrow.

Bryce’s doorman leapt out of his seat as they walked into the pristine lobby, asking if she was all right, if she’d been in the club. She mumbled that she was fine, and the ursine shifter surveyed Hunt with a predator’s focus. Noticing that look, she waved a hand at him, punching the elevator button, and introduced them. Hunt, this is Marrin; Marrin, this is Hunt; he’s staying with me for the foreseeable future, unfortunately. Then she was padding into the elevator, where she had to lean against the chrome rail along the back, as if she were about to collapse—

Hunt squeezed in as the doors were closing. The box was too small, too tight with his wings, and he kept them close as they shot up to the penthouse—

Bryce’s head sagged, her shoulders curving inward—

Hunt blurted, “Why won’t you make the Drop?”

The elevator doors opened and she slumped against them before she entered the elegant cream-and-cobalt hallway. But she halted at her apartment door. Then turned to him.

“My keys were in my purse.”

Her purse was now in the ruin of the club.

“Does the doorman have a spare?”

She grunted her confirmation, eyeing the elevator as if it were a mountain to climb.

Marrin busted Hunt’s balls for a good minute, checking that Bryce was alive in the hallway, asking into the hall vidcom if she approved—to which he got a thumbs-up.

When Hunt returned, he found her sitting against her door, legs up and spread enough to show a pair of hot-pink underwear. Thankfully, the hall cameras couldn’t see at that angle, but he had no doubt the shifter monitored them as Hunt helped her to her feet and handed her the spare keys.

She slowly slid in the key, then put her palm to the bespelled finger pad beside the door.

“I was waiting,” she murmured as the locks clicked open and the dim apartment lights flickered on. “We were supposed to make the Drop together. We picked two years from now.”

He knew who she meant. The reason why she no longer drank, or danced, or really seemed to live her life. The reason why she must keep that scar on her pretty, sleek thigh. Ogenas and all her sacred Mysteries knew that Hunt had punished himself for a damn long while after the colossal failure that had been the Battle of Mount Hermon. Even while he’d been tortured in the Asteri’s dungeons, he’d punished himself, flaying his own soul in a way no imperial interrogator ever could.

So maybe it was a stupid question, but he asked as they entered the apartment, “Why bother waiting now?”

Hunt stepped inside and got a good look at the place Quinlan called home. The open-concept apartment had looked nice from outside the windows, but inside …

Either she or Danika had decorated it without sparing any expense: a white deep-cushioned couch lay in the right third of the great room, set before a reclaimed wood coffee table and the massive television atop a carved oak console. A fogged-glass dining table with white leather chairs took up the left third of the space, and the center third of it went to the kitchen—white cabinets, chrome appliances, and white marble counters. All of it impeccably clean, soft, and welcoming.

Hunt took it in, standing like a piece of baggage by the kitchen island while Bryce padded down a pale oak hallway to release Syrinx from where he yowled from his crate.

She was halfway down the hallway when she said without looking back, “Without Danika … We were supposed to make the Drop together,” she said again. “Connor and Thorne were going to Anchor us.”

The choice of Anchor during the Drop was pivotal—and a deeply personal choice. But Hunt shoved aside the thoughts of the sour-faced government employee he’d been appointed, since he sure as fuck hadn’t had any family or friends left to Anchor him. Not when his mother had died only days before.

Syrinx flung himself through the apartment, claws clicking on the light wood floors, yipping as he leapt upon Hunt, licking his hands. Each one of Bryce’s returning steps dragged on her way to the kitchen counter.

The silence pressed on him enough that he asked, “Were you and Danika lovers?”

He’d been told two years ago that they weren’t, but friends didn’t mourn each other the way Bryce seemed to have so thoroughly shut down every part of herself. The way he had for Shahar.

The patter of kibble hitting tin filled the apartment before Bryce plunked down the bowl, and Syrinx, abandoning Hunt, half threw himself inside it as he gobbled it down.

Hunt turned in place as Bryce padded around the other end of the kitchen island, flinging open the enormous metal fridge to examine its meager contents. “No,” she said, her voice flat and cold. “Danika and I weren’t like that.” Her grip on the fridge’s handle tightened, her knuckles going white. “Connor and I—Connor Holstrom, I mean. He and I …” She trailed off. “It was complicated. When Danika died, when they all died … a light went out in me.”