Cal sat back on his heels and examined the blade before tossing it to the side with a rusty clatter. “Chain’s harder than the saw, it’s never gonna work.” Della’s mouth fell open, all of her unanswered prayers stuffing themselves down her throat. Cal reached out and dragged her close, covering her face with hard, frantic kisses. “You gotta go.”
Her soul cracking open, she pushed at his chest, angry and hysterical and on the verge of screaming in his face. “No,” she said, shaking her head. She cupped his stubbled cheeks, bringing his eyes level with hers. “I don’t run from you, remember?”
A sudden calm slashed through the hysteria as her brain caught up to her tongue.I don’t run from you. One day ago, she promised him while he’d fucked her in her Omega nest and laid his bloody claim on her neck, and she’d meant it. Her will hardened stronger than the shackle that imprisoned him.
She wasn’t about to make herself into a liar.
More crashes from the upper level made the future imminently real. They were going to die there. In the midst of fire and flames and senseless violence. But neither of them alone.
Pain crumpled Cal’s face, and he leaned his forehead against hers, his words gruff. “Della, no, that’s not what—”
“Shh. I know,” she whispered, tucking tendrils of sweaty hair behind his ears. “But I said I wouldn’t run, so don’t ask me to.” His mouth opened and then closed again, helplessness and grief marring his beautiful face.
Peace enveloped her. Like the old movies where the soundtrack went silent right before someone died, only in Della’s peace, everything crackled vivid and wild and entirely the way it should be. All of her previously eroded surfaces had been recast and reformed in the complicated, intricate shape of Adeline Cabrese, and she treasured every edge and angle and rough patch.
“It’s okay,” she said, wiping away the tears that dripped down his cheekbones and replacing them with soft kisses. All of Cal’s anguish howled through their bond, and she absorbed and rejoiced in it, pumping pure love out in return. “I was ground down to nothing,” she said directly into his ear. “I felt nothing and loved nothing, and I thought that made me safe.” She pulled back and looked him square in the face, so he could see her truth as well as hear it. “But the only thing it made me wasalone. But, right now, with you, I’m not alone anymore, and I refuse to go back.”
She leaned in and kissed him like it was her first kiss and last kiss and every kiss in between all rolled into one. He kissed her back, his lips moving slow and sure, as if they had all the time in the world.
Seconds passed like minutes while the bond in her chest sputtered and dripped golden tears all over her insides. There was a certain poetry to it, she supposed, or destiny or some sick irony or simple, meaningless, idiotic coincidence, to lose two men she loved in fiery destruction.
Life was stupid like that.
All anyone could do was make the best of it, and Della knew, in this moment, she was making the best of every shitty circumstance she’d ever been handed. She was going to die here, and she had zero regrets.
Cal’s chin jerked back. “Do you have your knife? The one I gave you?”
Confused, Della rummaged in her clothing, pulling it from a pocket. “It won’t cut through the chain.”
His jaw flexed with resolute intention. “No. But it can cut me.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Cal
An amputation. As a child, Cal had stumbled upon a gruesome do-it-yourself surgery book in Pa’s library. A survivalist to his core, Pa had estimated the possibility of needing to do wilderness surgery sometime in his life, not as remote as some folks would assume.
Goddamn him for being right.
Cal had known, when he’d watched Colt slip the shackle key into his front pocket, that, one way or another, he’d die in this basement. What he hadn’t anticipated, not for a single second, was taking Della along with him.
No amount of arguing would sway her. The twinkling star that lived in his chest told him everything he needed to know and nothing he wanted to hear. Her resolve reverberated along their bond like the final note of a symphony held for far too long. It flowed from her soul into his, showering him with undeserved affection meant to soothe them both. But her determination and poignant resignation to the situation drove the final nail in his decision’s coffin. Too many lives had been lost because of his miscalculations and here was yet another. Not only did the bond not protect Della, it imprisoned her to a dying man, and he refused to surrender without a fight. It was save them both or die together, and Della’s death was not one he could bear.
Tipping Della off his lap, he awkwardly hiked up his pant leg one-handed. His limp, useless arm hurt, the pain a dull throb in the back of his mind. His main worry was that it would limit his ability to help Della with what was to come.
“We need a tourniquet, and it needs to be tight. And Della,”—he captured her dazed and confused eyes with his own— “you’re gonna have to do the cutting.”
Horror spoiled the serenity in their bond. “What? No! You can’t be serious!”
He stared her down, imparting all the gravitas and Alpha command he possessed into his next sentence. “I got you into this mess, and I’m getting you out.” He reached out, grasping her chin in his hand. “I’m losing the foot either way. The only question is whether it’s attached to me when I go or not.”
Her eyelids dipped in a slow, pained blink. Then, as if something switched inside her, she shook off the bewilderment and adopted a wolfish focus. “Okay, okay.” Shoulders heaving up and down with steadying breaths, she got to her feet, scanning the room. “Tourniquet. Okay. We need cloth, and there’s gotta be some of that awful alcohol in here.” She raced around, tearing into the dark recesses behind sacks and stacks of provisions, her face set in grim determination.Thiswas the Della who survived a century in the AfterEnd, and thank god she’d chosen this moment to show up. “Here!” she yelled triumphantly, hoisting a glass container from behind a crate of potatoes.
She rushed to his side, handing it over. “Sterilize everything. I’ll find something we can use for a bandage.”
With his working arm, he adjusted the shackle, riding it up his leg until it wedged tight around the diameter of his lower leg. The metal circlet had enough give that he could push it up a few inches and give her enough room to make the cut. Nausea blasted up his esophagus at the thought, but he fought it down, determined to make this work or die trying.
“Here.” Della had two empty grain sacks in her hand, laying one beneath the leg and tearing the other into a strip. She shot him a worried look, “There’s no way that knife is going to cut through two bones.”