#Chapter 101 What It Costs to Stay

Ember The man carrying Clara hears me coming and turns, and I see the decision cross his face—drop her, free his hands—but he doesn't get the chance. Kaine hits him from the side like a landslide, all that dark muscle and fury, and the man goes down hard with Clara still clutched against him. I'm there before they've stopped rolling, my hands finding my daughter and wrenching her free, and I spin away curling my whole body around her until the world narrows to nothing but her small hot weight and her outraged shriek vibrating against my collarbone. I breathe the words into her hair—I've got you, I've got you—over and over until they stop being language and become just sound, just the shape of my mouth promising her that nothing will touch her again. She smells like herself, milk and warmth and that particular sweetness that is only hers, and under it, faint and wrong, the stranger's scent from the hands that carried her. That wrongness does something to me I don't have a civilized