by Eva Chase
I couldn’t quite finish the sentence. Funny how back in the real world I couldn’t tell the truth, and in here I was struggling to tell what I was afraid might be a lie. Deep down what made me angriest was that I wasn’t sure Dad had been lazy or stupid, but I did suspect he’d slipped up where he shouldn’t have. That he’d gotten tired of family life, of constantly moving to stay ahead of the law… and he’d given up on himself and on us. On me.
Davin stared at me. “Are you kidding me? I was just shooting my mouth off. How the hell could I know anything about your dad?”
“That’s not the point. You shouldn’t have—”
This time I cut myself off on purpose. I was getting riled up all over again with the same angry heat that had fueled my schemes before. That wasn’t what I’d come here to get sucked into.
I forced myself to inhale slowly. I was pissed off, sure. The guy in front of me was kind of a prick, sure. Neither of those things had justified ruining his life. I could admit that.
The much bigger prick in this scenario was me.
“You’re right,” I said, each word like a shard of glass dragged up my throat. “Going after you was petty and unfair, and against my usual principles, which I did have a few of. I let my personal feelings mess with good business sense. The point is never supposed to be to totally wreck someone’s life. But I didn’t let myself think that far ahead. I’m sorry. I should have backed off as soon as I knew you were hardly making ends meet.”
“Sorry doesn’t do me much good now, does it?” Davin said. “I’ve still lost everything. Are you going to give it back to me somehow?”
My lungs constricted. How could I? Out in the real world, he was already dead. And even if he hadn’t been— “I can’t turn back time. I can’t reverse what happened. Would it help you to pretend I could? Even if I went to your company and claimed I was responsible, do you think that would fix much of anything for you? They’d still blame you for letting me hook you.”
“You could at least offer to try.” He held my gaze for one last fleeting second, his eyes wild. Then he swiveled toward the railing and threw himself upward.
I hadn’t known I had it in me. I didn’t even realize I was going to move until I was already lunging forward. But somehow every part of my body reacted automatically in a way it never had before—toward the danger, rather than away. To help someone else rather than to cover myself.
I flung my arms around Davin’s waist before he’d quite gotten his knees onto the railing. He heaved forward, and with a lurch of my gut, I thought we were both going to tumble over. Maybe the fall would have killed me too. All I had to do was let him go in that last moment.
But I didn’t. I clung on and hauled backward with all the strength I had in me.
We swayed together. My feet skidded against the concrete. Trix called out something I couldn’t hear over the blood rushing past my ears. Then, my breath stuttering, Davin and I toppled back onto the sidewalk.
My tailbone jarred against the concrete. Davin landed half on me with an elbow to my ribs. I coughed and winced—and kept my fingers dug defiantly into his shirt.
Davin gazed up at the sky. He didn’t make a move to repeat his attempted suicide. After a few seconds, he started to laugh, hoarse but genuine.
“You saved my life, you fucking bastard,” he said without any hint of rancor.
“I owed you,” I said. As the truth of that statement shot through me, the vision ripped apart and hurtled me back to the world where I couldn’t speak anything but lies.
Chapter Eighteen
Trix
Jenson’s vision tossed me free so abruptly that I fell back into the real world with a thump of my shoulder against the side of the shed. Jenson teetered in front of me and caught his balance against the wooden slats. He dragged in a breath and expelled it with a rasp as if he couldn’t get quite enough air.
I couldn’t imagine what he was going through after the scene he’d just relived. I reached for him and tugged his lean frame to me. His head bowed next to mine, his arms coming up to return the embrace almost hesitantly. A faint tremor rippled through his body.
“That guy really jumped when it actually happened,” I said, making what seemed like a reasonable guess. “You didn’t manage to stop him.”
“Would you believe I wasn’t there to even try?” Jenson said. The rasp had come into his voice too. “What better way could Roseborne guilt me than throwing shit at me I had no idea was even my fault? Be grateful you never had to go through the staff’s idea of counseling.”
He hadn’t known about the suicide until after he’d gotten here? What an awful thing to have hanging over you. “Are you sure it’s even true? They didn’t make it up to torment you?” All the other visions and the rest seemed to be taken from the students’ real lives, but that didn’t mean the vengeful spirits never tossed more horror into the mix.
Jenson was silent for a moment, maybe grappling with the right way to get across his answer. “Isn’t it plausible that he’d have felt that hopeless after the way I screwed him over? Remember that part was true.” He made a sound of frustration. “And isn’t it kind of them to let me say what I actually mean when I’m off in a fucking nightmare but not anywhere else?”
Despite the harshness of his words, he sounded more defeated than anything else. His arms tightened around me and then started to let go as if he felt he needed to. I held on to him, looking around, and drew him with me toward the door of the shed.
“You should sit down for a minute or two. Get your bearings.”
He grimaced, but he didn’t argue. He followed me into the small room and sank down next to me on the little cot against one wall. The cot that had revealed Cade’s presence on campus to me a few weeks ago. None of the faintly lingering scent I’d caught then reached my nose now. All I breathed in was a hint of dust and a mossy, lightly musky whiff from the guy sitting beside me.
Jenson leaned back against the wall. His throat worked with an audible swallow. He looked at me, his bright blue eyes shadowed in the dim space.
“Don’t stay if you don’t really want to be around me,” he said. “How could I blame you if you don’t?”
My own throat closed up at the simple, nonjudgmental question. He really thought I might want to wash my hands of him—because he’d hurt someone in a horrible way? He knew I’d done the same thing. Maybe for different reasons, maybe he’d done it a lot more than I had, but he’d been in Roseborne’s grasp paying for those decisions for a year now. And I knew he was a hell of a lot more than a con artist and a liar.
Where could you start laying blame, really, when someone followed the only path they knew how to? Like I had with Cade, like Elias with his grandfather.
I slipped my arm around Jenson again and leaned my head against his shoulder. The heat of his body melted some of the ache that had filled my chest while I’d watched him come clean with his former victim.
“I’m not in any position to judge you,” I said. “Not for what you did before. I’m going by who you are now, by how you’ve treated me, by the ways I can see you’ve changed. That’s what counts. And I want to be with that guy. I admire that guy.”
Jenson gently gripped my arm to turn me all the way toward him and hugged me even closer. For several beats of our hearts, he just held me, his breath tickling warm over my temple. His fingers stroked over my hair. Then he said, low and soft and with enough emotion ringing through the words that there was no doubting what he actually meant, “I hate you.”
I’d never have thought it was possible to say that statement so tenderly. For a second, I choked up too much to speak. I gulped down that lump and tucked my head to the crook of his neck. My reply came easier now that I’d said the words once to Ryo. My whole body resonated with how much I meant it.
“I love you too.”
Jenson’s chest hitched, and then he was cupping my cheek, tipping my face up so he could kiss me. I teased my fingers over the back of his neck and k
issed him back hard, in case he needed more convincing. The longing that radiated from him into me kindled a spark that ran from my chest right down to my core.
One kiss blurred into another and another. We only came up for air in quick gasps before we dove back into each other. Jenson’s fingers ran up and down my torso, tracing heat to the surface of my skin like lines of flame, as if he were trying to build layer on layer of pleasure and reassure himself of how real I was at the same time. The need inside me flared hotter.
I leaned back, pulling him with me, until my head hit the pillow. Jenson braced himself over me, drawing out the next kiss until I was practically quivering with desire. I ran my hands up under his shirt, and his breath stuttered with his own longing. He eased up and bowed his head over mine.
“Trix?” he said. The fringe of his hair tickled my forehead. In the darkness, I couldn’t make out much more than a glint in his eyes and the vague shapes of his features. But I knew him, now and before—and from other times I might have lost the details of but that still lived inside my mind. I knew his past and how it weighed on him. I knew everything I needed to.
“I want you,” I said quietly. “Like you are, right now. There’s nothing you need to prove to me or make up to me.”
It was absurd how much I wanted him when I’d just been with Ryo and Elias earlier tonight, but at the same time it felt totally natural. We were all tied together in our own weird ways. For all the awfulness Roseborne had thrown at us, it’d also created something like a miracle in bringing us together.
Jenson still hesitated. “Are we safe from those ghosts anywhere on campus? Or from…”
From the spirits of the former staff who could return to harass us, or who knew what else. I found I didn’t really care.
“Probably not, but we’ll deal with that when it happens. You were right in what you said before—that we might as well make it as hard as possible for the assholes running this place to take us down. And I think we should get in as much happiness as we can too. In case we don’t get a chance later.”
My heart squeezed at the thought of losing the battle we were fighting—losing my life, him, the other guys, everything. But those words cut through whatever uncertainty had been gripping Jenson. He dipped his head to capture my mouth with his, even more determinedly than before.
I caressed the compact muscles lining his back and then slid my hands up over his chest again. When my fingers brushed over his nipples, an encouraging noise worked from his throat. I tweaked them, and he shoved aside my jacket to return the favor. His thumb swiveled over the peak of my breast firmly enough to send a jolt of pleasure through me despite my shirt and bra.
“Do you have any idea how much I want you?” he murmured, his lips grazing mine with the most torturous friction. “Just let them try to tear us apart.”
I hummed in agreement and then let out a gasp when he flicked his thumb with more force. My hips arched up. Jenson grinned at me brilliantly and tugged my shirt higher so he could release my breasts from my bra.
I wriggled and growled between kisses as he worked me over. His skillful fingers stroked every inch of my curves. I yanked his shirt higher too and hugged him to me with a kiss that was all heat and tongues, wanting to feel his bare skin against mine. Imagining what it’d be like to totally strip down with him and enjoy an interlude like this with all the privacy and time we deserved.
Eventually. Maybe even soon. We had to get out of this place, if only because I didn’t want to waste away without finding out just how good it could be with three guys who truly cared about me, out in the real world without curses or spirits confining us.
But this—this was plenty good all in itself. Jenson gently rocked against me through our next kiss, his hardness settling between my legs, and set off a deeper pulse of bliss. My desire turned blazing. I pressed up into him, and he groaned.
Urgency seemed to rush through both of us at the same moment. I jerked at the fly of his slacks, and he pushed up my skirt. When he sat up to help me with my leggings, a new urge came over me, one that set off a tingling right down to my sex.
I squirmed out of my leggings and panties, leaving them dangling from one calf to avoid dislodging my makeshift bandage, and nudged Jenson down onto his back. He raised an eyebrow at me as I straddled him, but his eyes gleamed even brighter than before. I kissed his chest, slicking my tongue over one nipple and then the other, and reached between us to grasp his erection.
As I eased my fingers up and down his silky hard length, an inarticulate sound broke from his mouth. He bucked into my hand. I bent to kiss him and lowered my hips at the same time so I could rub his cock against the dampness between my thighs. He kissed me back, rough and ragged, his hand coming up to clutch my waist.
He couldn’t have any doubt about how much I was invested in this moment, how much I was getting out of it too.
He and I—and the other guys as well—had been alone for a long time, hadn’t we, even if it’d seemed like we had some kind of company? Not anymore. We were making something better of ourselves, something constructed out of love and forgiveness, together.
I lined up Jenson’s length with my opening and slid down onto him. He groaned against my mouth. Without a word, he matched the rhythm I set, his hips pumping up as I bobbed down to meet him, plunging deeper and deeper each time.
The delicious burn spread through my hips, tingled down my legs and up to my heart. I rocked faster, chasing the ultimate explosion of bliss. Jenson kept his hold on my waist and brought his other hand to my chest to tweak my nipples. When a needy whimper fell from my lips, he dropped his hand lower, trailing over my stomach. His thumb found an even more perfect spot just above the point where we were joined.
At the first press of my clit, pleasure rushed through me twice as potent as before. I kissed him sloppily, bucked into his thrusts even more urgently. A trembling raced through my muscles. So close. So fucking close—
The wave of ecstasy I’d been riding crashed over me. I cried out, unable to hold back the sound. Jenson tucked his arm around me and managed to flip us over on the cot without slipping out of me. He plunged into me faster, harder—and I shattered all over again as he found his own release with a shaky exhalation.
We eased to a halt, our bodies still locked together. Jenson pressed a delicate kiss to my cheek, my forehead, and then my lips. As our breaths evened out, he gave me a wry but fond smile.
“What’s there to regret except the fact that we can’t stay like this?”
I smiled back at him. “Nothing I can think of.”
We couldn’t stay like this, though. Guilt was already starting to creep through me when I thought of the short time I’d avoided everything else we were up against on campus. We shifted apart, grabbing our clothes. I’d just tugged my skirt straight over my leggings when the shed door thumped.
I froze. It couldn’t be a ghost—one of those could have walked right through the surface. What—
Something scraped against the ground outside, and the door flew open with a bang that snapped the latch. Cade’s beast landed on the threshold, his eyes glowering and his fangs gaping to emit a snarl.
Chapter Nineteen
Trix
“Holy shit.” Jenson backed up so abruptly his shoulders hit one of the shelving units. The tools and other odds and ends stashed there rattled.
Cade growled again, his coarsely furred form silhouetted by the pale moonlight outside. It glanced off those viciously curved fangs and the silvery eyes set deep in his wolfish head. He stalked a couple of steps into the shed, forcing me to retreat too.
“Cade,” I said, holding up my hands and keeping my voice as even as I could. “You can get control of yourself. You’re still in there—I know you are. Listen to my voice. Remember who I am and who you are. You’re not this monster. You can’t let Roseborne turn you into one.”
I couldn’t tell if anything I’d said had sunk in. He’d said everything was foggy when he was transformed
like this. The creature swung its head from left to right, studying us. The muscles along its back bunched.
“Hey,” Jenson said in the bantering tone I’d often heard him put on with the other students. At this moment, I could hear a thread of tension running through it. “What’re you looking so grim for? Why don’t we chill out like civilized people and—"
Cade lunged. The space was so small that I’d been standing partly in front of Jenson, but the beastly form knocked me to the side, onto the cot, on its way to him. They fell with a thump and a hiss of pain through Jenson’s teeth, his head knocking against the wall.
I shoved myself off the bed and flung myself at Cade without giving myself a chance to hesitate. With those claws and those teeth—it might not be the spirits and their roses that killed Jenson.
“Stop it!” I shouted, digging my fingers into the thick fur. A pungent odor like spruce and spoiling meat filled my nose.
I hauled back, and Jenson thrashed and kicked. The monster slashed its claws across his shoulder and snapped at his face, far too close for comfort. Before Cade could take a real bite out of him, I slammed my elbow onto the beast’s jaw.
Cade’s head jerked to the side. I smacked his face again, trying to push myself between him and Jenson. Even in the dimness, I could make out the dark patch of blood spreading swiftly across Jenson’s shirt. Another was forming lower down at the side of his belly where Cade must have gouged him before.
The creature snapped again, this time at me. The curved teeth rasped against each other with a grating knife-like sound that set the hairs all over my body on end. I shoved the beast by the shoulders, and Jenson landed a kick just beneath its ribs. Cade heaved back and lashed out again. A clawed paw raked across my forearm with an immediate, bone-deep burst of agony.