Elijah cringed. Even now, after all these years, he hated to admit that it had been his own family’s homophobia that had driven him halfway across the country. To New York and the Community. Religion was just as capable of brainwashing and indoctrinating as the Community. If people devoted their lives to something, they sometimes refused to turn their backs on it even if it meant hurting their own.
“You survived hitchhiking across the country, being homeless in New York fucking City, and you managed to pull your head out of your ass and open those big pretty eyes of yours to see what the Comm is. Even if it took as long as it did. Some people still ain’t about to admit it, Elijah. You’re stronger than most. Than Holden. Maybe even stronger than me.”
A hoarse laugh released from Elijah’s throat. “No one’s stronger than you.”
“Untrue,” Chase said roughly. “You didn’t let your hardships turn you into a cold, unfeeling bastard. I did.”
The pained look on Elijah’s face intensified, and his fingers dug into Chase harder. “Chase, please . . .”
“Please, what?”
“Tell me if you believe those shitty things you said about me. If you think I’m just using you while holding out for Holden.”
Chase’s jaw clenched.
“It’s not true,” Elijah said fiercely.
“Yeah, whatever.”
“It’s not fucking true, you fucking pendejo. Yes, I was infatuated with Holden. Yes, I wanted him to notice me for years. But you know what I realized after everything fell apart? That I wanted you, not the person who I thought had saved me.”
Chase looked away from Elijah’s furious gaze. It was hard to believe what he was saying after so much evidence to the contrary. “This isn’t the time. They’ll be in here—”
“Stop telling me about it being the right time! Whatever you think about me and about how I feel is wrong. Maybe I’ve said things out of anger in the past, but that’s because you do act like a bastard. Why would I tell you how much you mean to me when you sometimes act like I’m nothing but a convenient piece of ass.”
“Good point.” Chase pushed Elijah back. “Can we—”
Elijah surged forward to crush their lips together. Chase started to shove him away, to twist his face and end this, but when Elijah’s tongue flicked at his mouth . . . he was gone. Gone into the sea of warm sensation and pleasure. The peace of the man’s mouth and the familiar stirrings of arousal that made it clear his sex drive would never lower no matter how much they tortured him. Months of mind-fucking, and his body reacted to Elijah just as strongly as it always had.
He wanted him on the bed or on the floor. Screw it, he’d fuck Elijah up against the wall. Run his mouth all over soft brown skin, tangle his fingers in tangled hair, and look into eyes that always held a promise even though Chase had never allowed himself to fall too deep. Believing Elijah could ever want someone as warped as him was as good as believing in miracles. Telling himself he was just a stand-in, a big dick and a high libido with killer stamina, was easier.
But Chase hadn’t realized how much he’d miss Elijah’s mouth. After all this time, it was like heaven. Or whatever afterlife would take a freak show like Chase.
He slanted his mouth and kissed Elijah deeper, drinking in the soft little moan that followed, and enjoying how demanding Elijah was even now. They were surrounded by enemies, locked in a room with only a small hope that there were still no cameras, and moments away from pretending to be enemies. And yet . . . Chase wanted to rip down Elijah’s shorts and bury himself in his tight heat. Let him feel, with intense fucking, how much Chase wanted him. But then he’d have to swallow all the traitorous nonsense words that always wanted to fall from his mouth, because those words made it plain as day that he needed Elijah for a lot more than sex.
He tore away, heart jackhammering against his chest, and sucked in deep even breaths.
“I might have to hurt you,” he panted against Elijah’s mouth. “If they let me in the silo.”
“Until I . . . pretend to have turned?”
Chase nodded, still running his fingers through all that wild beautiful hair. “At the very least, I’ll have to treat you like you’re finally mine. And you’ll pretend you want it that way.”
“Who said anything about pretending?” Elijah licked his lips slowly. “If us fucking makes things more believable, I’m not going to complain.”
“Even if I treat you like my bitch boy? Tote you around like arm candy?”
“You can slap me around and fuck me in front of an audience as long as no one else lays a hand on me and the end game is us getting the hell out of here.”
“If anyone touches you, I’ll cut their throats. I may be hogtied mentally due to the drugs, but I still have a mean streak a highway wide and can hold my own in a fight.” Chase sat back on his haunches. “But when you walk out of that silo, you need to act like Ex-Comm are basically traitors, Holden and Lia are shady, and that you’re devoted to me. Then when they trust us enough to put us to work, and there are fewer eyes on us, we get the fuck out.”
Elijah’s breathing had increased as he listened to the skeleton of a plan. “And from there?”
“I’ll think of that. For now, the plan is to get off the Farm.”
“Got it.”
Chase stood, but Elijah grabbed the hem of his shirt.
“I mean what I said, Chase. It won’t be pretending. I do want to be yours. Even before they dragged me here, I was searching for you. All I wanted to do was find you. The minute you disappeared from Evo and the city, I realized how much you meant to me.” Elijah sat up on his knees. “Were you lying when you told Richard how much I mean to you? That you’re in love with me?”
A vise closed around Chase, and a tableau of everything that had happened between him and Elijah in the past few years sprinted through his mind. The grudging kisses, the frantic and intense sex, the traded insults, and the way Elijah’s attention had always skewed back to Holden.
“No, it’s not true.” Chase turned to the door, but even out of the corner of his eye, he could see Elijah’s face fall. “I just said it so he’d think they had me under their thumb. He knows I would never admit to anything like that of my own free will.”
“Got it.”
“Good.”
Chase strode out before his resolve could crumble. Just like it had the first time he’d laid hands on Elijah, and every time after that when he’d told himself to stay away.
“See you on the other side.”
The room around him was white and the floor beneath him was hard and cold. It wasn’t exactly freezing, but it was frigid enough for a consistent shiver to pass through his body, and for the scratch of soreness to have already formed at the back of his throat.
It was that scratch, and the coldness beneath his bare thighs, that immediately allowed Chase to realize he wasn’t in his new bed in the cottage.
He was in the silo, and this wasn’t a dream.
Visions had come to him this way for his entire life, and it was still a surprise when he opened his eyes to find himself somewhere else. Especially when everything felt so real.
Chase’s eyes adjusted to the blinding brightness of the room—shocking mostly because it must have been the dead of night outside—and focused on Elijah. He looked so small balled up in a corner with his hands pressed to his ears and his eyes shut. He’d tilted his head back against the ceiling. It looked like he was praying. Or trying to sleep.
And that’s when the music started.
The roar of an aggressive beat intercepted with the growl of a voice so distorted it was hard to make out, or maybe that was the static of the vision making it impossible for Chase to understand. Elijah curled in on himself tighter, hands plugging his ears harder, as his jaw clenched up.
Pain was a bullet to Chase’s heart. Jasper had stolen his empathy ages ago, but when it came to Elijah . . . Chase’s chest was like a cage with wide bars. Easy for the beautiful boy with the smart mouth and
luminous eyes to reach in and touch Chase’s heart, even if those feelings never managed to get out.
He stood from his own crouch and walked across the room in measured steps. The cold seeped into his skin with each movement, so he walked faster, moving with the beat, before he reached Elijah. Even after Chase crouched in front of him, Elijah didn’t react. His face was twisted, damp with tears, and his brows all screwed up.
God, he was so beautiful. Even when he was hurt.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Chase put his hands on Elijah’s shoulders and leaned in. There was no way his touch would be felt or his voice would be heard, but he spoke anyway.
“They can’t get you, baby. You’re fucking strong. They’re nothing. You survived too much for some psy kids with distorted brains to mess you up. As long as you can keep your shield up, you can beat them.” Chase brushed his hand alongside Elijah’s face with a gentleness he never showed in the real world. “And if they do manage to get you, I’ll bring you back. Because . . .” He swallowed, that sick feeling taking over even as he beat it back. “Because I do fucking love you.”
The music seemed to lower, and a beat later, Elijah opened his eyes and looked directly at Chase. His brows rose, relief washing over him, and then everything faded around Chase. The white walls crumbled and Elijah dematerialized.
Then Chase woke up.
His heart wasn’t pounding and there was no cold sweat. He lay still and silent in a too soft bed as he gazed up at a ceiling that was far too low, and listened.
No footsteps. No voices. Nothing but the distant hooting of an owl and the wail of the wind outside the windows. The Farm was still except for somewhere up in the silo where Elijah had been inundated with sound and the drone of Community propaganda for the past two weeks.
Chase knew without question the vision had been real. And he knew Elijah had heard his voice. Which begged the question: why weren’t the psy-sups working?
He went through a mental catalog of the past several days. His realignment was different from Elijah’s because they thought he couldn’t act without fighting past the excruciating pain of his programming. They didn’t realize the brainwashing had lapsed, and he’d regained his free will.
He wondered what else they were doing to Elijah. They were trying to disorientate him—that was clear. They probably had Community propaganda on repeat—stats about who they’d saved, or maybe even data from Elijah’s own file. Recordings of his old counseling sessions at the CW. Reminders of how they’d “saved” him, when all they’d done was take him off the street to put him into a different type of unsafe situation.
They would also be performing nonstop questioning. That was a given.
If Chase knew their strategies, the questioning would have been going on all along. The questioning was what had gotten Chase as a kid. Why he’d never told his father about what could only be described as torture. Jasper had always bombarded him with the same questions but worded slightly different: Why did your mother leave? Do you think your mother left because of you? Do you think you scared her? Is your father scared of you? Would he be angry if he knew you didn’t want me to fix you? Do you think your father will leave like your mother?
It was weird how something so obvious could break you after enduring it for long enough. But it’d worked for a while. Undoubtedly, they were laying into Elijah with it. They’d even taken it up with Chase again. Which turned his thoughts away from Elijah, where they always landed even when he was trying to focus on something else, and back to his analysis of the past few days.
They all started the same. Like at a hospital or a residential psychiatric treatment center, from what Chase had gleaned from baby psy kids who’d stumbled into the CW after escaping a situation where their parents had thought telepathy was schizophrenia, and had them institutionalized.
He woke up to a nurse giving him his meds. A cocktail of vitamins, sedatives, and psy suppressants. The psy suppressants were what kept him, and what had kept Holden’s mother, from fully using their talents while on the Farm. If they used enough, it made him as useless as a void. But Jessica had been more with it than him after the invasion, so somewhere along the line she’d fooled them into decreasing her meds.
The only way Chase’s abilities could be active was if he was doing the same. But he wasn’t. The nurse—Shelby, a chubby black girl with deep-brown eyes that reminded him of Elijah, and pink woven into her braids—gruffly gave him his meds every day and practically took apart his mouth making sure he swallowed them.
Now, he wondered about those pills.
It was time to get friendlier with Shelby.
The next day, Chase made it a point to wake himself up a little before Shelby arrived. He wanted to be alert when she showed up, and he’d had trouble sleeping anyway.
He’d lain there wondering whether he’d be able to play along with the daily questioning sessions and fake-ass counseling to earn a trip to the silo. So far, he hadn’t asked to see Elijah. Until the day before, he’d been too doped up to even think of asking. Now everything was different.
The world was clear, his thoughts were sharp, and he was ready to fuck someone up and get the hell out of Dodge.
Shelby came in wearing her light-pink nurse uniform with her matching pink braids, and gave him the usual stern look. The I-know-you’d-be-an-asshole-if-you-weren’t-drugged-up look.
“Good morning, Shelby.”
That eyebrow drove straight up. “Oh, so he speaks today.”
Chase crossed his arms behind his head. “Wasn’t feeling up to it until today.”
“Uh-huh.” She pushed her cart with the computer, tray, and various implements to the side of his bed. “Time for vitals.”
He sat up, watched as she took his blood pressure, holding her steady gaze as she took his temperature, and tried to get a read on her. It was risky, but if he moved fast, he could dip in and out without leaving a mental footstep behind. Unfortunately, it was impossible. There was basically a mental fortress around her brain. Fuck. What good was being a psychic if every other psychic could shut him out of their brains? Tapping into the average psy kid at Evo had been a cakewalk, but Comm staff had their shields secured.
The shittiest part of being a psychic was having this entitlement—like all of this info should be at his disposal—but being unable to actually utilize it since his abilities were inconsistent. Visions came when they wanted, and he could only get into the minds of a void or someone without a strong shield. There was never really a reason for him to psychically connect with a void, so that left him with a useless talent. Theo had let him in, but he’d also not listened to Chase’s warnings.
Which was why he’d died.
The memory of that night came back with a roaring intensity. A freight train of guilt and horror that he’d known his brother would die, and had been utterly fucking powerless to stop it as he’d watched through Theo’s eyes. The Comm programming had kept him from doing anything but screaming one word over and over: Run.
But Theo hadn’t run. He’d been so cocky. So sure that he could handle Beck, and that the confrontation would go his way. He’d sworn he could influence her to seeing his point of view and telling the truth.
Neither of them had expected her to have absorbed enough abilities to make her the superhuman everyone always said Chase was. But they were wrong. Compared to Beck, his abilities were child’s play. So far, his telepathy had been most useful for sending visions to Nate. And his telekinesis worked only at random. Like when he’d powered through those straps in the silo, causing them to stretch out of shape with sheer willpower before the talent had gone dormant again.
“BP was a little high.”
Chase blinked, refocusing on Shelby. “Huh?”
“Your blood pressure was high.”
“Maybe I’ll have a heart attack,” he suggested.
“Is that a personal goal?”
“More like a dream.”
“Uh-huh.” She sh
ook her head, but the corner of her mouth was twitching. “Open up, smart guy. Time for meds.”
“Yummy. Gotta love those psy-sups.”
“Mm-hmm.”
The look Shelby gave him this time was a little narrower. Was he seeing things or had that been a shut your dumb fucking mouth look? Or was he the only one to use specific glares for specific reasons? It was good to have an arsenal of stank faces.
“So,” he said, glancing into his little paper cup. “How’d a gal like you end up in a place like this?”
“Gal? I’m sorry, I didn’t realize we’d teleported to the South in the past twenty seconds.”
Chase kind of liked Shelby now that he knew she probably wasn’t evil. He fell back on the bed with his hands crossed behind his head and grinned up at her. “You got something against the South?”
“I just have no desire to be there.”
Shelby grabbed his jaw, jerked it down and inspected the inside of his mouth to make sure he’d swallowed the cocktail. Satisfied, she stepped back and peeled off her gloves.
“You really gonna do me like that, Shelby?”
“Do you like . . . what?” Her face creased incredulously. “We really do not need to interact. All my other patients shut their mouths, do what they’re told, and hold off with the small talk.”
“You got something against small talk?”
Shelby’s lips pursed as she nailed him with a skeptical stare that immediately pulled a smirk out of him. He couldn’t help it. Her glares were epic gold, and he liked people who said what they meant instead of playing games. Although, he suspected she did indeed have a game plan of her own.
Now that he was paying attention to it, the pills she’d just watched him choke down didn’t taste the same as the ones he’d taken a couple of weeks ago. They were just as jumbo sized, but the distinct chalky taste had gone, and they were smoother. Sweeter. Citrus flavored.
Sightlines Page 5