I growled, cutting off his accusation and fighting against his grip. He stepped forward, one of his legs pushing between mine, effectively pinning me where I stood as his hands dropped from my shoulders to my hands. I stopped fighting him immediately, and I wasn’t sure why. The move was so sudden and aggressive; I was still trying to come to terms with the fact that it was Quillan standing in front of me. He grabbed my wrists, pulling my hands up beside my head. He ducked his face, his eyes landing on mine. His stare was weighted, as it usually was, but the emotion behind it was heavier than usual. It dropped right through me, swelling into the pit of my stomach and tickling down my legs. For a moment, I thought that the scratchy feeling was back, but this was a different feeling. I would have described it as fear or uncertainly, except that it felt…
Nice?
“Go ahead,” he provoked, “push me away.”
“What the hell is this? Blackmail?” I flung my words at him, completely torn apart with confusion. “I prove that I can accept the bond and you’ll tell me all of your secrets?”
For just a moment, he seemed taken aback. He looked at his own tight grip on my wrists, and I thought I saw surprise in his face. That made two of us.
“God… I don’t know anymore.” His grip slackened. “Stop tearing me down, Seph. I’m only trying to protect you.”
“From who?”
“From Weston. From the messenger. From yourself. From us.”
“Sounds like an impossible task. You should probably give up. Take a load off. Share the burden.”
He chuckled, the sound seemingly extracted from his unwilling lips. “Let me give you a scenario.”
“A scenario?” I asked carefully.
“A hypothetical one.”
“About a hypothetical girl bonded to four people?”
“Yes.”
My heartbeat picked up immediately, and I was sure that he could tell because he turned his head from me, looking to the side as though giving me the privacy of my own fluttering hope. I scrambled for control over the barrier on my emotions and then said as calmly as I could, “I’m listening.”
“This hypothetical girl is at the end of a very taut tether, isn’t she?”
“How would I know?” I struggled to keep the impatience out of my tone. “It’s your scenario.”
“Seraph,” he warned quietly.
I huffed out a gentle breath. “Let’s say she’s at the end of her tether.”
“Now what if I told her, hypothetically, that her bonding to those four people in particular had doomed her to a certain, unavoidable fate. A fate that she will never be able to escape, save in death.”
I swallowed, averting my eyes from him. “Knowing is still better than not knowing.”
“Knowing is what gets people killed in this world.”
“Weston doesn’t scare me.” The bite in my tone finally emerged again. “He can’t see into my mind as easily as he can other people. He tried. He failed.”
“Oh really?” Quillan seemed to be mocking me, and the sharpness of his taunt was both unfamiliar to me, and perhaps a little gratuitous. “Lord Henry Weston: the most powerful member of our society—and as an extension, arguably the most powerful person in the modern world—doesn’t scare you.”
Well… when he put it that way…
He dropped my hands completely, shaking his head. I expected him to back off, but he stayed where he was, pressing me into the car, with our arms hanging uncertainly. I found myself staring at him, drawn to the morning sunlight that slanted over his perfect features, glinting into the dark sweep of his hair and reflecting in the soft black velvet of his eyes. He was taller than Noah and Cabe, so tall that it almost hurt to crane my neck back so that I could peer up at him. I felt that he should have appeared different to me—changed, or evolved. I wanted him to show signs of transformation so that the seemingly absurd shift of my own feelings toward him would make sense. His careful gaze narrowed on mine, reading into my own confusion as a pressure settled into the dip of my waist. He touched me almost experimentally, drawing my attention from his face so that I could instead examine his hands as they moulded naturally to the curve of my body. I had grown accustomed to allowing my body the freedom of its own reactions over the last year—but I would soon have to change that. I wasn’t stiffening and drawing away, or blacking out and stumbling. I was becoming a vessel of sensation, melting closer as Quillan’s fingers slid against the silky material of my top. I hadn’t even noticed him pushing aside the opening of my cardigan, but the single remaining layer between his skin and mine was unmistakable, the gentle slide of whatever silk-blend my top was made of allowing his touch to slide up the natural curve of my hip to my waist, where the material bunched slightly as his grip became firm.
“Why aren’t you pushing me away?” he asked, his voice finally reflecting the turmoil that was dancing violently inside my head.
It was fascinating to see the hesitation in his eyes and feel the complete lack of hesitation in the way he held me. The contradiction was enough to put me on edge about the question. I stopped to consider it seriously, the sounds of nearby people rushing back to me, assaulting me with our own stupidity. Quillan had me pinned me up against the car, and we were surrounded by Zevs. But then again… his car was hiding us on one side, with the scattering of pine trees that edged the parking lot shielding our other side. Quillan also had his face lowered, his expression hidden.
“Maybe I’m straining,” I replied carefully. It tasted like a lie, and that confused me even more.
I started to tell myself that I had never felt that way about Quillan, but my mind spluttered around the thought and pulled up short, not allowing it any traction. I had idolised Quillan right from the start; I had craved his attention, his approval, his voice and his heavy eyes… and now I craved his touch.
No. No. That wasn’t possible. Things couldn’t just change like that.
My breath halted, and I grew very still. I didn’t even dare to blink my eyes or taste any oxygen. The itching feeling and the blackouts had completely disappeared, leaving behind the strange yearning that assaulted me whenever Silas touched me.
I didn’t know how to deal with it.
I couldn’t believe it was happening.
“I don’t think you are,” Quillan countered softly, interrupting my thoughts. “You haven’t strained in months.”
“It’s overdue, then.” I laughed, but it was an uncertain laugh, fraught with nervous indecision.
“I know.” He shifted a little bit, his fingers tightening fractionally in their hold. “But you’re still not straining. You get this vacant, panicked look in your eyes when you are. I’ve been doing some research, trying to figure out why it might have gone away… but there isn’t any information out there about bonding with two different pairs, and I can’t exactly ask the Klovoda…”
I noticed movement in the trees, distracting me from what he was saying. I pushed against Quillan’s chest, remembering my two bodyguards, and he backed away instantly, walking around to the other side of the car as though nothing at all had happened. He got in and started the car, but I stared into the trees a moment longer before pulling the door open. I was about to climb inside when I saw it again: a person was moving between the trees. A man: hood pulled up over his head, his broad back presented as he strode away. My heart lurched in my throat, and a strangled sound escaped… but it was impossible.
Silas couldn’t be here.
“Seph?” Quillan asked. “What is it?”
I slammed the door and ran into the trees, forgetting my bodyguards, forgetting the messenger, forgetting everything but the hope that threatened to strangle me. The hooded man disappeared as quickly as he had appeared and I paused at the spot where I thought I had seen him last, turning in a circle. There was a cell phone taped to a tree, right in front of my face. When I switched my gaze to the side of the tree, I had a perfect view of the side of Quillan’s car—right where we had been. I ripped the p
hone free just as Quillan reached me. I showed him the phone and explained what I had seen; but our search of the surrounding trees revealed nothing. The man was nowhere to be found.
“Let’s go,” I finally said, trudging back to the car.
I waited until we were on the road before I turned the phone on, which caused Quillan to sigh in an exasperated way beside me.
“I told you to wait until we got back to the house.”
“I’ll start obeying you like a dutiful little Atmá after you tell me why you let Silas run rogue, resulting in him as Weston’s hostage—an angry Weston, by the way, because you shot him with a sniper rifle—Dominic Kingsling as a corpse on the ground; and me, with a bullet in the shoulder. Until then…” I trailed off, thumbing through the message threads on the phone. None of them were names that I recognised. Mother Hen, Trouble #1, Trouble #2, Her, Home, Other Home, Crass, Dom, and a bunch of others. I clicked on Mother Hen, because it was the most recent.
We’re set, the last message read.
Well, that was informative. I scrolled up, but all of the messages were similarly brief and uninformative. I clicked on Trouble #1, and found much the same thing. I bypassed Trouble #2, and clicked on Her.
The last message read: I haven’t heard from you. You won’t answer your phone. I’m coming to get you.
Frowning, I scrolled up and found myself reading a message that I had sent on the night that Dominic Kingsling’s men had kidnapped me.
“Oh my god,” I breathed out. “This is Silas’s phone.”
Quillan pulled the car to the side of the road, snatching the phone out of my hand. He silently examined it as I fell back into my seat, running through the contact names in my head. Mother Hen had to be Quillan—Silas had called him that before. Trouble #1 and Trouble #2 were Noah and Cabe, and I was… Her. I didn’t know about Home and Other Home, but Dom could be Dominic Kingsling and Crass could be Jayden—he had called himself Agent Crassus after finding me at the scene of the limousine accident, so I assumed that it was his last name. After a few minutes Quillan pulled back onto the road and handed the phone back to me.
“Are you sure you didn’t see the guy’s face?” he asked me.
“I’m sure. Only a hood—he was wearing jeans, I think. What does this mean?”
I clicked on the message folder again and glanced down the list of names, pausing at one that I hadn’t noticed before, as it was further down in the list, indicating that it wasn’t a recent contact.
Hunter.
My stomach lurched and I quickly clicked on the thread belonging to Kingsling so that I wouldn’t click on Hunter’s name. There were mostly messages coming in, rarely any going out, and they all stated locations, dates or times.
“What’s up with this?” I asked Quillan, flashing the screen of the phone at him.
“It’s how we receive our assignments,” he explained, glancing at the phone briefly before turning his eyes back to the road. “Our handler will send us as few details as possible—mostly because of hackers like Silas—and we meet up in person to discuss whatever they need us to do.”
“What if it’s an emergency?”
“There will just be a location—no date or time. There won’t be a person at the location, but all emergency locations are situated near hotspots. It’s any place marked with a K: chalk on the pavement, graffiti on a subway platform, that kind of thing. There will be a disposable phone in the hotspot location, with directions on what to do.”
“Wouldn’t that be a little hard to find? A random K written into the environment?”
“For less experienced agents… yes, I suppose it would be.”
“So what kind of stuff do they get you to do?” I fiddled with the phone as I asked the question, watching a drop of morning condensation track its way down the cold glass window. I wasn’t really expecting a response.
“That depends on what kind of agent you are,” Quillan surprised me by replying. “Me and the others aren’t a very good standard because we aren’t undercover in a human job—we live as full-time Zevghéri. Even though I have a normal-seeming job, it’s still at a Zev school, as a Zev teacher. For the rest of them, they do what the Klovoda asks them to do. That’s their job. Sometimes they just want their agents to follow a person. Sometimes they specifically want to get close to a target. Sometimes they want an item retrieved or planted, or a message delivered. The US government has their specialized operations groups… the Klovoda has us.”
I frowned, knowing that Quillan was leaving out the bulk of their ‘duties’.
“All that secrecy for… following people and delivering messages?”
Quillan’s lips twitched, but the amusement didn’t properly break through, and the spark quickly faded away. He still looked as devastatingly perfect as ever, but beneath it all, he seemed tired. Worn thin. Just like me.
“We do other things as well,” he said.
“Of course. Any chance you’re feeling particularly informative?”
He cut his eyes to me, catching the nervous way that I was twisting the phone in my lap, and then he looked back to the road.
“Our messages aren’t always the traditional kind. There are many ways to send a person a message… but I shouldn’t need to tell you that.” He paused, waiting for me to swallow his words.
I did, and I didn’t like the taste that they left behind. I didn’t like that my pairs were in any way similar to the messenger; that they could be doing to someone else what the messenger was doing to me.
“I see,” I said.
“It’s not like that.” Quillan’s fists clenched around the steering wheel, his mouth tightening into a hard line, like he had been disappointed at my response. Had he been testing me? “The Klovoda are only trying to protect our people. That’s what our missions are about, mostly. We have a tentative relationship with the country’s top security agencies, and an even more tentative relationship with the government funding those agencies. Sometimes they need us and sometimes we’re willing to help out. Just as often, though, they’re trying to test their limits with us. They would love to get their hands on an Atmá—despite the fact that they’ve already taken so many from us over the years. They’re angry because they can’t figure out how to harness the power of our people. It doesn’t stop them from trying, though. Whatever we do, whatever messages we send, whichever people we follow, whatever fires we start… it’s all in self-defence. It’s all to protect our people, our bloodlines, our power, our Atmás.
“Sometimes the government gets wind of an Atmá, and that individual is immediately targeted. They send their own agents to follow us, to harass us, and sometimes they paint the target over our heads that other people act on. That’s when one of us gets called in. We have to stalk the stalkers, making sure that they don’t make a move on one of our people. We step in if they do, but we can’t just outright interfere without provocation.”
I let the phone slip from my nervous fingers to rest between my legs. I held it between my knees as I flattened my palms on my thighs, rubbing them back and forth. I listened to every word that Quillan spoke, drinking the information up like a rare and precious wine. His hands were relaxed on the steering wheel, his dark hair slightly damp from the rain that morning. He had discarded his suit jacket and now wore a pale blue button-down that seemed to be attempting to convince everyone that he was a normal and regular human being. He was acting as though he told me about the Klovoda all the time. As though it wasn’t a big deal.
“Those are only the combative agents, mind you.” He glanced at me again. “Most Klovoda agents are undercover humans, working normal jobs, living normal lives, protecting our assets from the humans. Tabby shifts from human schools to Zev schools, depending on where she is needed. If there was a Zev child in one of the human schools, she could be sent there to keep an eye on them. To keep them safe. That’s our main preoccupation, Seph: keeping each other safe.”
I deflated into my seat, my head tipping back as I allo
wed my attention to drift back to the condensation on the window. I felt guilty for jumping to the wrong conclusion, but I was also very confused. They kept sending me mixed signals when they spoke about the Klovoda. I had no idea whether the Klovoda was supposed to be good or bad.
Maybe it wasn’t as simple as that. It rarely was.
“Well then why did Silas sacrifice so much to keep me away from the Klovoda?” I asked. “I understand why he would want to keep me away from Kingsling, but the rest of them?”
“He knew the danger.” Quillan sounded as though his patience was running out, and that made me nervous, because he rarely lost control. Until today. “While Weston and the Klovoda might be separate, it remains that the Klovoda is that one step closer to Weston. Silas knew that Weston would find out about who you are to us, and then it would be the end of you, and the end of everyone connected to you. Because he wouldn’t just kill you… he’d kill Poison, Clarin and Tariq for hiding you from him, and he’d kill me and Silas, too. He wouldn’t need us anymore. Paired, we’re more than useless to him. We’re a threat to him. That’s why he has two backup heirs, after all. Noah and Cabe would die as a result of the bond, but he wouldn’t discover that until after the fact.”
I climbed over my own shock, pushing it into the back of my mind and forging ahead with my questions. Quillan was finally saying things. I wasn’t going to pause to dwell on just how outlandish those things sounded.
“Would he really do that?” I asked. “He acts like you’re important to him, and I think even I’m important to him, somehow. Would he really kill us, just because we’re bonded?”
“Yes,” Quillan gritted out, sounding like he was finished with the conversation.
“Why?”
He pulled to the side of the road again, yanking on the handbrake and throwing off his seatbelt. He escaped the car and began to walk away. I was left sitting there with my mouth hanging open, blinking at his retreating form.
Lead Heart Page 3