Step. . . . nearly killed.
Step. Zara betrayed you—had possibly been plotting to do it since Beth’s death.
As I allowed myself to think about what Zara had done for the first time since coming face-to-face with her in that basement, I had to pause. One hand flew to the railing; the other went to my abdomen as I bent over. I felt sick—both as if I might vomit and as if my stomach were hollow.
After a few deep breaths, I straightened and continued to the kitchen. I was trying to convince myself the hollow feeling had more to do with the fact that I hadn’t eaten in nearly a day. Maybe food would help.
Alec and Tyler sat side by side at the dining table, laptops in front of them, both absorbed in what they were doing. They had the exact same posture—shoulders slightly hunched, hands moving furiously over keyboards—and they wore matching creases between furrowed brows. Tyler paused what he was doing and reached for a steaming mug of disgusting black coffee. Alec reached for his own only a beat behind him.
They were so similar in their mannerisms I wondered for a second if they weren’t related by blood after all.
I padded into the large open-plan room, the thick socks I’d taken from one of Alec’s drawers making my movements soundless.
“Morning, Eve.” Tyler greeted me without lifting his eyes from his screen.
“Morning, Evie.” Alec did the same thing.
I guess I hadn’t been as stealthy as I thought. I cleared my throat before mumbling my own “morning” and shuffling into the kitchen.
At the fridge, I frowned. Alec had called me Evie, and he hadn’t sounded pissed off or hostile at all. In fact, his voice had that honey quality I craved like an idiot. It was so contradictory to his behavior earlier that it was confusing the shit out of me.
Again, I put all my focus on food instead, pulling a bunch of stuff from the fridge for scrambled eggs. I’d cracked a dozen eggs into a big bowl when Ethan came into the kitchen.
“Morning!” He grinned widely.
The two at the table grunted in acknowledgment. Ethan planted a kiss on my cheek, replaced the fork in my hand with a fancy whisk, and started chopping vegetables, chattering about the omelet we were apparently making.
Josh joined us not long after, giving me a kiss and making coffee. Since I’d started staying over, a shiny new espresso machine had appeared in the butler’s pantry. I was never without a good latte anymore.
No one spoke about the heavy shit for the next half hour. We expertly ignored the shaky camera-phone footage of ourselves playing on the muted TV as we ate the omelet and sipped our coffees.
As I finished my latte and dropped my dishes into the sink, Tyler cleared his throat, closing his laptop.
“Eve, in light of the events of last night, I’d like you to consider moving permanently into our place.” His voice was even as always, his hands clasped on top of his laptop. But the slight tightness around his eyes gave him away. He was worried about my response.
Ethan’s head snapped up, looking from Tyler to me as a huge grin spread over his face.
Josh nodded. “I was going to suggest the same thing.”
I leaned back against the sink, gripping the edge of the bench on either side of me. I was trying so hard to ignore all the things threatening to tear us apart; I hadn’t expected that to be the first thing he raised. I hadn’t even thought about it.
“None of you have even asked me out properly, yet you’re asking me to move in?” I joked, trying to buy myself time.
Instead of taking up my teasing tone as he usually did, Ethan fixed me with one of his rare serious looks.
“I think we both know I was never pretending, baby. I’m yours through and through,” he declared without a hint of doubt, his big shoulders rolling back.
I couldn’t help looking over to Josh as an unfamiliar emotion threatened to choke me, the smile falling from my face.
Josh smiled at me with his knowing look, answering my unasked question, “Me too. Goes without saying.”
I looked back to Tyler, and he beckoned me to come away from the sink and rejoin them. When I did, he wrapped his warm fingers around mine. “If words of commitment are what you need, then, yes, I’m in too. Mind, body, and soul. I just want you to be safe, and since Zara . . . I don’t like the idea of you staying in the res hall alone.”
I didn’t like the idea of being alone either. I never wanted to feel alone again.
“You know about Zara?” I asked.
“We saw her at Christine Anderson’s house when we arrived.” Alec broke my flimsy bubble of pretending he wasn’t in the room. “She wasn’t tied up or locked in a basement, so we figured she had something to do with your abduction. According to reports from my team, she and the senator are the only ones who got away—with the help of Zara’s parents. We’re trying to track them down.”
“Shit.” I pulled my hand out of Tyler’s and wiped it across my eyes. Talking about Zara was making it all come back. Betrayal was the worst kind of . . .
“And just so it’s clear”—the hard edge in Alec’s voice had me lifting my head to look at him—“I want you here just as much as the others. Don’t let me stop you from moving in here. I said I would fix things, and I meant it.”
“Oh, was that you fixing things this morning?” The snipe was reflexive, born out of the need to protect myself emotionally from Alec’s behavior.
“What happened this morning?” Tyler frowned, looking between us. He didn’t like not knowing things.
“Dude,” Ethan said, “you slept through a lot.”
“Evie . . .” Alec’s voice was soft, his eyes pleading. Something clenched deep in my gut, but I wasn’t ready to let him off the hook.
“You basically pulled the same shit you did that night in Tyler’s study. You know how much that hurt me.” I crossed my arms and stared him down, challenging him to disagree.
With a deep sigh, Tyler dropped his head into his hands, running his fingers into his messy hair and leaving them there. “We can’t keep doing this.” He spoke to the table. “It’s getting dangerous. Everyone else knows now anyway.”
The rest of us shared confused looks. He was talking to himself, but he wasn’t making a lot of sense.
“Gabe?” Josh leaned forward, but before he could formulate a question, Tyler jumped up out of his seat, coming around the table to stand in front of me.
“Enough is enough,” he declared in a louder, confident voice. I stood up a little straighter. His shoulders were back, his face determined as he grabbed my face in his hands and kissed me firmly.
I made a muffled sound of surprise, and then my eyes closed of their own volition, my hands lifting to rest on his hips.
He pulled away just a fraction, his lips not even an inch away from mine.
“Let it flow, baby,” he whispered, his warm breath washing over my face.
Then his lips were back on mine with a renewed intensity. One hand threaded into the still damp hair on the back of my head while the other circled around my back, pressing our bodies firmly against each other.
I wrapped my arms around him and completely dropped my mental barriers, letting the Light flow freely. It always came most easily when one of them was kissing me—when all my logic went out the window, chased away by the heady feeling at the base of my spine.
Tyler pushed his tongue into my mouth, and I moaned softly, his hard chest pressing against my breasts. With a new wave of desire, a fresh wave of Light came pouring out, and he moaned in response.
“Uh, guys?” Ethan’s voice only just managed to penetrate the fog of lust Tyler had so expertly got us lost in. With a few more soft kisses to my swollen lips, Tyler pulled away but still held me close.
“My ability is not dangerous.” He spoke at a volume the others could hear, but his gray eyes focused on mine. “But it can be hard to live with sometimes. I know so many things I’d rather not know. Sometimes I’ll ask an innocent question, and my ability fills in the answer in ways
I don’t expect. It can be a burden carrying others’ secrets.”
I frowned, not sure where he was going with this, but didn’t interrupt. I ran my thumb across his cheek in what I hoped was a soothing gesture and waited for him to continue.
“So when I know that someone has a secret, something they don’t want to talk about, I try my best to respect that. I don’t ask them about it because I know they don’t want me to know.”
“Oh, shit.” As usual, Josh was the first to figure out what was going on.
“I’ve respected your privacy.” Tyler looked at me pointedly. “I’ve tried to be there for you in the hope that you would come to trust me enough to tell me yourself, but you’re more stubborn than I anticipated.”
His mouth quirked up just a fraction, but my eyes widened as I realized what he was doing.
“Shit! Tyler, no!” I injected as much steel into my voice as I could, my shoulders tensing as I pushed him away. He let me put a little distance between us, but his hands came to rest lightly on my hips.
“Eve, we’ve come so far, the five of us. We’re getting closer and working as a team more every day. But this thing between you and Alec, it’s hanging over us like a cloud. Shit’s getting really serious, and we just can’t afford to have any more surprises. Not ones we can prevent. No more secrets.”
“This is none of your business, Tyler.” Outrage surged through me, my breathing erratic for all the wrong reasons now. But I couldn’t seem to make my hands leave his shoulders. I was scared of this thing coming out—this thing festering between Alec and me. I was scared of what they would think of me, how they would react. But even as my anger rose, I knew it wasn’t Tyler’s fault for pushing it. I needed a push.
“It is though.” His eyes were sad, as if part of him wished that weren’t true. “I’m yours. Don’t you get it? This isn’t some human relationship with human rules. I’m a Variant and you’re my Vital. Your relationship with each of us doesn’t exist in a vacuum, separate from the others. We’re your Bond—we’re all yours, and we’re all in this together. When something affects you, it affects us all.”
He was right. The connection we had was far beyond anything that could be described adequately with words. Each one of them was a part of me, and I hadn’t known how incomplete I was until I found them.
Tyler had stopped speaking. He’d forced out of me the means by which he could get the information himself, but he was still giving me a chance to tell it first. He’d nudged me to the ledge, but the final leap was mine to take. I just didn’t think I had the words. I wasn’t sure I could get them all past the emotions lodged in my throat.
I looked up at his patient gray eyes, took a deep breath, and nodded once, giving him permission to finish what he’d started.
“Alec,” he said immediately, not giving me a chance to change my mind, “the night of the invasion, when you and Eve—”
“No!” The sound of a chair scraping on the floor was accompanied by Alec’s firm voice. “Tyler, I refuse to speak about this.”
Neither one of us was looking at Alec. Tyler was focused on me, and I was returning his gaze, even though every fiber of my being wanted to avoid his eyes.
“When you and Eve were in my study, alone”—Alec started cursing, but Tyler just raised his voice and kept speaking—“what happened between you two?”
“Fuck!” Alec stormed around the table, coming to stand right next to us. I could see him out of the corner of my eye but kept my focus on Tyler.
I watched his face closely, making a conscious effort not to cringe at what I knew must be running through his head. His eyes darted back and forth, and his mouth dropped open slightly. I replayed the main highlights of Studygate in my head as I watched him: Alec holding me and telling me I wasn’t alone, the matter-of-fact way he’d said he hated me, the frenzied make-out session on the couch, my incredible orgasm, Alec rejecting me, my outburst and the smashed glass all over the floor.
With a sharp intake of breath, Tyler’s focus slammed back into the present moment. I dreaded to see what look would cross his face now. Would he be disgusted with me, disappointed in me, pity me, or some other unfathomable combination of awful things?
But none of that came. Instead, he released me, only to push me behind him and give his full attention to Alec.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he seethed, and I braced for Alec’s response, sure he would explode and start shouting and throwing things. But he remained silent.
I leaned around Tyler to peek at him. Alec was breathing hard, his head hanging low and his shoulders slumped. Ethan and Josh were both staring at us with wide eyes, out of their seats and looking as if they were poised to move at any moment.
“So many things,” Alec finally replied, his voice quiet and a little shaky. “I fucked up, OK? I didn’t even realize how badly I fucked up at the time, but I know now. I’m an asshole.”
I snorted and rolled my eyes. I’d called him that as I threw the glass paperweight in the general direction of his head. I’d been calling him that in my head and out loud for months.
“What were you thinking, man?” Tyler’s shoulders were tense, one arm still holding me back protectively. He was keeping me away from Alec. He was protecting me from Alec. His ability had shown him not only the facts of what had happened but the truth about how I felt—about how Alec made me feel most of the time—vulnerable.
“I wasn’t.” Alec finally looked up, pleading. “You’ve never been depleted like that. You don’t know what it’s like to feel like you’re fading into nothingness, and then you feel the most incredible thing—it’s what sunshine would taste like, what warm summer nights smell like, what it feels like to be wrapped up in a warm blanket, naked. And it’s the only thing keeping you tethered to this world. And then you start to get some conscious thought back, and you realize all those things are her. It’s fucking impossible to resist.”
I didn’t know what it felt like to be on the other side of Light transfer. I knew what it was like for me, but I’d never asked what it felt like for them.
“That’s not an excuse.” Tyler echoed my thoughts.
“Can someone please clue us in on what the fuck the three of you are talking about?” Ethan’s booming voice could never be ignored, but I knew him well enough to hear the note of insecurity in it. He didn’t like feeling left out. His big arms were crossed over his chest where he stood, frowning at us.
Josh had sat back down, but he was watching us intently too. “Yeah, even I’m having trouble keeping up.”
Tyler rubbed his temple. “I don’t even have words . . .”
“Now you know why I refused to talk about it.” I stepped around Tyler and fixed him with a firm look.
Alec sighed and turned to face the table. He still hadn’t looked at me, and it was beginning to piss me off. “Look, I’m not proud of it, OK? But that night—”
“No. I’ll tell it.” It was time to put my big-girl panties on anyway. I was sick of people speaking for me, and I was getting sick of Alec’s voice. It sounded like honey—gentle and genuine—which told me he was being honest, but I wasn’t ready to forgive him. Not that he’d even asked for forgiveness.
Calling up every scrap of maturity I could muster, I took a deep breath and spoke in as even a voice as I could manage. “You both know what happens when you idiots overuse your abilities and I have to juice you up.” I looked between Josh and Ethan, fighting the urge to look down out of embarrassment, to hunch my shoulders, to fidget. “You know how drawn we are to each other. The Light pushes me . . . and the urge to just . . . get closer is . . . So I’m sure it’s not a surprise that things got physical between Alec and me. But things went further than they’d gone with any of you at that point, and I’m not even entirely sure how, because I tried to . . . and then . . . Fuck, I’m mumbling!”
No one was saying anything, giving me the time I clearly needed. I took a breath and crossed my arms. It made me feel a little stronger.
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“OK, basically Alec got me off, and then—”
“You two had sex?” Ethan’s voice was higher pitched than I’d ever heard it. Josh’s eyebrows shot up. I could almost see the gears turning in his head.
“There is more than one way to get a woman off, little cousin.” Alec chose possibly the worst thing he could say at that moment, and he said it with that cocky grin, the one that turned one corner of his mouth up.
Fucking asshole. I stared at him, my mouth agape, my brain trying to process that he’d actually said that while also trying not to think about all the other ways he could get me off. I was decidedly pissed off at him, wanted nothing more than to be away from him, yet I was getting turned on at that mere suggestion of feeling his hands, and other things, on me again. I hated it. But that’s what the Light did. That’s what it meant to be in a Bond. You were drawn to each other no matter what.
“You did not just crack a joke.” Tyler groaned.
“Dude, what is wrong with you?” Josh bugged his eyes out at him.
“I thought we already established that many things are wrong with me. I was trying to lighten the mood.” Alec groaned. “It came out before I could think about it. I can’t fucking think straight when she’s around.”
“Enough!” I banged my fist on the table. Like the mature adult I was trying so hard to be, I ignored that he’d just blamed his stupid comment on my presence and got back to the task at hand. “I am speaking. No more interruptions.”
I fixed each of them with a serious look, and they all looked appropriately chastised. Even Alec.
“As I was saying, he got me off—and I’m not going to elaborate on the details. Then when I tried to return the favor, he pretty much told me I was worthless and ran out of the room.” Josh and Ethan were staring at me with horrified expressions on their faces. “He rejected me twice that night, but none of that hurt as bad as when he told me he fucking hated me.” I ground the last part out between clenched teeth and felt the sting of tears. Blinking furiously, I finally allowed myself to turn away from them and toward the picture windows, staring at the heavy clouds hanging over the massive yard.
Vital Found (The Evelyn Maynard Trilogy Book 2) Page 30