Did he think I was disgusted by him? Was I? I guess I was, but only because of what he’d done in the limo. Did he think I was disgusted by our kiss? Wasn’t I? If I was being honest with myself, I wasn’t. I’d enjoyed it and wanted more.
Maybe I was just disgusted with myself. I had no idea about anything anymore. I’d hoped to use the ride back to clear my head, think about how I would broach the subject with the guys, but it was just getting more confusing.
I huffed and rolled my eyes at myself, and they landed on Josh. He was still holding his book in front of him, but his piercing green eyes were on me, his head tilted slightly to the side. He slowly turned his head to glance at Alec before turning back to me, fractionally lifting one eyebrow in a silent question.
Of course Josh had noticed. But this was not the time to get into it, all of us crammed into the limo and the driver within earshot. I shook my head almost imperceptibly. After another curious glance at Alec, Josh returned his attention to his book.
After dropping Dot and Charlie off at their house, we arrived back at the Zacarias mansion, and everyone piled out of the limo. Tyler said he would drive me back to my res hall and started to head toward their garage.
I stayed where I was, my overnight bag at my feet, my jeans and loose-fitting sweater feeling constrictive on my body, the bright sunshine bringing on another headache. “Actually, can I come inside?”
Alec was already at the front door, and as I spoke, he paused and turned around.
“I need to speak to the three of you. It can’t wait.”
“Of course.” Tyler smiled gently at me and picked up my bag as he passed. “We can talk in my office.”
“Everything OK, babe?” Ethan asked as he followed suit.
“Let’s just get inside.” There was a waver in my voice. My heart was hammering, and that pressure on my chest was back.
Josh looked between me and Alec and followed Ethan inside.
“You wouldn’t,” Alec whispered as I passed him.
I paused and looked him dead in the eye, injecting as much steel into my voice as I could. “Watch me.”
I didn’t wait for his reaction before I walked inside, but I heard him following close behind.
We deposited all our bags at the foot of the stairs and filed into Tyler’s office. Tyler leaned on the front of his desk, his hands by his sides. Ethan took a seat next to him on top of the desk, and Josh stood on Tyler’s other side, his arms crossed loosely over his chest.
I walked to the couch in the corner and sat down, wringing my hands in my lap. But that put me below their eye level, and having the three of them looking down on me made me even more uncomfortable, so I stood up. But then I thought, Maybe they should be looking down on me. Maybe that’s what I deserve. So I sat back down. But then I realized that I had no idea how to start, so I stood up again and started pacing the room.
My three guys were all watching me with varying degrees of caution.
“Eve?” Tyler was the first to speak. “You’re starting to worry me. What’s the matter?”
“I’m sorry. I’m just trying to figure out how to tell you this.”
“OK, now I’m getting worried too.” Ethan had one of his rare intense looks on his face. “Nothing good ever came out of ‘we need to talk.’”
Josh remained silent, his focus drifting between me and something by the door.
I turned slightly to see what he was looking at. Alec had followed us in. Almost. He was leaning against the doorframe, eyes narrowed and following my every movement. Why did he always stand in doorways? Was it his agency training, always putting himself in a spot where he could observe the whole room? Or was it just him, always needing to be in a place that allowed him to escape any situation easily? He was never fully in or out.
If his stare was meant to intimidate me, it failed; all it did was steel my resolve.
“Shut the door. This is a private conversation.” I didn’t tell him which side of the door I wanted him on—that was up to him—but he was either in this room, this conversation, or not. I refused to let him be half in and half out.
He stepped inside and kicked the door closed with one booted foot, then gestured for me to continue, eyebrows raised, a hint of a smirk on his face. He didn’t think I would do it. Arrogant asshat.
I turned back to my guys, doing my best to ignore him.
“OK.” I took a deep breath and focused on Tyler’s crossed feet resting on the dark carpet. “I know we haven’t exactly discussed the nature of our relationship yet—like, romantically—but I know enough about Variant Bonds to know where it’s likely heading, and . . .” I blew out a big breath, choking on my words.
“What are you saying, Eve?” There was a slight tremor in Ethan’s voice. Like a coward, I still couldn’t look at him. “You don’t want it to go there? Have we done something to make you feel uncomfortable? God, I knew I shouldn’t have slept in the same room as you last night. Idiot! I swear to god, nothing happened.” He was getting more and more upset as he spoke; it was breaking my heart.
I still couldn’t look at him, but I shook my head, hot tears welling up in my eyes.
“It’s not that, Kid.” Josh—correct, as usual—spoke at last. He too was working at keeping his voice even. “Tell us what you have to tell us, Eve.”
“It’s not that I don’t want you. This. It’s that I’ve done something, and . . . it’s that I don’t think you’ll want me . . .” My words cut out on a sob, and the room fell into silence.
“Eve. Whatever it is, just tell us, and we’ll figure it out together.” Tyler was the only one who still sounded calm. He had no idea what I was about to say, but his faith that we could work through it was unwavering. Another sob escaped me, and I had to fish a tissue out of my pocket to disgustingly blow my nose before speaking again.
None of them were moving to comfort me, and for that, at least, I was grateful. I wouldn’t have been able to do this with them showing me any more of the kindness I no longer deserved.
I knew I had to look them in the eyes when I finally told them, so I lifted my head. Three sets of gorgeous, concerned, loving eyes looked back at me, and I nearly broke down again.
“Alec kissed me.”
Three sets of eyes, now shocked and confused, flew to the man standing behind me.
“Last night at the party, he . . . that is to say, we kissed. I let it happen. I even . . .” liked it. I couldn’t get the last two words out.
“What the fuck, man?” I’d never heard so much emotion in Tyler’s voice. He pushed off his desk, fists clenched at his sides.
“Why would you do that to us?” Ethan had deflated in his spot on the desk, his shoulders sagging. He sounded so hurt. Betrayed.
Josh just glared.
All three of them were directing their hurt and anger at Alec, dismissing my part in it. They assumed I was the victim, the one that needed protecting.
I didn’t deserve them.
“Stop!” I yelled, throwing my hands out. My breathing was coming in pants, and tears streamed down my face, unstoppable now that they had started. “We both did this. I deserve just as much of your anger as he does.”
I wasn’t defending him, but I deserved to have them yell at me, turn away from me, want nothing more to do with me. Coming between them was the last thing I wanted. They had been family since birth, and I’d been around for only a few months. Now they were at each other’s throats.
Before I could say anything else, Josh held his arm out at his side and, with a motion that was now familiar to me from our training, flung it out. A book from the shelf behind him came hurtling out into the room. At first I thought he was aiming for me, but his gaze was still focused over my shoulder, and the book sailed right past me.
I spun around just in time to see it heading for Alec’s face, but instead of whacking him in the nose as it should have, it came within an inch of his head, bounced away, and thudded to the ground. Alec didn’t even flinch. He just stoo
d there, arms crossed.
“What the fu—” Josh’s confused utterance was interrupted by Ethan jumping into motion. He lifted his hand, fingers curled, and a ball of blue fire appeared. This was not the harmless magic trick he flicked around to impress his friends. This was angry fire, dangerous and lethal.
In the space of a heartbeat, he was hurling it at his older cousin, but just as the book had deflected away from him, the fire curved over Alec’s shoulder and sputtered out into nothing, leaving him completely unharmed.
Ethan looked down at his hand as if it were a faulty gadget, his brow creasing.
Alec finally spoke, sounding resigned. “You can’t hurt me.”
“Holy shit,” Tyler and Josh said in tandem from behind me.
My brain had begun to piece things together since the book had bounced off Alec harmlessly, just as all those items had bounced off me in Josh’s room when we’d first met. Just as Ethan’s fire had curved benignly over my skin in the pool.
I was reeling, but when Alec spoke those words, confirming what my brain was slow to articulate, a deep-seated rage from somewhere deep inside my chest began to fill me. It coiled around my insides, memories fueling it as it grew.
When I first saw him at Bradford Hills, naively hugging him, everyone around us had doubled over in pain, yet I felt nothing. When his hand landed on my bare shoulder as we entered the gala, it had felt pleasant, not painful. When he kissed me, he didn’t tell me not to touch him to protect me from his ability; it was to protect himself. To keep me from finding out . . .
The room had gone completely still. The rage was spreading out to my limbs, filling me with explosive energy. This had nothing to do with the Light. This was purely emotional, and it was about to rain down on Alec’s head.
“Wait, does this mean that she’s that . . .” Tyler was struggling to finish a sentence. “I can’t believe I didn’t see it before . . .”
“Yeah. Look—” Alec began.
But I didn’t give him the chance to try to explain himself or justify everything he had done—I cut across him.
“You knew!” The shriek that came out of me was like no other sound I’d ever heard myself make. It was guttural and feral, and it had the desired effect—he stopped talking and regarded me warily. “All this time you knew. From that night in the hospital, you knew we were connected, and you said nothing!”
“Hospital? What hospital?” Tyler asked, confused.
I hadn’t told anyone Alec had stayed with me after the crash, but I couldn’t stop to explain now. I barreled on.
“You knew I was completely alone in the world. I’d just lost my mother, and I thought I would never belong anywhere again for the rest of my life. And you knew I belonged with you, and you said nothing! Instead you actively avoided me, blocking my attempts to find you. For a whole fucking year! Why were you so determined to make me miserable? What did I do to you?”
The last question came out on a sob, but I didn’t let him answer, a new wave of rage edging me on.
“The last few months, you haven’t been staying away from me because you though I didn’t need to thank you. You weren’t avoiding touching me because of your pain ability. Your ability could never hurt me. You’ve been avoiding me like the bubonic fucking plague because you didn’t want me to realize I’m your Vital. Because if I touched you, I would have known.”
I was breathing hard, the words pouring out of me as fast as they were coming into my mind, frenzied and laced with hurt.
“And last night. It was perfectly natural for us to be attracted to each other. It was natural for me to want it, to like it. But I didn’t know that. I thought I was an awful person for having those feelings for you, for going outside my Bond. I felt like the scum of the earth for what we did, when in reality, there was a reason it felt right. And you knew. You let me feel like shit about it when you knew, this whole time, that I was your Vital. You . . . you fucking asshole!”
I screamed the last part into his face, my fists tightly clenched, completely giving in to the rage.
He stared back at me with intense, stormy eyes, his own breathing getting faster, his shoulders tense under his shirt. He kept his mouth shut, but an all too familiar tension entered his stance.
I knew this look. I’d seen it over and over every time he’d bolted out of a room to avoid me. He was about to run. I was done letting him.
“NO!” I declared with more finality in my voice than I knew I was capable of. “You don’t get to leave. You don’t get to run away from me anymore. You don’t get to avoid this clusterfuck you’ve created. I’m the one that’s going to leave now, and you’re going to stay here and sort this shit out with the three people who have been your closest family since day one. You owe them that much.”
I took a deep breath and walked to the door. With one hand on the handle, I said in a much softer voice, “Don’t any of you dare follow me.”
And then I walked out, purposely slamming the door. As I started climbing the stairs, Tyler’s office erupted into a frenzy of voices.
Twenty-One
I pushed open the door to Josh’s room, stepped inside quickly, and slammed it closed, leaning against it as I tried to catch my breath.
It felt good to slam doors.
I didn’t know why I’d chosen Josh’s room. Maybe because it was the first door at the top of the stairs. Maybe because this was where we’d been spending the most time together. Or maybe because this was where it had all started—with a kiss and a room full of floating books.
But that wasn’t where it had started. Like so many other things, that was a lie. It had really started in the hospital with Alec.
Another wave of anger surged through me, and with a grunt of frustration, I pushed off the door and started pacing the room. I was feeling so many things, I had no idea where to start unpacking them. Anger seemed like the easiest one to latch on to. It was safe and defensive.
He had avoided me for a year. A whole fucking year!
And it wasn’t just me he’d hurt. He had deceived the three people closest to him, and in a way, that was even worse. I had only known them for a few short months, but one thing was painfully obvious—they would do anything for one another. Did I factor into that equation now? Logically, considering our Bond, I must, but . . .
I paused to lean against the bookshelf by the fireplace, feeling drained. I had gone from crippling guilt and self-loathing over what I thought was a betrayal to searing rage over Alec’s actual betrayal in under a minute. It was a lot to handle.
My thoughts started down a dark and twisted path—what exactly did this mean about my Bond, about our connection? If Alec could resist it so easily, that meant Tyler could too. Maybe Josh and Ethan weren’t entirely thrilled about it either and were just being nice. After all, they were adamant about keeping it a secret. Maybe they resented my barging into their family, throwing their perfect lives into chaos. Maybe none of them really wanted me around.
Hot tears started pouring down my face again as doubt and worry overtook the anger. There was no denying I was already attached to them. Much of that had to do with our supernatural connection, yes, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t like it. The Light coursing through me had tethered us together, and for the first time since my mother died, I didn’t feel as if I was alone in the world.
But maybe that was an illusion too. If Alec could lie about it, hide it, and keep seeing other women, maybe the strength of our Bond was all in my head. Was I so afraid of being alone that I’d deluded myself into thinking our connection was stronger than it actually was?
I started sobbing, sinking to my knees, a horrible gaping wound opening in my chest. It was that same crushing feeling I’d had in the hospital. And it terrified me.
But something inside wasn’t allowing me to fall apart this time. A surge of anger rose up again, and I growled in frustration and lashed out with both arms, knocking the contents of the shelf to the ground. Josh’s books, CDs and other rand
om items fell in a mess that closely resembled my current emotions: chaotic and haphazard.
The force of my own blow sent me swinging sideways, and I landed on my hands and knees in among the stuff I’d knocked to the ground. I was breathing hard, my vision blurry from the tears still flowing freely through my rage. I tried to take some deep, calming breaths for the millionth time that morning, wiping the tears from my eyes.
As the mess under me came into focus, my attention snagged on something right under my face. A photo album had fallen open, its pages half-covered by another book. I frowned and leaned my head closer, pushing the book aside.
Someone familiar looked out at me from one of the images—the chocolate hair, the dull blue eyes, the black dress with the yellow and red poppies. The very dress that was hanging in my closet; the one I couldn’t bring myself to wear.
I was looking at a photo of my mother.
She was standing outside—smiling, bare feet in the lush grass—in the center of four other young women, their arms around one another’s waists. She must have been around my age when this was taken, maybe a little older.
I pulled the photo out of its sleeve and brought it up to my face, absorbing every detail of my mother’s youthful image as I sat back on my heels.
I missed her so much. Being reminded of her now, when I was already in such an emotional state, was like a punch in the guts. But my brain, always looking out for me with its logical thinking, reminded me how weird this was.
Why did Josh have a photo of my mother in his room? How did they know her? Or, more accurately, used to know her? Because I would have noticed if they’d been around growing up. That’s not something I would have forgotten. Right?
Great, now I was questioning my own memory and possibly my sanity.
No. They had definitely not been around when I was growing up. No one had been around when I was growing up. My mother had made damn sure of that.
A sickening thought hit me, sending a chill of fear down my spine.
What if they were what my mother had been running from this whole time?
Variant Lost (The Evelyn Maynard Trilogy Book 1) Page 25