by Somers, Jill
“And then you came here, and you were the cool kid again.”
Trent crossed his arms. Watched her closely. “Am I, though?”
She saw his point. If ‘cool kids’ existed here, they probably weren’t Trent types. Her constant rejection of him probably didn’t help, either. Was it possible that Trent’s whole confidence act was just that—an act?
“Trent,” Angel said, shaking Quinn from her line of thought. “Your turn. You can challenge Quinn back, or you can challenge someone else.”
“I’ll tell you what,” Trent said, eyeing Quinn sharply. “I’ll challenge you with the simplest question: If I were to ask you something as personal as what you just asked me, would you really tell me the truth?”
She could so easily lie, just as he was suggesting she would. But why bother? He had called her bluff, and left such an easy note for her to take her leave on.
“No. I would lie.”
Everyone stared at her wordlessly.
“To most of you,” she muttered, so quietly that she was pretty sure Dash was the only one who heard it. Good, she thought; he was the one it had been intended for. Their eyes met briefly, and suddenly she had no desire to be in that circle of people any more. She just wanted to be with him.
“Drax,” she said, stepping forward to hug her friend. “Congratulations again. I think this is where I take my leave for now. You know, given that now everyone knows I’d cheat at the game anyway.” She winked at him, and luckily, he only smiled back at her. She might be a terrible person, she reckoned, but at least those who were getting to know her weren’t surprised by it any more.
Before anyone could boo her, and before Dash had too much time to think about what she had whispered, she headed for the roof.
It was bold, she knew. It was still early in the party, and in the brief time she had been at the party, she had probably pissed everyone off. But in that moment, all she cared about was him. It was rare for him to be in the state of mind that she wanted him to be in, but when he was, it electrified her.
Once she got to the roof, she pulled the pack of cigarettes out, contemplating it. It had been thoughtful of Hank to stock up like that. But did she really want one? If she knew she’d be alone up here—if it was about taking a break from people—sure. But she felt confident that Dash would join her. And if he was with her, she wasn’t sure she needed the nicotine. He brought something different to the table.
She set the pack of cigarettes down on the edge of the railing, deciding to let the evening pan out a little more before partaking.
“Something wrong?” he asked as he climbed up. She turned to him, wondering what he meant, and grinned when she saw the two fresh whiskies in his hands.
“I’m referring to the pack of cigarettes you just put down,” he explained, coming over to her and handing her the drink. She gulped down the remainder of her first drink before accepting it.
“Oh, that,” she said, locking eyes with him. “I don’t think I’ll need them. I have a different sort of craving tonight.”
Her words had exactly the effect she had wanted on him; she could tell the moment they escaped her lips.
“So, strip story,” he said, flustered. “That was your invention?”
“People on this island have a lot of secrets. Thought maybe they just needed the right incentive to share.”
“Even though you won’t share with them.”
“With them,” she emphasized. “I think we both know I can’t seem to avoid being honest with you.”
He watched her. Satisfaction and intrigue sparked in his eyes. And that same vulnerability that she knew sparked in her own eyes whenever he was around. “So, you’re not opposed to playing with me,” he inferred carefully.
“I’m game if you are.”
“Okay. Me first, then. A question for you.”
She waited, breath held. She had known this was what she had signed up for—she had learned by now that the only way to drive their connection forward was with honesty and vulnerability—and yet, she still loathed it.
“You said you never fell in love,” he told her. “I found that hard to believe. At the very least, someone must have fallen in love with you.”
She considered this. Besides Kurt, who had loved her so much it got him killed, only a few others had truly fallen for her. It was easy to hook them, to manipulate them, but she drove most of them crazy with rage before they had the chance to really love her. But did she want to share this story with him? Was it worth folding so early?
She decided to give this one to him.
“There was a boy or two. I guess you could say they fell in love with me. Couldn’t tell you why. I never really gave anyone any reason to.”
It clearly wasn’t enough for him. “Why not?”
She sighed. “Look, you never knew your dad. I knew mine. And he was there, crushing my chances of ever loving or trusting a man, long before any other man was. By the time the boys started coming around, that hope was long gone. Besides, I was on the run before I ever started dating. If I was with someone, chances were, I was using them. For a safe place to sleep, for protection, for whatever.”
“And the boys? Were any of them using you?”
“Just about all of them, I’d imagine. But none of the boys I was with were ever really the problem. It was mainly the guys I wasn’t with, if you know what I mean.”
She could tell from his expression that he didn’t fully understand the implications of her words. But he also seemed to understand that that she wanted to say nothing more on the matter. She didn’t care to relive her experiences as a young, mostly powerless teenage girl, being beaten, shot at, and even violated by the men who hunted her. Besides, in her way, she didn’t regret any of it happening. It had made her as strong as she was now.
“Okay,” he said, easing up on the pressure. “Your turn.”
She considered her first question carefully. Despite how personal her answer had gotten, his first question had been mostly harmless. She knew she needed to ease into her questions, not start with the ones she really wanted to know. She started with an easier one that paralleled his own question—one she was still curious about.
“You told me about the love of your life—the one I sort of remind you of but sort of also don’t remind you of at all.” She ignored his eye roll at this. “But you also said that was many years ago. Has there been no one since then? All these years on the island?”
He had seemed nervous when she first brought up his old girlfriend, but relaxed once he realized the simplicity of the question. He answered easily. “No, I can honestly say there hasn’t been anyone.”
She watched him, waiting for more, but she could see that there was no more. An until now would have been nice, she mused, but she knew they were both still being careful. A part of her, guilty as she felt for thinking it, was glad to hear he hadn’t ever been in love with Angel. She wondered if he would accept a small follow-up question.
“It’s just,” she said, “the way Angel acts around me—the way she brings you up—it almost seems like there’s some sort of history there.”
His eyes seemed to grow sad at the mention of Angel. “Angel was truly a shell of a girl when she came here. Torn from her family. She was so young—eleven, maybe, and I was only seventeen and still crushed by what had happened with Charlotte. I wasn’t teaching yet, but she made me want to. She came to me for advice, for help, for everything. Maybe I helped her too much, I couldn’t really say. I know that she grew to feel differently towards me than I ever felt towards her. I think of her as a little sister. Someone I will always want to protect, but not love. Not like…” He trailed off.
Quinn didn’t mind him stopping himself. They both had miles to go before they could truly say everything they felt—if that time ever came at all. She also understood what he was saying about Angel. It almost sounded like her relationship with Rory.
He chuckled slightly as he took another sip of his drink. “That sho
uld count as two questions. My turn. I’ve put together some of the pieces of what brought you to Siloh, but it still doesn’t totally make sense to me. The stories say you went into Crowley Enterprises to steal money. You can’t have known Crowley was the director of the DCA—it wasn’t public knowledge; hadn’t been since the last director got murdered by a deviant. It had to have been some kind of setup. But you don’t strike me as an easy victim of a setup. There was a reason they didn’t catch you sooner.”
She stared at him for a few seconds, contemplating her answer. She couldn’t tell him the story. Not that one. Not about Kurt. What could she do? She could either make up a story—which, she reminded herself, he would inevitably sense—or she could remove an article of clothing.
Without a word, she reached for the clip of her bra, snapped it off with one hand, and flipped it out of her dress with ease. She let the bra drop to the ground, grinning at his wide-eyed boyishness. But he regained composure quickly enough, joking, “I was almost disappointed you didn’t answer. Until you did that.”
She smirked. “Happy to help. Now, my turn. Where were you the night of the event?”
His expression became more serious, eyes searching hers. She knew why. He wanted to know why she was asking this question—whether she still believed he had been there with her.
“We had just left dinner,” he told her. “Me, Reese, Savannah, Charlotte, and Ridley.”
“Ridley? You knew him in the real world?”
“He was a close friend of Reese’s back then. He lived in our neighborhood, a few doors down from us.”
She couldn’t recall ever seeing Reese and Ridley interact; it surprised her that they had been close friends.
“Anyway,” he said, “I’m sorry to say, there isn’t that much more to the story than that. Savannah had been meeting with a client and his family—she was a lawyer, back then. I don’t even remember how the dinner went. I was really only paying attention to Charlotte. Don’t even know what happened to the client and his family.”
“And that’s it? You stayed together and waited it out?”
He nodded, eyes sad. “16th and Mulberry was the intersection. Nowhere near a bank. I’ve thought it over many times since meeting you. Trying to imagine some scenario where your memory could be real. I just… can’t think of one. I mean, hell, Quinn. I’d remember you.”
She knew he meant to be flattering. She knew he was trying to be kind. But his words stung her. It was one of the most vivid memories she had, and it wasn’t real.
“I’d like to know, though,” he said. “Maybe that could be my next question… I’d like to know how that night happened for you. What you thought I did for you.”
It wasn’t an easy memory, but given that it was basically a memory of him, she supposed she could share it. “I had just left my dad’s. My mom had just died, and she left me with his address… I hadn’t seen him in years. I went to him, tried to explain that I had nowhere else to go… He slammed the door in my face.”
She kept her eyes cast downward. She knew the pitying expression he was undoubtedly watching her with all too well.
“I left his apartment and started walking, and I just kept walking, trying to find somewhere that didn’t scare me. I made it to the front of this Bank of America building and just sort of camped out there. I remember thinking it was pretty, the way the lights were, and that the people in that area seemed nice, friendly. Like they wouldn’t hurt me. So… I stayed there. I stayed there through the alarms, and the warnings, all of it. And in the thick of it, when I was being trampled by all of these panicked people, when I could barely see or even think straight any more… You came. You didn’t say much. You looked exactly like you do now. You told me that I could trust you, and that you wouldn’t leave me. And you stayed with me until I drifted out of consciousness.”
She could see in his eyes that he was both mesmerized and completely lost. “It just doesn’t make sense. I wouldn’t have looked the way I do now. Even if I hadn’t aged, I wouldn’t have these eyes, wouldn’t be—”
“—a pretty monster,” she finished for him. “I know. Now that I know you, it doesn’t make any sense. Must have just been some kind of strange dream. Some coping mechanism for what really happened.”
He nodded. Eyes sad. Utterly silent.
She knew, from the honesty of that last answer, that she deserved a big question. She decided to ask the question she had wanted to ask to begin with.
“What happened to Charlotte?”
He ran a hand through his hair. He didn’t look entirely surprised that this was her next question. In fact, he seemed emotionally ready to answer. “I’ll tell you. But you might want to brace yourself, because if I’m not mistaken, I think we have a common enemy.”
She waited, intrigued. Could he mean Crowley?
“After the event, Savannah was in denial for a long time. She wasn’t affected, as I’m sure you know. And she refused to accept that we were. By the time she finally realized there was no escaping it, things were getting bad. I’m sure you remember… the widespread panic, the fear of deviants, the resistance fighting back. It scared her. I think more than anything it scared her that we might join the resistance. So she decided to do something about it. She met up with this man—one of her clients at the time. Told him that she had two boys she needed to shield from the world before it was too late. He told her he’d take care of us, he had a place to put us, a place to put everyone like us. And she trusted him. His name was Cole Crowley.”
Quinn’s spine went rigid. Savannah and Cole Crowley, allies? It had always been a fear of hers, yet like everything else about the island, it had never quite added up. Nothing Savannah did ever seemed to add up.
“Everyone trusted him,” Dash continued. “Her. Reese. Ridley. Even me, to some extent. But not Charlotte. She knew what it meant for them to ship us off like that. It didn’t matter to her that he promised Savannah she could be the leader of this new place, that she could run it however she liked. Charlotte knew.”
Quinn watched him silently. It was hard for him to tell this story; she could see it in his eyes. She could see the love for Charlotte still lingering there. She didn’t think she could blame him. Charlotte sounded like a strong, instinctively smart woman.
“Charlotte stayed, and we went. I would have stayed, if I could have. But I didn’t have much of a say in the matter. We kept in touch. As the island became what it is to the outside world—as what we thought of as ‘recruits’ turned into what they thought of as ‘prisoners’—she continued to write to me. Scared and desperate. Eventually she joined the resistance. Before long, she was its leader.”
Its leader… The one deviant who had been more famous than the Siren.
“Blackout?” she whispered. “Charlotte… was Blackout?”
Dash nodded sadly. “It was strange. She was as powerful as you and me, but turning the world black, making her enemies blind, the way they described her… I don’t remember her having those abilities. I only knew it was her from the letters she sent me. She loved the nickname. Never explained it to me, but loved it. She wore it like a badge of honor. Fearless.”
Quinn swallowed. Fearless… the quality he had seen in both her and Charlotte. Blackout had always been Quinn’s heroine, growing up. It was starting to make sense to her, why Dash had resented her so much upon meeting her. After all, that fearlessness had led to Blackout’s infamous death—and the destruction of the entire resistance.
“Crowley wasn’t the director of the DCA at the time,” Dash continued. “But he wanted to be. And the previous director had been killed by a deviant in the resistance only days earlier. So, whatever political connections Crowley used to turn his island into a deviant prison, he used them again. Made some sort of deal. If he could kill Blackout and her associates…”
“…He’d become the new director.”
He nodded silently.
“The way she died,” Quinn said carefully. “They said she was in C
anada when they found her—that she took down an entire US embassy before they got her. Killed hundreds of international diplomats. Triggered the formation of the UNCODA.”
His eyes were dark. “Believe me, I remember.”
“Well… Was it true?”
“What do you mean, was it true?”
“I mean, this is Cole Crowley we’re talking about. He’s insane, Dash. Beyond evil. I wouldn’t put it past him to kill every last one of those people and frame her for it. Think about it. Cole Crowley, international savior.”
She could tell from his expression that this thought had never even occurred to him. “I never wanted to believe it,” he admitted. “That she would kill all those innocent people. I just… I thought the world had changed her.”
“The world changed me,” Quinn said softly. “But I never killed anyone.”
A tear slid down his cheek. He didn’t touch it or acknowledge it. Just seeing it, she felt a tear slide down her own. She wiped it quickly, annoyed with herself for shedding it at all.
Crowley really was their common enemy, she realized. If there was any man in the world who hated Crowley as much as she did, it had to be Dash.
She had more questions. So many more. Were Savannah and Crowley still allies? Was Crowley really okay with them all living in the conditions they were living in, or was it part of some kind of larger plan? What did Reese and Dash know of his plan?
But she already knew the answer she would receive—the same one he and Ridley had been giving her for weeks: You’ll know in good time. She hated it, but she wasn’t going to let it get to her in that moment. She was still getting personal answers out of him—answers to questions she had wondered since she met him. And for the first time in her life, she was enjoying giving someone else answers about herself.