by May Dawson
“You two fucking idiots are going to get yourselves killed.” Linc’s tone is even harsher, more demanding, than usual. He looks between Eden and Everett with a frown.
It’s painful to watch. He’s scared for the two of them, but all he knows how to do is get angry. It’s leaking out at them because he doesn’t know any other way.
“I think I’d already be dead if Ever hadn’t been there,” Eden admits. There’s bitterness in her tone; she hates to admit it. “The ghosts could hurt me. Hurt us. And they did. It took both of us to fight them off.”
“Luckily, each ghost only had a minute or so of temporality.” Ever leans against the wall, his face exhausted. “Unfortunately, they also had supernatural strength and we never knew when they were going to stop talking and try to kill Eden.”
I rest my hand on Linc’s shoulder, because I can tell he has more harsh words for them otherwise. “We need to get you two cleaned up. Get you into bed to heal. Then it’s time for a reckoning. No more secrets.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Eden says, her voice harsh.
I kneel in front of her, taking her chin in my hands. “I meant it when I said it, Eden. Open book.”
“You first,” she says, a faint smile touching her lips.
“All of us,” I say firmly, glancing around at my former friends. “Someone’s trying to kill Eden. And we’re all going to do what it takes to stop that.”
“I’m happy to hurt anyone who needs hurting,” Linc offers.
“You’re not going to just hurt people,” I tell him in exasperation. “You’re going to talk.”
Linc looks skeptical, and Ever laughs, although that laugh turns into him wincing and grabbing his ribs.
“Let me help you with that ankle,” I say. “I’ve learned a few things. Linc, you take Eden into the shower.”
Linc’s lips knit themselves into a tight line. But he jerks his head into a nod.
“Don’t know when you became in charge around here,” he mutters.
“I’m the least damaged of the four of us,” I shoot back.
Not that that is saying much.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Eden
Lincoln leans in and turns on the shower. Someone tries the handle to the men’s room, then bangs on the door.
“Occupied!” Lincoln shouts. “And that’s not changing any time soon.”
Whoever it was, having heard Linc’s voice, they scurry away down the hall.
“You’re still very scary,” I tell him, and it makes me smile.
He grunts. “You never thought so.”
He comes back to me as steam begins to billow through the narrow tile shower space. Ever limps into another shower.
“You’re a fucking mess,” Lincoln grumbles as his gaze rakes over me, taking in the blue blood streaked in my hair, the tattered blazer and skirt that barely survived the night.
I work the first button apart on the blazer, my fingers clumsy. All my knuckles are split open now, and I broke a few fingers in those desperate fights. Lincoln watches me, then steps forward impatiently. He reaches for the blazer, then he hesitates.
“Can I?” he asks, his voice as harsh as ever. More gently, he says, “Let me help.”
My legs feel unsteady. I nod, letting him take control.
He unbuttons the blazer and slips it off my shoulders, laying it to one side. He finds the zipper on the side of my skirt and undoes it, and his knuckles slide down my hip as he eases the skirt off. Just that faint touch makes something inside me throb, no matter how sore and beaten I feel right now.
I sway on my feet, exhausted from the constant adrenaline of the night’s fighting, and he grips my shoulders, steadying me. Those golden eyes blaze as they look into mine, fierce and magnetic, and for a second, I forget to breathe.
He sweeps me off my feet suddenly, cradling me against his chest. Still dressed in his jeans and t-shirt, he wades into the water, and the shower spray soaks his t-shirt to the chiseled planes of his chest and to his broad, powerful biceps. Even though the water is hot, I shiver for some reason as he carries me into the spray.
“You’re all right,” he mutters as he holds me under the hot spray. I’m not sure if he’s trying to convince me, or himself.
He holds me under the water until I stop shaking, until my body relaxes under the warmth, or in his touch. I’m not sure which. The heat of his body and the heat of the shower mix together.
Then he sets me carefully on my feet, steadying me until I nod. His fingers feel hot against my shoulder, even though I think of angels as running cold, not hot.
Lincoln begins to rub shampoo in my hair, his fingers teasing through the strands. Blood-tinged water runs down my body and pools at the bottom of the shower, then runs clear. His fingers feel good as they tease against my scalp, and then he rubs conditioner into my hair. His touch is rough, much rougher than I am with my own hair because a girl’s not trying to put knots in her hair, but it feels good in a strange way too.
He runs a washcloth under the water and begins to wash my shoulders, then my back. When I hear his faint intake of breath, I remember the ghost that got behind me, and the wound stings as he cleans it.
“I’m going to find who did this to you,” he mutters, “and I’m going to hurt them.”
“I can hurt them myself, Linc,” I promise him.
He doesn’t answer, just rinses the washcloth under the water and then turns me toward him. Gently, he cleanses my face, then my throat, then the front of my shoulders. His jaw tenses as he wipes around the wound left by Richmond’s apparition.
But when he circles my other nipple with the cloth, I inhale quickly, a breath that has nothing to do with pain and everything to do with the sudden ache between my thighs.
He looks up at me, his eyes meeting mine as heat blazes in them. Lust is written plainly across his face, but he kneels in front of me then, pretending he feels nothing. He rubs soap across the washcloth and carefully washes my stomach, his touch tender. I bite my lip as his thumb brushes against my throbbing core as he washes my thighs, but he doesn’t seem to notice as he works his way down my calves. I steady myself with my hands on his shoulders, feeling his powerful muscles shift under my palms.
I can’t trust this, I remind myself.
It feels too good to be cared for. I shouldn’t get comfortable.
Once he’s sure that he’s washed and rinsed every part of me, he wraps me up in a soft, warm towel. “Better, princess?” he asks.
“Don’t call me that,” I warn him.
“You were always our princess,” he says, his lips twisting in a mocking smile. “You couldn’t stay away forever, could you? Now you’re trapped in here with us.”
“You’re trapped in here with me,” I warn him.
He just smiles faintly as he carries me from the bathroom and down the hall. I’m still so exhausted that my head sags against his shoulder.
When he carries me into an unfamiliar room, I look up in confusion.
“We need to have a conversation, all of us,” he says. “Julian is right.”
I glance around his empty room. It’s almost as bare as mine.
“You only said that because he’s not here to hear it,” I accuse him, and he smiles.
“True,” he admits. He sets me gently on the edge of the bed; it’s strange to have Lincoln handle me like I’m fragile. That’s definitely not how he acted during our training sessions.
“The bag’s yours,” he says. “Find something in it. I’ll be back in a minute with those two jackasses.”
He heads out of the room, and it feels too lonely and quiet without him. The bag’s mine? Curious, I pull it open and find it’s filled with clothes. I pull out two cute workout tees and a pair of leggings, jeans, a hoodie, a bunch of tops, two lacy bras and matching undies. I frown at it, trying to make sense of it all, then hurry to get dressed before the guys come in.
Pulling clothes over my bruised, aching body feels like dressin
g a stranger. Being unbreakable is part of who we are as Nephilim. As I recovered from that vicious beating from the Lords two years ago, I hadn’t cared about anything but mourning Elliot and plotting revenge. This time, I feel violated that someone left me wounded. I carry their marks on my skin, and it makes my body a stranger to me.
Lincoln comes back in looking grouchy. “They wandered off. I think you need stitches.”
“I don’t think so,” I say, looking at him skeptically. “I’m a Nephilim.”
“You’re a Nephilim on a regular dose of Break,” he says. He sits down next to me, so close that the mattress dips a bit under his weight, and I slide toward him before I can stop myself.
His golden eyes meet mine. He’s so intimately close to me that I can study all the details of his face: his perfect, gold-tinged skin, his mesmerizing bright eyes, those regular, chiseled features that are so beautiful it’s hard to tear my eyes away from him.
My breath catches in my chest. I don’t know why the hell Lincoln has such an effect on me. It’s not just how pretty he is. I like the heart that beats under his cold exterior.
He grabs the top of my shirt and tugs it down, revealing the gouges on my chest, which are bright blue and look wet again. “You’re about to ruin that bra, and that’s too bad. It’s the nicest thing you own.”
Deep, deep under his cold exterior.
I grab his wrist to push his hand away. “There’s a doctor or someone who can do stitches, right?”
“I’m good at it,” he promises me.
“How?” I ask. “When would you have gotten practice sewing?
“I’m good at a lot of things,” he tells me, unsmiling, with that typical angel arrogance. “The cuts on your back should heal without stitches, but the gouges are pretty nasty.”
“They opened up before,” I admit.
“What were you doing?” he asks, rising to move to his desk. He’s opening up a drawer, his back to me, when I decide I’m not going to answer that.
He turns around, his brows arching. “Oh. In the detention center? That’s dirty, even by your standards.”
I want to throw something at him, but he’s threading the needle he’ll lace through my skin. “Even by my standards? I’ve only slept with Ever in all my life.”
“That’s the most shameful thing I’ve ever heard.” He comes over, needle in one hand, antibacterial swab in the other. “The stitches should come out soon. We do heal faster, at least. Just not instantaneously, as we used to.”
Suddenly, I realize that it would be so much easier to murder Linc and Julian and Ever than I imagined. They’d be easier to kill than any of the other Lords. Imagining that, though, is like a sudden stab of pain in my chest.
Lincoln is watching my face carefully. “You’d think you’d be happy about that.”
I shrug. “I’m just bitter about the Break.”
His lips purse as he moves to sit beside me. “Sure. This is going to hurt.”
“Of course it is.”
Julian comes in then, Ever behind him on a pair of crutches.
“Look what we managed to find,” Ever says, flashing me a grin.
“Where’d you get those?” I ask.
“Storage closet,” Julian says. “Ever sprained his ankle fighting ghosts, and I am never going to stop giving him shit about Casper kicking his ass.”
“He sweet-talked Esther to get them out for us,” Ever says. “I didn’t even know that was possible. It was nauseating.”
“And helpful,” Julian points out.
I scoff. “You seem to have a knack for charming people into doing your bidding.”
“Some people don’t seem to find me charming.” Julian looks at me pointedly, but from his mischievous smile, he knows that’s a lie.
Lincoln snorts and brushes the cold swab over my skin.
I frown at him. “Do you have a painkiller?”
“No,” he says. “You can get one if you go to the real doc, but we grit it out.”
Great. If they grit it out, so will I. But it’s tough, because we’re not used to sustained pain. What was on our special ability is a weakness now that our power has taken away. “You guys need stitches a lot?”
“It’s a reform school,” Lincoln reminds me.
“And here I almost forgot.”
“Julian and Ever can hold your hands,” Lincoln says.
I side-eye him.
As Lincoln looks back at me, curved needle held carefully between his fingers, I could swear he almost smiles for once.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Ever
I sit behind Eden, wrapping my arm lightly around her waist. I don’t want to hold her still, because I don’t think she’ll take that very well, but I will if she needs me.
“Funny,” Julian says to her, “I thought you wouldn’t want Ever touching you. I told him just yesterday that he might be the wrong man to ride to your rescue, given that you hate him.”
Eden seems distracted by the needle in Lincoln’s hand. “Hate is an oversimplification.”
“Lincoln hates Everett,” Julian reminds us all. “But then, Lincoln is a simple guy.”
Lincoln just grunts. I’ve missed my two best friends while we’ve been in here. Originally, Lincoln didn’t much care for Julian anymore either, but he’s softened. Julian is hard to hate.
I’m easy to hate, I know that. Most of the time, I embrace it.
Eden winces as the needle brushes against her skin, and Lincoln raises his eyebrows at her.
“We’ve always thought of you as the true badass of our little group,” Lincoln tells her. “Don’t disappoint us now.”
“Don’t manipulate me,” Eden tells him.
He shrugs one big shoulder. “What goes around comes around.”
But no matter how quick and glib her response, her chin rises in response to his words. She tenses, bites down on her lower lip with her eyes closed. Then as Lincoln sinks his circular needle through her skin, she’s silent. Her body is so taut against mine that her muscles must ache.
“Julian,” she says, her voice ragged, “hold my hands, and then don’t ever fucking bring it up again.”
He laughs at that invitation, but he also pulls up the chair from the desk so he’s to one side, out of the way of Lincoln’s work, so close that his knees brush Eden’s. Julian braces his elbows on his knees, gripping Eden’s hands in his. The four of us are in closer quarters than we’ve been in years.
“Now, talk it out,” Eden forces through almost closed lips, before breathing through her nose as if it takes all her concentration to hold still. I hate that she’s so hurt; I wish I could take the pain away. But all I can do is hold her close.
“You don’t want to distract me now,” Lincoln says.
“Just talk, Linc,” Eden says. “Why are you so mad at Ever?”
Lincoln sighs. His gaze sweeps to mine for just a second before it returns to the needle and the wound. I think he’s not going to answer, but then he says, “Julian and I turned ourselves in. Ever refused.”
I scoff. That’s a pretty simple version of events.
“Why did you turn yourself in?” Eden presses.
Lincoln glances to Julian.
Julian admits, “I wanted the chance to put the Lords behind me. What we did…”
He seems to be choosing his words carefully. Then he shakes his head, as if he’s decided that caution isn’t serving him well. “Look, humans are a mess. But so are we. We don’t need to fix them—we can’t even fix ourselves.”
Julian looks at me over Eden’s shoulder.
“Well, I agree,” I explode. “Christ, you two. It’s not like I’m still one of the Lords.”
“Aren’t you?” Lincoln demands, without looking up from his careful stitching.
Eden hisses a breath, and her head falls back onto my shoulder, her lower lip bitten hard between her teeth. Something protective seizes in my chest, and it makes it hard to focus on the conversation.
�
��I never wanted to be one of the fucking Lords,” I say. “I never had a choice.”
The confession hangs in the air. I didn’t mean to blurt that out. There are things I promised I’d never talk about—not with my best friends, not with Eden, not with anyone.
“What?” Lincoln demands.
“You were Richmond’s fucking coup d’etat,” Julian says, frowning. “He stole the son of two Sent agents away from right under their noses and recruited you into the Lords.”
“Hell, we broke into that Sent field office…” Lincoln adds.
Oh, the memories.
“Yeah, that was the first time I was ever useful to my parents,” I say, my voice coming out bitter, and I try to let the darker memories fade. “I was never truly a Lord, you idiots. I was deep undercover.”
“What kind of fucked-up parents would send their own untrained kid undercover?” Julian asks, his voice full of genuine curiosity now.
“A question I asked myself many times,” I say. “Once I was in, it all got…blurry. I didn’t like what the Lords stood for, but I liked us… it felt like the five of us became a family. Sometimes, what we were fighting for made sense. But I was never… all in.”
They were all-in, and Julian’s cheeks color slightly.
Lincoln snorts at that. “All done, princess,” he says, and at first, I’m not sure if he’s talking to me or to Eden, but then he begins to dab the blood leaking around her sutures with a wet cloth.
“Why didn’t you just tell us that?” Julian asked. “I tried to get you to come in with me. How come you didn’t?”
“Because I was never really supposed to do any time. I was only ‘sentenced’ to keep my cover intact,” I confess.
Lincoln snorts. “The stakes were a little lower for you when we got caught, huh?”
“Maybe not,” I shoot back. “I did end up here.”
The Sent believe there are Lords on campus. The question is how many. Who.
That’s why I’m here, serving my time.
I didn’t exactly get a choice about one more undercover mission, either. There’s no running from the Sent.