Lead Heart (Seraph Black Book 3) (13 page)

We both knew that she was lying.

“I love you,” I replied, squeezing her extra hard. “Tell me something before I go. Something to distract me.”

“My name isn’t really Poison,” she answered automatically. “I was born Annabeth Hailey Singala, and on my birth certificate, next to ‘Father’, is the word
unknown
. When I was six, my mom took me to Seattle and I ran away to hunt down my father. I knew it was Weston: she had told me, early on. Or… well, I suppose she had
cautioned
me rather than
telling
me anything. But I didn’t listen to her. I wanted to find my father. I was sure that he would want to know me. Anyway, I turned up at the Shangri-La and his security team detained me. When they found out who I was, they laughed at me. I yelled at them that I had a right to see him, and I didn’t stop yelling until the man himself stepped out of the hotel. He took one look at me, said the word, “poison,” and got into his limo, driving out of my life before even giving me a chance.

“I was an idiot, back then. I thought he was giving me a name. I thought he had all of my baby clothes in a shoebox beneath his bed, the name ‘Poison’ stitched onto each item. I thought he considered me his long-lost child just as much as I considered him my long-lost father. I went home and told everyone that my name was Poison. I insisted on it. I wouldn’t answer to anything else.”

Poison trailed off, and I realised that I was now comforting her as she sagged against me, releasing a story that I was sure she didn’t often relive.

“I waited years and years, but he never came for me. He kept having bastard children and I started hearing about all the others. Clarin had always been a brother to me, but he had rejected Weston as his father long before me. When the Adairs and Quillans broke away from Weston and came to Maple Falls, Weston finally came to me. He wanted information on his
real
sons. And that’s when I realised… I wasn’t
his
Poison. I was his
poison
. Me and all the other bastards: we were his hatred manifest: the reason he kept having children; the evidence of his failure, whatever the hell he was trying to achieve.”

Poison didn’t cry, but she released a shuddering breath before pulling upright and away from me. She had just told me something monumental about herself, and though I knew I shouldn’t, I wanted to return the favour. I wanted to let her in.

“Me,” I told her quietly, pulling open the door of Quillan’s car. “He was trying to achieve me… or the solution to me. I’m the Voda Heir.”

I closed the door on Poison’s stunned face, unable to prolong what I needed to do any longer.

“I know you’re there,” he rasped. “I can feel you in my mind.”

Lela was fighting to be heard again. The memory of a voice inside my head had taken me by surprise—not because I hadn’t been thinking about Jayden and Silas and the day everything changed, but because I had been studiously ignoring that particular memory with a fervour that could only be described as obsession. That was life, though; tripping you up with the very details that you tried so hard to overlook. I pumped my legs faster, trying to outrun the demons in my mind, the slap of my sneakers against the pavement a blessed reminder of where I was. I held onto that pounding sound, clutched it desperately… but it slipped away all the same, and Lela came rushing back.

I couldn’t think of a way to communicate with him. I closed my eyes and embraced the shudders that wracked through me. It always happened after Gerald visited my room at night. They originated from somewhere deep inside me; blossoming out to rattle my bones and clatter my teeth together. I whimpered, my head falling against my raised knees. I wanted to submit to the panic, but I didn’t want to release the boy.

Desperately, I pushed the panic attack aside, and clung to him.

Tears started to blur my vision, taking me away from the sidewalk and trying to yank me backwards, into a dream, into a memory, into an acceptance that I fought with every ounce of bitter strength that I could conjure. I stumbled, falling onto the grass.

“Can you hear me? Can you speak?” His voice was faint, fading away as he slumped backwards onto the table, his head rolling to the side. “I don’t think you know what you’ve done, but it doesn’t mean anything good for you.” He laughed, but the laugh ended on a gurgling cough, and then he was groaning. “God, you have no idea. But it’s okay. I’ll find you, and I’ll make sure you forget everything. I won’t let Weston hurt you.”

I ground my fists into the grass beneath me, lifting my arms back and punching… punching… trying to end the pain. I was fighting against an invisible foe that resided somewhere inside me. It was that beast again; that beast that waited within the cage of my heart, tapping impatient talons and scoffing at my desperate grasps for ignorance. With every passing day, it grew bigger, stretching out my limbs, testing the capacity of my body. Trying to settle in, to claim me.

His breathing turned laboured, and he wavered out of focus for a moment. I despaired losing him, but I couldn’t cling onto him anymore, because he was even slipping away from himself. He muttered something else, but I didn’t catch it. His voice was too low. I clutched at my trembling knees.

My knuckles threatened to turn to mush as I attacked the ground, grinding my flesh against dirt and rock and whatever else. The bandage on my right hand was trailing in the ground, stained by sweat, soil, and blood. I couldn’t see past my tears and I couldn’t breathe past my hatred, because I
hated
myself. I hated that hint of something that tried to edge into my mind, trying to force me to accept what I had done.

Trying to make me own my pain.

My mistake.

“Say it again,” I pleaded quietly.

“Silas… My name is Silas.”

“Holy crap—” a hand lit upon my shoulder, tugging, and I slumped back to my heels, kneeling there on the ground unseeing, lost in feeling— “Ah… Miss Black? Can you speak to us? What happened?”

I blinked through my tears, turning to see one of the bodyguards that Jayden had tasked with following me. For a brief moment, I had forgotten all about my plan. His partner was hovering behind him, and they both looked partway frightened and all the way uncomfortable.

“Take me to him,” I said, knowing that the words sealed my fate even as they fell from my lips. “Take me to Jayden.”

The guy closest to me seemed to hesitate, but then he drew back and pulled a cell phone out of his pocket.

“She wants to see you,” he said, after a few moments. “Should we—oh, okay. Yes, we’ll wait. I’ll text you the location.” He ended the call, sent off a message and folded his arms, rocking back on his heels. “He’ll be here soon. Your hands are bleeding.”

I didn’t bother looking. I just nodded and turned the other way, sitting down by the side of the road to wait. I must have been running pretty hard because the two guys were covered in sweat, and there was a dull pain resonating from my legs. My pants were splattered with mud, and my shirt was stuck to my torso. I had left Quillan’s Porsche in a random neighbourhood with no significance to me, my plan or where I was going. Inside, there was a note for the guys. It said simply:
I’m sorry
. Words were cheap, though, and nothing I could ever offer them would be enough. I had formed the bond and deserted them. I was doing the one thing that they had tried so desperately hard to avoid.

I was leaving them and turning myself over to Weston. Even though I should have been consumed by guilt at that fact, I was only sorry that I hadn’t done it sooner. Now that I had taken the plunge, the path ahead was finally clear.

I had done the right thing.

When Jayden finally arrived, I cast my eyes over the grey Mercedes, recognising it as a replica of the previous Mercedes that I had crashed into a gully in an attempt to run away from him.

“Sorry about your other car,” I said, as he walked across the road toward me.

He looked down at me, his mismatched irises glinting with curiosity as they travelled over my damaged hands, to the evidence of my tears, and then down my mud-splattered legs.

“You should have called sooner,” he said.

“Sure,” I replied, taking his offered hand and allowing him to pull me to my feet. “My self-preservation mechanism got in the way. Useless thing, really. But I’ve taken care of it now… where are we going?”

He laughed, leading me to the car and helping me into the passenger seat, not that I needed help. I was upset, angry, and at the end of my tether—I wasn’t an invalid.

“We’re going to my house. You chose a good location to break down, I don’t live far from here.”

“Hmm,” I hummed beneath my breath, opening up his glovebox as he got into the driver’s seat. I looked under the seat, and then in the centre consol.

“What are you looking for?” he finally asked.

“The candy,” I said. “You lured me to your car, and now we’re going to your house. So… where’s the candy?”

He shook his head, but he was smiling as he pulled back onto the road.

I eventually settled back into the seat, jiggling my legs restlessly. “Just for the record, I don’t like you, and I don’t trust you.”

“But you need me,” he countered.

I grunted in reply and spent the next ten minutes debating whether to use the valcrick to heal my hands or not. Jayden and Weston had both witnessed my inability to heal myself from the bullet in my shoulder, so maybe it was better that I pretended to still be unable… just so that they didn’t use me as collateral again.

“You still can’t use the valcrick?” Jayden asked, catching me staring intently at my own hands.

“No,” I lied easily, shoving the door open before the car had even stopped moving.

I walked toward the front of Jayden’s house, trying to take in everything at once. It was tiny compared to the usual Zev mansions that I was used to. The front yard was small and well-contained, leading up to a white-painted porch. His front door was blue, and I found that mildly amusing. He unlocked the door and motioned me to enter, so I slid past him. The house opened up into a bare-as-bones living room, with a single chaise pushed beneath one of the windows, and a few antique-looking side tables scattered about the room. Some of them held books and some of them held struggling potted plants.

“You should really water those.” I pointed at one of them: a fern with drooping, almost brown leaves.

“Yeah.” Jayden scratched the back of his neck, his cheeks gaining the faintest hint of colour. “I’m not here much.”

He turned right and I followed him down a short hallway, into a simple kitchen with blue stone bench tops. He filled up a glass with water and disappeared—I assumed to go water the fern. I stuck my hands under the tap while he was gone, ignoring the sting as I tried to wash away the mess of dirt and blood. When I was done I turned around to find him right behind me. I jumped, ready to fend off an attack, but he was holding up a hand-towel in one hand and a first aid kit in the other. He frowned at my reaction.

“Thanks,” I muttered, trying to take the towel from him.

He pulled the towel out of reach. “Have a seat.” He motioned to a stool on the other side of the counter. “I’m not going to hurt you, Seraph.”

“It would be nice if I believed you,” I said, moving to the stool and holding my hands out.

“When have I ever given you a reason to
not
believe me?” He dried my hands with surprising care before rooting around in the first aid kit and extracting an antiseptic cream.

“How about when you took away Noah and Cabe’s memories of…” I quickly snapped my mouth shut. He knew too much already; he didn’t need me confirming any of it out loud.

“Of your bond?” He smiled, uncapping the cream and dabbing it onto my knuckles. “Is that what you were about to say?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “Weston forced me to do that, though he didn’t realise what he was asking. You see,
someone
managed to plant the idea in his head that the Adairs and Quillans were forging some kind of a relationship with you just to keep you away from him, to punish him for what he had done to Silas. Silas was the one who eventually offered a solution to the Klovoda’s problem of how to bring you back into the fold, after all.
He
was the one to finally connect with you, to earn your trust. Miro was doing it as well, but he wasn’t reporting back to the Klovoda. He was just doing it because he wanted to. Weston assumed that it was all to spite him, personally. Because you were so important to him. If I had truly wanted to do you harm, I would have taken away Silas’s and Miro’s memories too.”

“Okay… you said you wiped Cabe’s and Noah’s memories because Weston
forced
you… couldn’t you just say no?”

“He forced me the same way he forced Silas to shoot you. Well… actually, not entirely the same way, since Weston’s ability doesn’t work on me. But when he tries to use it, I still have to do what he wants, otherwise he’ll find out that his ability doesn’t work on me.”