Lead Heart (Seraph Black Book 3) (23 page)

“What have you done?” Quillan asked from the doorway, his voice steady. I had always loved the sound of Quillan’s voice, but on this one occasion, it seemed to seal my fate, and I hated that.

I drew away, retreating to a corner of the office to give myself the space I suddenly needed. I could feel their attention on me, heavy and fearful, and I tried to block it out, my fingers curling over the windowsill, my eyes screwing shut.

“The messenger put a bomb around my neck,” I said, my eyes trained on inconsequential details in the landscape beyond the school as I sorted through details that I could share and details that I couldn’t share. If we were in Quillan’s office, which I suspected that we were, there was a good chance that the messenger had snuck some kind of recording device in at some point.

I continued carefully. “He gave me until midnight to leave Maple Falls—”

“The room isn’t bugged.” Quillan spoke lowly, apparently reading my mind. “I combed it just this morning.” He was still using that tone of voice that dropped dread into my stomach. “You should have
told
us, Seph. You should have told… me.”

I could hear his quiet footfalls as he moved closer, and then I could feel the heat of his body hovering right behind me.

“I couldn’t.” The two words sounded strangled, and I cleared my throat, trying to speak normally. “I couldn’t. You would have stopped me. You would have tried to come with me. He’s never tried to kill me before. I… we… I couldn’t risk his reaction.”

I spun around, facing Quillan directly. His dark eyes were heavy and guarded, the usual drag of his heart was painful as it slapped against me, a physical reminder of how much I had hurt him, or maybe how much he had been hurt in general. I hated that I had contributed to it.

“I would have done it anyway,” I said. “I had to save Silas. You know I did. We all did, and this was the only way.”

“It’s not saving anyone if Weston figures out what you are. He’ll blow that pretty little head of yours right off your shoulders before the messenger can so much as reach for a detonator.”

I was aware that Quillan had a point, and I was aware that his intention hadn’t been to compliment me, but… he thought I had a pretty head?

Not important right now!

I shook my head a little, pushing back the strands of hair that spilled over my face. There was something seriously wrong with me if I was getting hung up on
that
fact to the exclusion of others. “Weston’s not going to find out. I know how to keep him out of my head.”

“
Dammit, Seraph!
” Quillan jerked away from me, turning and slamming his fist into the wall.

I was too shocked to act, so I simply watched as he picked his arm out of the debris and leaned his forehead against the damaged wall, breathing deeply. I had never seen him lose so much composure.

“You don’t
know
how to keep him out of your head,” he continued. “You tried something once, and it worked. That doesn’t mean it’ll work every time. All Weston needs is a
hint
of the truth, and we’re all dead. All of us. The Klovoda can’t save you from him, he’s the
Voda
. They might not agree with everything he does, but they can’t control him. Nobody can.”

“The messenger put a bomb around her neck,” Noah said, his eyes on Quillan. “She had to leave.”

“Don’t you stand up for her,” Quillan snapped, pointing a finger at Noah. “You feel guilty for the way you’ve been treating her and for everything you’ve done, but don’t let that cloud your judgement. She should have told us.”

I frowned, looking between the two of them. I saw the guilt that flashed over Noah’s face before he hung his head.

“You’re angry at me,” I declared, “so
be
angry at me, not him.”

Quillan pulled away from the wall and stalked over to me, forcing me to fall back a step until he had me caged against the window, though not an inch of him was touching me in any way.

“I…” He worked his throat, trying to get the words out, his eyes growing darker until his pupils seemed to blend into his irises, opening a chasm fathomless enough for me to tumble through and never see the light of day again.

Fear
. It took me too long to recognise the emotion, and as soon as I did, I immediately lost my fight. Quillan was scared for me; so scared that he didn’t even know how to tell me, or how to conduct himself, and that was a first.

“It’s okay,” I whispered, reaching up to touch his shoulder.

At the brush of my fingers, he pulled in a deep breath and hooked an arm around my spine, pulling me up in a hug that I was sure he had intended to be a stern sort of acknowledgement that he was glad to see me safe. I slipped my arms around his rigid shoulders, threading my fingers into the wavy strands of hair that had been cropped short to the back of his neck.

“Give us a minute,” he grumbled.

I heard the sound of the door opening and closing, and then Quillan was pulling my hands away and setting me back on my feet.

“You can’t touch me like that,” he said warily.

I frowned, shoving my hands into the pockets of the workout pants I had borrowed. He followed the movement, running his eyes over my clothing as though only just noticing that I wasn’t dressed normally.

“You stayed at Le Château?” he asked.

I nodded, staring at my sneakers while I waited for another lecture. “I’ll be staying there from now on. Tariq too.”

He sighed, reaching out for me again. I wanted to heed his warning and respect the distance that he was trying to establish between us, but the second he pulled me back into his arms, I was clinging to him again. He jostled me higher, his one arm banded around my back again as he caught my chin with his free hand, lifting my face up.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m feeling a little out of my element. I hate that you’re there with Weston, but I’ll worship the ground you walk on for the rest of your damned life, because you put yourself in danger to save Silas. Nobody has ever done that for him. If I didn’t love him so much… I think I would be jealous. Maybe I am. I don’t know.”

I could tell that he was about to set me down again, so I tightened my hold on him, burrowing into the warmth of his neck and drawing comfort from the way his arms tensed just enough to draw me in closer.

“I stole you, Miro. I stole all of you.” It was the first time I had acknowledged it out loud to any of them.

“We know,” he replied gently. “Silas told us.”

“I don’t deserve you.”

“We don’t deserve you either.”

“You deserve the Atmá you were born with. She probably wasn’t anything like me.”
You probably wouldn’t push her away
.

“I don’t doubt that. Nobody in this world is like you. It frightens me. I’ve lost someone before, and it hurt more than anything I’ve ever felt. I suddenly went from bringing a woman flowers to laying them on her grave. I thought I would never be that close to anyone again… and here you are. Incredible, independent, and so
goddamn
soft-hearted. You’re an experiment in contradictions and every time you show me something new, it becomes clearer and clearer that there will never be another person in the world like you. I’m terrified, because you’re something I crave now. I need to know more about you, I need to see you home safe every day. I need to see you shuffling for coffee every morning. Just to see you. Just to know that you’re still there. That you haven’t disappeared on me yet…”

He paused, and I could feel the breath that trembled through his lungs, spilling warm air onto my exposed neck. I remembered Noah and Cabe telling me about the girl that Quillan had dated, the one that Weston had apparently paid to keep Quillan occupied so that he wouldn’t go searching for his Atmá. I hadn’t thought about the ramifications of that woman dying, but obviously Quillan had been unaware of the deal between her and Weston at the time of her death; it was only something that he had learned later. Her death must have crushed him. It must have made him feel as though he wasn’t allowed to love: he had known all along that his Atmá was an impossible option thanks to Weston, but even a normal partner had been denied him.

“You won’t lose me,” I promised him. “And I know that I mean something… different… to you, but however you chose to have me in your life, I’m not going anywhere. You won’t be visiting my grave ever. I refuse to die.”

He chuckled, stepping forwards until the backs of my thighs hit the edge of the desk, and then he lowered me slightly so that I could sit there. His leg brushed against my knee, and I instinctively parted my legs so that I could continue to hug him. He stepped between my legs and passed his hands down my spine, making an annoyed sort of sound at all the cloth that bunched into his grip.

“This stuff doesn’t fit you, you need your own clothes. You can’t defy death wearing Cabe’s hand-me-downs.”

“Sure I can. Immortality doesn’t discriminate based on looks.”

He laughed again and the door swung open, admitting Noah and Cabe. They both seemed surprised at my position on the desk, but didn’t comment on it. Quillan pulled away, passing a hand over the back of his neck as he moved to sit beside me on the desk instead.

“So,” he said, his tone back to normal. “What do we do now?”

I sat in the back of the limousine with Quillan and Cabe on either side of me and Noah directly across from me, looking uncomfortably sandwiched between the two silent giants. Hans cleared his throat as the limousine pulled away from the campus and I folded my arms stubbornly at the look he was giving me.

“What?” I asked. “You didn’t have to come with us. You could have waited until I was done.”

Hans frowned and looked back to the window, but then Andrei cleared his throat. I sighed, rolling my eyes at the man. They were clearly upset because I hadn’t bothered to tell them about the plan.

“We’re headed to the hospital,” I said, looking from one to the other to catch the way they shifted about, pretending they hadn’t been demanding answers with their passive-aggressive throat clearing since they had gotten into the car.

“Why isn’t Seph sitting here?” Noah suddenly spoke up, apparently made even more uncomfortable with the recent shifting around. “She’s the little one.”

“She wanted to sit with us,” Cabe replied.

Noah grumbled something and then shot out of his seat, plucking me from mine and taking my place. He tugged on the back of my shirt and I landed in his lap sideways, my hand catching onto Quillan’s arm to steady myself.

“She can’t sit in the middle like that.” Cabe pulled the back of my shirt out of Noah’s grip and slid me from Noah’s lap to his, putting my back against the window. “She’ll fall or something.”

Noah shrugged, picking up my legs and laying them over his lap, looking out the window. “Problem solved.”

The silent giants pretended not to watch, and I knew that my reputation with the Adairs and Quillans had filtered down through the ears of the Klovoda agents. I considered standing up and taking Noah’s vacated seat, but Cabe’s arm had slipped around my middle, his hand gently splaying along my side, and I was suddenly too comfortable to move. It was odd to be in his embrace without the scratching feeling making me wary of our contact, but I was curious enough to not want the space I had been so desperate for the year before. It made me wonder, once again, whether Cabe and Noah had managed to get all of their memories back or not, but I couldn’t ask in front of the silent giants. Cabe rested his other hand on my thigh, his palm facing up, and he ducked his head briefly, burying his nose in my hair.

“You used my shampoo?” He sounded shocked. “When?”

Quillan looked over at us, his expression unreadable, and I realised that my sneakers were resting in his lap, spilling dirt onto his pants. I tried to move them off, but he draped his forearm casually over my shins and turned toward the front of the limousine, dismissing us.

“There was some in your old bathroom,” I told Cabe.

“At Le Château?”

I nodded, and Cabe made a humming sound in the back of his throat. “You stayed in my room?”

I nodded again, and Noah suddenly released a deep, rumbling laugh. Even Quillan’s lips were quirked into a smile.

“What?” I asked.

“We all used to crash in that room most of the time,” Cabe admitted, pressing his nose into my hair again so that his voice was muffled. “If you look under the bed you’ll find two single mattresses.”

“Ah.” I clucked my tongue lightly in understanding, shifting a little bit so that I was more comfortable. “It was the closest room. First door.”

“The rooms are situated by order of importance,” Cabe said, a laugh in his voice.

I was distracted from my laugh by Noah’s fingers plucking at the pants I was wearing. “We should stop by home on the way and pick up our stuff.”

“
Our
stuff?” I asked.

“Surely you didn’t think that you and Tariq were going to go back to Weston’s lair all on your own, did you?” Disbelief marked Noah’s tone.