I pulled it out, seeing Silas’s name.
“Shit,” I muttered under my breath.
Poison stalled on her way past me, whirling. “Seph? Did you just use a naughty word?”
I made to shove my phone away but it vibrated again. Quillan this time. They had felt my freak-out.
I licked over the cut on my lip. “I bit myself,” I said by way of explanation.
She knew that something was wrong, but she was too smart to push it right now, so she passed it off as a joke.
“I knew there was a dirty-mouthed little dictator under that adorable exterior. Where do you keep it all hidden?”
“My boobs.”
She threw her head back and laughed. Mike coloured. I didn’t dare look at Danny, but it was all worth it to make Poison laugh like that. She reached out and patted my head, and I knew I was forgiven for ruining her date. I played it cool for ten minutes, taking my turn bowling and answering Danny’s polite questions just as politely as he had asked them, and then I escaped to the bathroom. Unsurprisingly, Poison followed me in.
“I’m sorry,” I said as soon as the door was closed. “I’m so sorry. I told them the address. I just… I—”
“It’s okay.” She soothed my stuttering with a smile. “I saw the way he looked at you. This whole thing was Callaghan’s set-up wasn’t it?”
“Yes… but I can tell that Mike likes you. Maybe they came up with the idea together?”
“Maybe.” She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. Callaghan must be pretty into you though…” She pinched my cheek. “Don’t worry, cupcake. I’ll forgive you this time.”
I wrapped my arms around her middle and then pulled back quickly to check my phone.
Why are you having a panic attack in a bowling alley? Silas.
I frowned, typing a message back, and Poison glanced over my shoulder.
You’re tracking my phone?
His reply was instant.
Is that a serious question?
Poison groaned. “Tyrants.”
I’m fine. I’ll tell you when I get home. Noah and Cabe will probably be here soon.
Not probably. They’re outside.
It was my turn to groan now. I navigated to Quillan’s text.
Tell me that everything is okay or I’m sending in Silas.
Everything is fine! I sent the text as quickly as I could and we hurried back out into the bowling alley. Unfortunately, Cabe and Noah had already found Mike and Danny. They were all sitting down, postures rigid, not speaking.
“Ah, damn,” Poison muttered, taking my hand and dragging me towards them.
“Why did I think I could do this?” I whispered to her as we drew near.
“Because, like me, you’re fabulous,” she shot back, before making her voice a little louder. “Cousins! How nice of you to drop in. You could, hypothetically, take a day off babysitting your sister’s virtue. Hypothetically.”
“Sure,” Cabe smirked. “But it’s much more fun this way.”
I glanced at them, wary because Cabe’s eyes weren’t sending me happy sparks and Noah looked downright grim.
“I feel like I skipped out on my parole officer,” I said uneasily.
Cabe’s expression softened. “You don’t like us hanging around?” He placed a hand over his heart. “I’m wounded.”
“You’re up,” Noah said.
I looked at the screen, realising it was my turn. I had to move back to my seat to grab my bowling ball, and that meant making eye-contact with Danny. He was unreadable. I clutched the ball with shaking hands and bowled it straight into the gutter. I stood there, watching it crawl to the other end as Noah materialised behind me.
“This was a bad idea,” he whispered. “Maybe we shouldn’t have come…”
“It’s fine.” I turned and glanced up at him. “I’m glad you’re here.”
His golden brows inched closer together, his ocean-bright eyes drawing into a scowl. “You’re beating yourself up over this.” He sounded frustrated.
I didn’t have anything to say in response to that, and the others were watching us, so I walked away. I glanced at the u-shaped cluster of seats as I returned, worrying my lip again. The action caused a twinge of pain and so I stopped, moving away from the row of seats Cabe and Noah had claimed, walking past Mike and Poison and settling next to Danny.
I can do this.
Maybe I couldn’t do it half an hour ago, but I could do it now.
Probably.
Danny straightened—apparently surprised—and shot me a hesitant smile. It was sweet, and maybe a little scary, because Danny was not a sweet-looking guy. He had too many piercings, too many tattoos, and he had licked my blood. Licking a person’s blood was not a sweet thing to do.
Cabe tilted his head, watching me, but it wasn’t with annoyance over the seat that I had chosen. He was concerned, trying to hide it behind a casual smile. His sunlight was starting to glint back into existence, so I wriggled my fingers at him.
“Hey, Lucifer.”
“Hey, Seph.” He chuckled.
We were supposed to go to a restaurant after the bowling alley but everyone seemed to unanimously come up with a half-hearted excuse about having too much homework to do. Poison and Mike wandered outside to talk briefly, and Danny pulled his keys out of his pocket, swinging them around nervously.
“Walk me out?” he directed at me.
I gave a stiff nod and followed him, not making eye-contact with the others. I knew it was too much to ask that they didn’t follow me, but when I looked back and didn’t see them anywhere, I was thankful that they were at least making it subtle. Danny approached a sporty, navy-blue convertible and pressed a button to unlock it. He opened the door and then slid himself behind it, leaning against the frame.
I wondered, briefly, why he was working at a tattoo parlour if he had the kind of money that would be needed to buy expensive cars.
“Well that was awkward,” he said.
“Sorry.” I was twisting my hands, looking at the ground.
“If you don’t look at me I’ll have to touch you,” he warned.
My head snapped up. His words were a harsh sort of shock, at complete odds with the calm that my common sense was attempting to instil, due to the ease of his tone. His grey eyes showed equal parts amusement and frustration.
“I don’t really date.”
“I can hear hearts breaking across the continent,” he teased. “But you’ll forgive me if I keep trying?”
“I’m not angry at you,” I hedged. Please stop trying.
He sighed, his hand touching the side of my face. Unease prickled across my skin, forming a hard lump in the back of my throat. I fought not to pull away. Or throw up.
“You’re a damned snow globe, you know that?” He shook his head. “I really want to crack the glass. Shatter it, actually. Pulverize it. But then you’ll spill out everywhere. You’ll slip through my fingers, and I won’t ever get a chance again.” He sounded sad.
He slid into the car without waiting for a response of any kind, and I stumbled several steps back as he turned over the engine and left the parking lot. I was left with his words ringing around my skull. He had managed to say something entirely disturbing, yet the ease with which he delivered it—the softness of his voice, the slow blink of his eyes—was leaving me confused.
Crack.
Shatter.
Pulverise.
I shuddered and fell back another step, and then another. Maybe I was afraid because he was touching me and he wasn’t in one of my pairs. He wasn’t gay like Clarin, either. Or a girl, like Poison. He was interested in me. Maybe that was it.
I spun and hurried back to the bowling alley. I passed through the doors and an arm hooked me, drawing me to the side before I could go any further. I allowed myself to be pulled into the darkness behind a large advertising banner to the left of the doorway. It was a very short corridor with a cleaner’s closet at the end, and the banner spanned almost the entire
width of the doorway.
Noah’s arms wrapped around me tightly and I glanced out of the tinted glass ahead of me to where I had a very clear view of the car park. Cabe stepped into my vision, his eyes on the side of my face.
“He touched you.” He was using the hard voice that he reserved for special occasions.
Noah grunted behind me, and I took it as some kind of agreement. Noah could be a bit of a caveman sometimes. I reached for Cabe’s hand and pressed it to the side of my face. My stomach lurched all over again, but it wasn’t as bad as when Danny had touched me. At the brush of Danny’s fingers, I had fought against the contact with everything inside me. My body wanted to pull away, and my mind had flinched in instant rebellion. With Cabe touching my face, and Noah still hugging me from behind, there was a swell of happiness rooted to the centre of my chest, trying to grow, inflate, until it was all that I could feel. Unfortunately, there was a bigger part of me, the part that truly belonged to me, that was pushing it back. Smothering it.
As always, I began to grow dizzy.
“Now you’re touching me.” I tried to placate Cabe, though I couldn’t help but add, “You overprotective, overbearing, over-the-top, controlling, stalker.”
Noah’s breath teased my hair into a flutter against my neck as he laughed. They knew they were that bad. They didn’t care.
Cabe’s eyes melted into a smile, and for just a moment, I was held in awe. Cabe had eyes like toffee stretched out in front of the flare of the sun, honey-golden, sometimes brown and sometimes amber. They usually shimmered with light, or sparked with emotion, and right now the effect seemed to be turned up to its fullest potential. He moved in, pressing me between them. I fought the urge to reach down and wipe the uncomfortable itching from my stomach, but I knew that it would insult them, so I stayed still, trusting that they wouldn’t do anything. Not in a bowling alley. Not when I had asked them for time to figure things out.
“Silas is freaking out,” Cabe said lowly. “You won’t be able to win him over with those doe-eyes.”
“Sure I can.” I let my head fall back, trying to relax enough to focus on the conversation instead of the itching, which was now transforming into a steady burn. Odd, that didn’t usually happen. I turned my face to the side, finding the crook of Noah’s neck. It was warm, and I smelled the innocent allure of scented smoke, something that always seemed to cling to his skin—though I’d never actually seen him burn incense. Maybe it was a foreign cologne.
Noah’s arms tightened around me, his body shifting behind mine.
“We should probably get her home,” Cabe muttered, studying my expression. “I think she’s touched too many people today. She’s straining right now.”
I pulled back from them, realising what I was doing. The last time the bond had strained me, I had… well, it had been embarrassing. I quickly jumped away from them and ran for the door, Noah’s astonished laugh billowing behind me. I found Poison waiting in her car, texting absently.
“Hey!” I tapped her window.
She cranked it down. “Hey there, munchkin. I’m heading home. You stay safe, yeah? Don’t let the big bad wolves eat you alive, you’re like, the the sweetest friend I have, and your boobs are so nice to sleep on when I’m drunk.”
I laughed at her, ducking through the window to plant a kiss on her cheek. I was used to these obscene sentences from Poison, that’s just how she was. She didn’t change for nobody.
“Alright,” I agreed. “I’ll keep your pillows out of trouble, but your fixation on my boobs has got to stop. It’s weird.”
“Appreciate it!” she shouted after me as I turned away.
I sat primly in the front seat all the way home, determined not to crack. I would not embarrass myself like I did the last time. Unfortunately, Cabe was right, and the same hazy, needy force was gradually settling into me, trying to define me. I could feel it tugging, coaxing, whispering… and it got much worse when I saw Silas and Quillan. They were both standing on the front porch like they had been waiting hours for us to get home. Silas’s frown was dark, and surprisingly, Quillan wore a matching one. It arrested me for a moment, and it wasn’t until Cabe’s hand fell to the centre of my spine that I continued my slow march forward.
I was almost too scared to look at them.
“Angel,” Silas said.
I looked up then, sucking my injured lip into my mouth. It was throbbing, because I couldn’t seem to leave it alone. Every ten seconds, I was trying to bite it again. Maybe it had something to do with the strain. I flicked my eyes to Quillan again, and almost flinched.
“We felt it.” Quillan was unhappy, his words full of trepidation. “What happened?” he asked.
I couldn’t do this. The strain was killing me. I couldn’t face their inquisition right now. I walked to Quillan and grabbed his hand, pulling out his pointer finger and holding it up, before my face. His lips twitched. I released him and he held the finger up. It was what he used to do when I messed up, or did something stupid. Behind me, Cabe laughed. Quillan wasn’t jealous like Noah and Cabe. He wasn’t… whatever Silas was. He was concerned for me.
It was enough.
I spun quickly and ran into the house.
“The bond is straining her again,” I heard Noah explaining.
“That only happens when she has too much contact with people,” Silas replied. “Who was she with?”
“He didn’t touch her,” Cabe lied. “We were watching.”
I came up short, having never heard them lie to each other like that before. They hid things all the time, especially from me, but they never outright lied. Not to each other. Another shudder passed down my spine and I looked back. Silas turned at the same time, meeting my eyes.
He saw it all; I know he did. His eyes stared right through me and somehow looked all the way back to the bowling alley. He knew that Danny had set up the whole thing, had touched my lip, had tasted my blood. What am I thinking? Of course he didn’t know. He wasn’t psychic, and that wasn’t an easy conclusion to come to.
I quickly moved back to him, almost pleading him with my eyes. There was a low sound vibrating from his chest. I had a sudden, unwelcome vision of all the blood that had marked his hands in the past: simply because people had touched me. I hadn’t wanted to know about it when he had confessed as much the night we spoke in his Jaguar, and I didn’t want to know about it now. But that didn’t mean that I was going to stand back and turn my head the other way while he did it again. My hands clenched into uncertain fists by my sides, and I saw the others watching warily from behind him. I took a wobbly step forward and pressed my face to his chest, hearing the thump of his heartbeat. He seemed to be tensing every single muscle, and it was like leaning against a boulder.
“Please,” I whispered against the soft material of his shirt. I was suddenly confused about why I was leaning on him. Was it to calm him down? Or was it because I was about to pass out? “Silas.”
Gradually, painfully slowly, his arms came around me. At first, I thought that he was going to hug me, but his arms banded across my back and he hoisted me up until my feet were dangling and I could see over his shoulder. The other three looked on with varying degrees of wariness as he began to carry me into the house. When they started to follow us, I gripped Silas’s shoulders nervously. The house was quiet and I knew that Clarin was at a party tonight—as he was most nights. I suspected that Tabby was lurking around somewhere, and that she would appear when we least expected it. I had grown used to her by now. She was sugary sweet and maternal most of the time, but every now and then a flash of madness would shine through. I liked her most of the time. The rest of the time she scared the hell out of me.
Silas walked to his study—a long sunroom connected to his bedroom, filled with computer screens and anonymous, flashing machinery. I didn’t really understand the technical paraphernalia that took up most of Silas’s time. He jostled me, switching his grip to my thighs—somehow without dropping me—and pulling my legs around
his as he sat down behind one of the desks. This ensured that I was still facing over his shoulder, my legs dangling either side of his hips. I suspected that he didn’t want me to be able to see his computer screen, but the position was encouraging much more bodily contact than I was used to: especially considering that it was Silas. He had kissed me once, hugged me once, and intimidated me with his body around a thousand times.
This was… new.
His thighs were tense beneath mine, the thick leather seams of his jacket pressing uncomfortably into the softness of my front. When I tried to shift away a little bit, one of his hands returned to my back, forcing me flush again. Either he didn’t want to see my face, or he didn’t want to chance that I’d see what he was doing… and neither option seemed like a good thing. The others fell about the room in an imitation of unaffected nonchalance, with Noah and Cabe pulling up chairs and glancing at Silas furtively, while Quillan leaned back against one of the desks facing me, his eyes on the back of Silas’s head.
Since leaning back wasn’t an option, I tucked my chin awkwardly onto Silas’s shoulder and hooked my arms beneath his, trying to get comfortable. My dress wasn’t agreeing with my position, so I pulled my cardigan around like a blanket, shielding the fact that my dress was riding up to an indecent length.
I couldn’t feel Silas’s emotion very clearly. He was much harder for me to interpret than Quillan, whose spikes in temperament came only when he was affected heavily by something—yet they all came in the same wave of feeling, rushing into me and then slowly dissolving. Silas’s emotion, on the other hand, usually revealed itself to me through his heartbeat.
It was erratic right now, a jittery pattern that skipped through my chest, flirting with the steady rhythm of my own heartbeat, palpitating a terrible song of disconcerting seduction. Once again, the beast inside Silas was calling to me, silencing reason and murmuring wordless promises. Dark promises that shouldn’t have appealed to me.