“Shh.You’re all right.” A thick accent warms my ear and I come into myself, feeling the comfort of the bed beneath me and the familiar scent of birch.
Is that Mori? My stomach flips and I become hyperaware of the places his body is touching mine and where his hands are. He draws languid circles on my forearm with one. I realize my head isn’t on a pillow—it’s actually his biceps. His arm is crooked and teasing a strand of my hair around his finger.
“Mori?” I whisper, shutting my eyes and trying to decide if this, too, is a dream. But it wasn’t just a dream, was it? I focus harder.I know those were my parents.It was too real. Too vivid to be only a dream. And if that’s true, it means so are the horrible things I did in it.
“Who else?” he says softly, there’s a weariness in his tone. I wonder how long he’s been awake and has stayed by my side like this.
“What time is it? How did I get—” I stop talking, trying to press my mind for anything that happened after I killed those assholes. I come up blank.
He takes a deep breath and slowly unweaves himself from me. My heart all but stops as he does. My body is already reminiscing the way his chest felt at my back. I firm my lips so he won’t see the disappointment on my face.
Mori leans up on his side and stares down at me. His sage eyes aren’t filled with callous indifference like they usually are, they’re kind. Soft. His pale blond hair tousled and splayed over his forehead.
“Do you remember anything?” He thumbs my cheek, wiping a drop of drool away, I think. A cheeky grin grows on his lips and semi-confirms that it was.
My face flushes and my heart flips.
“I remember them attacking me and then…it was darker outside and they were beaten to a pulp. I can’t account for a lot of that time.” It sounds so innocent when I say it like that. It sounds like there weren’t teeth strewn over the asphalt, and blood and flesh weren’t caked into the pores of the cinder block walls.
“By ‘beaten to a pulp’ you mean that you ground their faces into mush and cartilage against the cement, right?” he remarks flatly.
I sit straight up and give him a reluctant stare. “Itwasthat bad, wasn’t it?”
He smiles grimly and flicks my forehead. “It was.”
“It was so odd, it was like I didn’t have an ounce of control.” My words are so quiet I’m not sure he heard me. I study my hands. They’re so small and seem unlikely to cause such chaos, but I cannot defy the truth of what happened.
Worry blooms inside me. What if it had been someone else? What if it was one of my squad mates or Mori? The thought of attacking him like that makes me feel sick.
Is this how he feels constantly? He’s killed his own partners. How does he live with himself? There’s hardly a shred of emotion that he lets slip through. Does he burn inside? Does he feel anything at all or has he grown cold and dead to the act? He might even kill me.
If I keep this up, Lieutenant Erik might have Mori do it, or even send the Riøt Squad after me.
Mori’s eyes warm with empathy. Admittedly, something I was certain he didn’t have.
“Come with me.” He slides off my bed and slips his casual shoes on.
I follow him, tiptoeing as quietly as I can through our room filled with the heavy snores of our comrades.
When we get into the lit hallway, I look down at my attire. I’m draped in the gray hoodie Mori was wearing earlier today. It goes down past my knees.Holy shit, he’s so much bigger than he looks.I bring the collar of the fabric to my nose and breath in his scent, letting it comfort me.
He stops down the hall and waits for me to catch up, eyeing the way I’m holding his hoodie up to my face. I immediately drop it.
“Do you trust me, Emery?” he says with a tone that suggests that perhaps I shouldn’t.
“Not usually, but considering the day I’m having…” I offer him a wry grin.
He winks at me. “Good. After you then.” Mori looks down both ways of the hall before popping open a vent that is halfway from the showers on one side and the gym on the other.
“Wait, you want me to go inthere?” I whisper shout.
He nods without missing a beat. Damn his otherworldly charm, but he did save me back there, the least I can do is indulge whatever this is.
I crawl in first. It’s spacious in here, enough even for him to fit comfortably. Mori clamps the vent door back down behind us and pinches the back of my thigh to get me moving.
“Ow!” I smack his shoulder. He chuckles in response. My chest lightens as I take him in. He seems so unlike himself right now. Like a completely different person than the grumpy, quiet soldier I’ve come to know him to be.
We round a few corners before a large room comes into view. It reminds me of a sewer tank, the boxy ones that are a junction point for the tunnels to merge into, but it’s dry, only some crisp leaves and spiderwebs litter the bottom. A tall ladder extends to the ceiling where a square hole leads up. There are bars blocking access to it, but Mori walks up to a keypad against the far wall, clearly very familiar with this place.
