I frown. “Which was?”
“That maybe Skye’s not the problem here.”
Fucking hell.
Once again—what the fuck is going on here?
I shift in my chair. Cassian still has that intensity about him, like he’s waiting for us to circle back to Death and all its unfairness. I don’t want to. Not now.
So I cop out. Push my palms into the armrests and stand.
“I’m going after him,” I say.
“Don’t,” Cassian warns. “We’re not finished here.”
I look down at him. The angle still makes it feel like he’s kneeling before me, his neck craned, throat bared. The line of his jaw catches the light, sharp and clean.
He looks so handsome I almost don’t want to go.
But the things he wants to talk about are too heavy for one sitting.
“I know,” I tell him. “But right now it’s all too fresh. We need time to think.”
“And Talon doesn’t?”
That stops me.
“He does. I just—” I exhale. “I don’t like it when people walk away angry. Especially when I don’t even know what I did wrong.”
Nathaniel exhales through his nose. “If you’re going after him, tread lightly. He’s… not mad in the way you think.”
“Right, you keep saying that, and yet here I am with zero actual explanation.”
“Skye—” Cassian starts.
“I’ll be back,” I cut in, already moving toward the hall. “We’ll figure something out once I’m back, okay? All of us.”
No one tries to stop me anymore.
I suppose the two of them aren’t all talk about freedom and justice. They live by it too.
The hallway smells faintly of smoke before I even round the corner—a good or bad sign, depending on how much of Talon’s temper he’s burned off out there.
The front door is propped open, cold air leaking in. He’s outside on the cracked front steps, hunched forward with his elbows on his knees, a cigarette dangling between two fingers.
He doesn’t look up when I step outside, but his shoulders tighten.
“Didn’t know you smoked,” I say.
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Little Grim.”
I take a few steps down, the chill biting through my blouse. The days are getting colder by the day. Now I get to feel it.
Kind of makes me wish I didn’t.
Now’s one of those times.
“Well, I know you hit Nathaniel in the face. And that you’re angry at me for a reason you haven’t shared.”
