Shit. I scrub a hand down my face. What are we even still doing? It’s been a week since the circle where his curse was lifted. And more and more each day, I’m starting to think Sabra was right. About everything.
“Did you look any more today about getting a job?”
“Yeah!” he said, still all but bubbling over with enthusiasm. “And I was thinking. This compound and all the surveillance work you do for your grandfather. That’s gotta be a job for more than one person, right? I’ll stay here. And help.” He grins so big I can see he really does see it as a perfect solution. Especially when his expression softens. “And I could stay with you.”
I start to back away from him. After the night I’ve had, this is too much.Too much! Too much, too much, too much.
Averting my eyes from Layden’s bright, simmering-with-life gray ones, I murmur, “I’ve got to go wash my hands,” and leave the room.
But Layden has never met a boundary in his life, or if he has, he was asleep too long in the forest to remember them, so he follows me to the little bathroom off the living room.
I start to close the door, and he says, “I thought you said you just needed to wash your hands.”
“Goddammit, Layden, it’s like you’re a needy little puppy that’s not housebroken yet! Just give me some fucking space!” I slam the door in his face. And then immediately feel like a piece of shit.
I look at myself in the mirror.
You are a piece of shit. You killed a man tonight.
The reflection shows what Lucian saw. Pretty, petite. Long black hair. Pointed chin. Big, full cheeks. Full lips.
Tonight was supposed to be just a routine visit with a statesman. I’ve met with him before. There’s new legislation that’s come up, and Vlad needed votes to go a certain way.
But as soon as I got in the room with the man, he started trying to maul me, telling me how much he loved me, how devoted to me he was, and how I was all he could think about. He wanted to leave his wife and kids for me. I shoved him away, but he wouldn’t stop. He’d do anything I wanted, he said.
Which is when I should have mentioned the voting Vlad wanted from him.
Instead, I screamed at him that I wanted him as far away from me as possible. I can’t stand them when they get like that, all but suffocating me.
I turn on the tap, bending over to splash my face with water a few times before standing back up and looking into my eyes again. Water drips down my face and the front of my hair. I get these frightening flashes as if the liquid were blood. The blood I longed for so long in the dark.
“You sure got what you wished for,” I whisper.
“Phoenix?” Layden knocks on the door.
I close my eyes, except when I do, all I can see is the statesman saying, “Of course, Mistress!” and spinning exactly where he was standing in his third-story office building where we were alone after hours. And then he sprinted full speed toward the window of his office, splitting his head open on the glass and plummeting to his death three stories below.
ELEVEN
PHOENIX
I shovethrough the bathroom door, the image of the politician bursting through the glass to his death still on repeat in my head.
“Hey, are you okay?” Layden asks, puppy dog eyes concerned.
I glare at him. “Why are you still here?”
He looks at me, confused. “What do you mean?”
“Cut the shit. You’re free.” I fling out a hand. “So go be free. You can go anywhere. Be anyone you want.”
“I like who I am,” he says. “And I don’t want to be anywhere but here.”
He steps forward, and I step back. He stops, frowning, but doesn’t stop talking. “Phoenix, I feel like I really have gotten to know you over these past few months. You’ve become closer to me than any other person I’ve ever known in my life. I don’t want to go anywhere else because I?—”
I throw up a hand to try to stop him from saying it, but it doesn’t work.
“—I love you.”
