“You should’ve waited,” he said again, softer now.
“I didn’t want to watch you pretend I don’t exist,” I reiterated.
“You don’t know who is looking for you. You’re not safe.”
“I’m not a child, Halo. I needed air. I didn’t go far.”
His hands flexed on the table. “I’m trying to keep you alive.”
“Well, you’re killing me slowly. Just so you know.”
He didn’t answer, and the waitress came back with our food, breaking the tension like steam off a plate.
“I just needed to feel normal for ten minutes… I thought maybe we could have coffee and eat breakfast for dinner like normal people do when they’re not being hunted.”
“That’s not what we are,” he said, looking down.
“No,” I said quietly, “but we can pretend, can’t we?”
“Yeah. You can pretend,” he agreed quietly.
He reached over and took a piece of bacon off of my plate and put it between his teeth.
We didn’t talk about the blood.
We didn’t talk about who he’d killed.
We didn’t talk about what it meant that he didn’t want to tell me.
When we were done, he reached for the check before I could, slid a few bills under the edge of the plate, and looked at me likehe was sorry without ever saying it. And I wondered what it was that he needed forgiveness for.
Chapter twenty-six
Halo
“Broken Wing”
Itrainedthenextmorning. It made me feel like my transgression had followed me back to the motel. It wasn’t the same downpour though; this was a softer rain. The kind of rain that makes everything smell like wet pavement and rotting grass. Not violent, just steady.
We didn’t leave the room. I had to extend our stay, much to Eden’s dismay. She didn’t say it, but I could tell she didn’t want to be here anymore. These things took time, and I needed to come up with my plan for taking these men out. I was hoping I’d find something where I could pick several off at once. I wanted to do this as clean as possible, without any loose ends. I needed a plan that didn’t end with Eden in a morgue. That was my priority. I stared at the folder in front of me, thumbing through the things the men had in common. I was looking for efficiency, minimal fallout.
Eden sat on the bed in an oversized sleep shirt that belonged to me, but she’d claimed it as hers. She had her legs crossed, sketching something on a diner napkin. It didn’t look likeanything. Scribbles. Shapes. Her mind working in arcane spirals I hadn’t figured out how to read yet.
“I used to want to be a vet,” she said, like it just slipped out. Like the silence between us had grown too thick.
I looked up. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. I used to rescue cats off the street. Once I brought home a pigeon with a broken wing and kept it in the bathtub.”
I paused, putting the paper in my hand down. That mental image of her, younger and somehow even more innocent, bending over a tub and whispering kindness to a broken thing. It hit me harder than it should have.
“Did it make it?”
She shook her head. “But I tried.”
That did something to me. Twisted a nerve I didn’t know I still had. The simplicity of her answer. The quiet resolve. Of course she tried. That was the thing about Eden, she would always try, even when there was no hope. She would try until she was out of breath, out of options, out of time. Even when she knew it wouldn’t change anything.
“Why’d you stop?” I asked, I couldn’t meet her eyes.
