She took a step into the corridor.
Then, in a flash of movement, she was gone.
CHAPTER 23
She was an idiot.
He told her he was dangerous. He told her she was in over her head. That they wouldn’t be friends or anything else.
She hadn’t believed him.
She still didn’t want to believe it, and yet she had just seen the evidence of his duplicity with her own eyes. She felt it. His guilt seeped into her through their blood bond, feeling as thick and black as oil.
He had betrayed her.
Lied to her.
Used her.
A choked sob caught in her throat as she moved through the Order’s mansion as a flash of motion. She hurried back into the lovely guestroom Tavia Chase had provided for her, feeling on the verge of a hideous emotional breakdown.
She couldn’t let herself fall apart. Not here. Not when Rafe and the rest of his comrades were likely down in the command center’s meeting room roaring with laughter over her naïveté. Her blind stupidity.
Her foolishness over allowing herself to fall in love with him. To bind herself to him in blood.
Oh, God.
She needed to get out of there.
She slammed the door behind her and held it shut with her mind as she hastily changed out of Carys’s borrowed clothing and back into the grime-caked black turtleneck and jeans she had arrived in. She didn’t want anything she had been offered here. Not the comfort or the clothing, not the kindness, either. Not if it had never been real.
She especially didn’t want a damn thing from Rafe.
“Devony.” He stood on the other side of the closed door.
She heard him try the latch, heard him swear when he couldn’t break through the mental hold she had on the lock.
She just wanted to get away from him.
“Leave me alone.”
“I can’t do that.” He tried the lock again. Another vivid curse. “Damn it, Devony. I need to see you. I need to talk to you, and not through this door.”
She didn’t answer. Mostly because she didn’t trust her voice. She could feel the sincerity of his plea. He was hurting too. He felt as terrible as she did. Maybe more, although how that could even be possible she didn’t know.
Good. Let him hurt too.
“Go away, Rafe. Go back to your friends. I’m leav—”
The thick wood panel burst off its hinges, exploding inward. Rafe stood in the ruined doorway, a look of pure anguish on his handsome face.
“Devony, I’m sorry.”
“For which part? Pretending we were some kind of team when you were still part of the Order? Stealing weeks of my work and my father’s, and then giving it to your comrades behind my back?” She shook her head. “I guess you learned a few tricks from that mole from Opus, didn’t you?”
“That’s not fair,” he said calmly. “Even if I do deserve every bit of your anger.”
She refused to be lulled by his sincerity now. Not when he’d left her in this same room only an hour ago with the ache of his guilt carving a hollow in her breast. He’d made a mistake with her. That’s what he told everyone in that room just now.
