I’d feel it. Certainly, I’d know if he were…
“I don’t know. That’s all the godspawn said.” His words were calm, apologetic. “I don’t know how or why you’re involved with him, Ar, but he’s dangerous. Going to school with those people doesn’t make you one of them.” At my glare, he said, “Come on; we can’t stay here.”
He led me back toward the main road and glanced both ways before nodding at a waiting taxi. This one was plush inside, curtained with velvet to hide us. There was no way Bennett could have afforded this.
“What now?” I asked as Bennett knocked on the window of the car and we rumbled down the road.
Bennett pulled a pistol from a holster hidden beneath his jacket. He emptied it of bullets and stowed them in a pocket, then replaced the gun.
“Were you planning to use that?” I asked him.
He sniffed and didn’t answer. “We need to get you the protection you need.”
“I’m never joining the Serpents. I’ve told you that.”
He leaned forward in the seat, elbows on knees. His dark eyes, so like mine, held a fierceness, a sadness to them, that told me everything I needed to know about the Serpents. “I can’t protect you on my own anymore. There’s turmoil in the streets right now. Tensions are high. There’s talk that the Empire is weakening. When word gets out that it was the duke who put you in jail, and now you’re out, legally or no, you will be target number one, not just for the duke and his muscle but for every trigger-happy fool in Treston. If anyone thinks you’re something the duke wants, they’ll stop at nothing to get to you first.”
“Use me as a bargaining chip.”
“Yes,” he said, leaning back.
“Won’t I just be a bargaining chip for your gang, too?”
Bennett narrowed his eyes. “I won’t let that happen. And if you swear your fealty to us, we are bound to protect you with our very lives.”
“How poetic.”
He scooted forward, getting in my face. “You don’t understand what life is like out here. You dance around in your dreams and willfully ignore the reality of what’s all around. For the longest time, I loved that about you. I wanted you to always live above the reality I know. But it’s time to wake up.”
My lips pinched in, and I squeezed my eyes shut, wanting again to disappear and awaken in the dream world I once lived in. But Bennett was wrong, at least in one sense. I had already left my dream world behind when I’d stepped into Cardan Lott,with its glittering halls and false nobility. There was nothing noble about the traditions they treasured, their unwillingness to admit they were wrong. Nothing noble about the way they’d treated me.
If the duke was planning to execute Myth, he would likely try to get him to flame first, so he could extract whatever magic he could get from it. Which meant Myth might still be alive. And if my dragon was still alive, there was still hope.
“Let me out,” I said.
“What?”
“I want to get out here.”
When he didn’t respond, I knocked on the car’s window. We slowed. A window between us and the driver slid open, and he looked at Bennett questioningly.
My brother looked over at me and reluctantly said, “Pull over.” When the man closed the small window again, my brother added, “I don’t know what your plan is, but you should stay off the streets. The duke put youinsidethe jail, in case you forgot.”
“I do have a plan,” I replied. It wasn’t much, and it was rapidly evolving with every dead end I mentally ran into, but I couldn’t run back to our apartment. “But I can’t risk you following me or knowing where I’m going. The duke won’t look for me where I’m going.” Bennett had one thing right: the duke was clearly trying to keep me out of the way. He must not want to reveal the results of my bond test but instead cover up the truth that was staring him in the face—a bottomsider had bonded to a dragon.
When I didn’t elaborate, my brother sniffed and crossed his arms.
I climbed out of the taxi and gritted my teeth against the cold air. I stood at the corner and watched Bennett’s taxi drive away, clutching the key to Rush’s townhouse so tightly in my fist that it drew blood.
CHAPTER 37
As soon as Bennett’s taxi rolled out of sight, I turned into the wind and marched toward Old Town, where the Covingtons’ townhouse sat.
I walked in a freezing rain that melted the snow on the ground into a gray soup that seeped through my shoes until my toes hurt from the cold. Hands shoved deep into the pockets of my school’s blazer, I tried not to think of the words Bennett had spat at me as he’d left. He was only afraid for my safety, but his version of keeping me safe was selling my soul to the darkness. I kept my gaze straight, trying not to look at the lumpy shapes huddled against buildings or in doorways, or the fact that I had barely escaped becoming one of them.
As I turned onto Easton Drive, my fingers drew out the key in my pocket and I hurried toward the basement entrance to the Covingtons’ townhome, eager for respite from the cold. The door still squeaked when it opened, as it had the first time we’d entered.
Branded into my memory was that night that I had entered with Rush, clutching him in the darkness. When touching him had felt like a cruel joke. When I’d still thought he was nothingbut a bank account with a bad attitude. As my fingers curled around the key in my hand, my eyes briefly drifted shut. The Covingtons lived in another world, and even though I held the key to his house, I felt no closer to that world than I’d been when I’d spent the night on the street as a girl.
