"Come on."
He tugs me toward the door.
"Where are we going?"
"My baby wants a piercing." He turns his head to grin at me, blue eyes alight again. "So she's getting one."
6
A MAN WHO DOES NOT EXIST
ATTICUS
Isling the towel over my shoulder, breathless from the grueling thirty minutes I spent on the rowing machine.
A hot shower, a good release, then it's lights out.
And then tomorrow—tomorrowI stop pretending Aurora doesn't exist.
Eli made it clear this isn't a hall pass and I'm not to use it however I want. Apparently, she's made the library, where I've started to set up a command center, 'Switzerland', and while she's enclosed in those four walls, I can look at her. I can speak to her.
Will she look back? Will she say more than three words to me?
Even if it's only for the hour it'll take me to explain how we're going to pull this off, I intend to make the most of it. Draw it out as long as I can.
If I can get her used to talking to me again, maybe it'll be the start of something. If she could stand to hear me out, I know exactly what I want to say. I've rehearsed it in my head over and over andover again.
I do have another idea I can still use if this opportunity fails, but I've replayed the imaginary conversation in a hundred different ways. I know I have a way around any argument she can lob back at me. If she'll let me get it out, maybe she'll understand.
Maybe she could forgive me, or at least deign to fucking look at me when we're in the same room.
I jerk to a stop as I pass through the front dining room on the way to the basement, seeing twin shadows shift outside the window. Quickly, I step out of sight, my mind filling with every place I have a weapon hidden within twenty steps of where I stand. The walkie app on my watch that will alert the guys we have intruders if I give it a double tap.
Where's Aurora? Is she upstairs in her room or with one of the guys?
After I grab the Glock under the table, I can be up the stairs in five sec?—
Then she laughs, and the tension in my aching muscles eases.
It's only them.
I push sweat-dampened hair from my face and wipe a drop from the tip of my nose. I know I should walk away, but I stay put, hidden in the shadows by the curtain.
She laughs again, and I peer out onto the front drive.
Aurora and Sev emerge from the trees, her hand in his, her feet unsteady as he guides her toward the house. She clutches one of his sweaters to her naked torso. Her bare legs are pale in the moonlight as she goes up onto the balls of her bare feet when they reach the sharper gravel.
My stomach twists watching the easy way Sev crouches and tells her to 'jump on' so he can piggyback her the rest of the way to the front door. His smile is broad and genuine. He's always been able to find joy in anything, but I haven't seen him look so recklessly happy since Florence was still with us.
It cuts like an icy blade in my stomach.
I'll need to talk to him about keeping focused. That shit can be the worst sort of distraction if you let it. It makes you stupid. Makes you drop your guard. Makes you rely on idiotic things like hope and fate instead of hard work and cold facts.
It's been so long since Eli came home, it's easy to forget what we're up against. Ambrose isn't just smart, he's patient,brutal. I've never met a man who could do what he did to Elijah and his family without even a lick of guilt.
I'm also convinced he knew if he sent his men after Sev and Eli in Paris that they'd kill them. There weren't enough of them to even make it much of a challenge. But he sent them anyway.
And to watch his men whip Eli until he was bloody and unconscious?
