“Is Meg’s condition still the same?” Dare’s question stops my prying thoughts. Only now I notice Fred, his blind squirrel wrapped around his neck like a scarf.
Sari nods. “It’s extremely rare to wake up from a long-term coma after six months. Meg…it’s been a year.”
The silence that follows feels heavy.
“Sometimes I ask myself what would have happened if Meg and Linda had found Nine, just like they did us,” Sari adds with a watery voice.
“What happened to you was inhuman and horrifying. But you made your own choices after that,” Ash states vehemently, gritting his teeth.
Ren nods, the flames of the bonfire reflecting from his mirrored sunglasses. “You didn’t have to trust Meg and Linda, or follow the path they showed you.”
“You could have turned like Nine, regardless of what they were teaching you,” Ezra agrees, reminding us how he didn’t become like her even though he was kept imprisoned just as long.
“She made her bed and she…bled in it,” Ollie says.
“And got stabbed, shot, and cut open like a turkey.” Lori gives me a vividly gory idea of what they did to her. I was there, but Ezra kept my face against his collar, sparing me from the haunting image.
“We should think about the future. Not the past,” Rague suddenly declares, passing his beer bottle to Ollie.
“Mmm. I always wanted to turn Serena into an anthropomorphized vessel of knowledge. Up for the challenge?” Ramiel looks at Dare, the other computer genius in the family.
“A super robot?Terminator1-2-3-4-5-6 didn’t teach you anything?” Ash widens his eyes at him.
“Only that after the second movie, the production company should have laid the franchise to rest,” Ren deadpans.
“The pet shelter. Will you rebuild it?” I ask him. I really enjoyed volunteering there.
“Yep. With some little changes. Rague and Ollie will start as soon as they finish Linda and Meg’s house.” He turns toward the work site near the training facility. Linda wants to move Meg here. She thinks that the hospital environment is not good for her. Or maybe she just doesn’t want her to die there. The thought makes my heart break. Sari has successfully developed an antidote. Uritested it on a couple of donors first–after injecting them with the poison–since it worked, Sari gave it to Meg. But to this day there’s no change.
Linda isn’t here because the atmosphere is still a little tense. She apologized to me many times in the last two weeks, and I forgave her. People make mistakes sometimes, led by anger or even love. And I know she would have never intentionally put me in danger. Ezra, Lori, Ollie, and some of the other bros, though, need a little more time.
“We should go visit Meg next week,” I whisper into Ezra’s ear.
He nods and curls his arm around my shoulder, pulling me closer against his side—a little bit more and I’ll fall from the chair. His Adam’s apple bobs as he takes a sip of beer, and I stare, hypnotized by the movement. He can be sexy even doing the most mundane stuff. I really have it bad for him.
“That reminds me. You went to my competition to build your house.” Rague’s accusing voice is directed at Ezra.
“Oliver wouldn’t have accepted the job,” he simply says. My brother nods, glaring at him. I glare back, moving onto Ezra’s lap. He still doesn’t accept Ezra fully.
“That’s not what’s important here, Rague,” Rami interjects. “He called Dare for the house security system. Betrayal!”
“Nine knew less about Dare than you. It was a strategic choice.” Another very reasonable reply.
“You’re always bragging about your pupil’s skills, shouldn’t you be happy Dare got a job?” I huff. Do I need to bare my teeth to make them back off?
“Since when did Ezra get a guard dog?” Ash laughs.
“Fuck off.” I flip him off, earning a half-surprised, half-teasinguhhhh.
Ezra slides his hand between my legs and tightens his fingers around my flesh, right where he left a bite mark this morning.
“I bought an apartment near Sully’s vet school in Chicago,” he suddenly says.
That’s news to my ears.
“I need to renovate it, and then to put in a new security system. You interested?” he asks them.
“No!” Ollie answers at the same time Rague and Rami say, “Yes.”
