“And my father? Is he safe?”
“What the fuck makes you think I know what happened to your parents?” A mirthless laugh escaped him. “Oh, that’s right. You think I had something to do with last night.”
“Didn’t you? Something horrible happens and you’re there, by what, coincidence?”
Emory’s chest rose with an incensed breath. If Amelia was meant to passively sit and listen, she was making a fine mess of it.
“I told you I didn’t. Take it or leave it. I won’t tell you again. Youwere targeted last night, and you know it. They came for you. Why?”
“I don’t know why. I haven’t done anything to anyone!”
Emory laughed again at her expense, the derision apparent.
“That’s not how it works. Good people get fucked over all the time, and no one cares that they didn’t deserve it.”
“I care. You’re telling me those people, whoever they were, wanted me dead.”
“Want.Theywantyou dead,” he corrected with hard emphasis to make her understand. “They don’t call it a wash because you disappeared off the face of the goddamn earth. They’re coming for you and for me and they’re going to keep coming.”
“Who arethey?”
With fiery exasperation, Emory sat up in his seat.
“Who do you think? Who might possibly want you dead?”
Last night, Amelia would’ve answered with his name. Her father had painted a violent and terrifying picture of the Moriartys—men who murdered indiscriminately and espoused strange traditions that led them down a path of darkness. Central to the mystery was the man sitting across from her.
There was, of course, one other answer.
“Velascos,” Amelia said on a hush.
Emory nodded, but his delight in mocking her vanished. He crossed his legs at the ankles and folded his arms over his chest.
“I need to go home. My dad needs me,” Amelia insisted. Maybe she’d gain some ground—Emory was human, after all—but he shut it down with a firm shake of the head.
“You can’t. The Velascos finish what they start. You go home, you die. Simple as that.”
He made it sound so clinical, as if he couldn’t summon sympathy for her life upended and hanging in the balance. If it was all the same to him, then why bother?
“You honestly expect me to believe you’re protecting me?” Pulse on the rise, Amelia coiled her fingers around the arms of the chair. “My father’s entire existence has been to take you down. Ifyou’re going to hurt me, then just get on with it and stop with the bullshit.”
Emory’s eyes flicked to her. Where there was fire before, he turned to ice and cut deep with cruelty meant to wound.
“If I wanted to hurt you, I would’ve done it already. I could’ve left you to die, to burn to death like your mother.”
Amelia erupted in a flash that propelled her out of her seat. She lunged at him with balled fists. She’d never hit anyone before, never dreamed of it, until then.
Emory sprung up and snatched her by the wrist. He squeezed hard enough that Amelia collapsed back into her seat and trembled in his grasp. Emory lurched over her, seething as he spoke.
“You think you’re brave, but I saw you before, and I see you now. You crumble and all I have to do is look at you. Feel that? You’re shaking like a leaf. How brave are you now?”
Brave enough that she lifted her eyes to him. Up close, Emory got his look; the fear surely flooding her face and the frantic pulse at her wrist that thumped against his palm. She got her look too; the way he fractured with fickle guilt, gone before it took hold but enough to dispel his anger.
Emory released her and reclaimed his seat with strange affliction. When his eyes found her, he seemed to measure some conflict in himself, and when he spoke again, Amelia didn’t know which part of him had won.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said. “That’s not what this is about.”
Amelia couldn’t reconcile his words with the ones that’d come before or the bruises blooming beneath her skin. Then there was Brian; sweet Brian, with disheveled curls and a lopsided smile.
