He let out a disbelievingmmmand nudged her hair over her shoulder so it spilled down her back. The lavender ends had begun to silver, fading. “Tell me what it said to you,” he prompted, “when it got inside your head.”
“It talked in riddles,” she admitted. “Not all of it made sense. But it knew things about me. Things it shouldn’t have been able to know.”
His fingers hovered over the pulse beneath her ear. “What kind of things?”
Her cheeks caught fire. “I’d rather not say.”
“Okay.”
His head was a laundry list of shouldn’ts. Shouldn’t have let her talk him into this trip. Shouldn’t have assumed he could get away with it. Shouldn’t have touched her, that frozen night on the quad. Now that he’d started, he was having trouble remembering how to stop.
Softly, she whispered, “Colton?”
He continued his inspection of her, his thumb trailing along the protrusion of her collarbone. “Yeah?”
“Are you in some sort of satanic cult?”
A laugh clawed out of him, and he tamped it down at the look on her face.
“It’s not funny,” she chided.
“Sorry.” Christ, he wanted to kiss her. All his life she’d been his ghost, and now she was as corporeal as anything beneath his fingertips. “I am not currently, nor have I ever been, involved in a cult of any kind.”
Out in the room, her handbag started ringing. They both froze. The sound was jarring—a clarion fanfare of trumpets. He was met with Lane’s stare, wide and a little bit panicked.
“That’s Mackenzie.”
“Ignore it.”
“I can’t.” She slid out of his grasp. “It could be important.”
Something cinched deep inside his chest as she slipped out of the bathroom. She toed across the floor and pried the still-trumpeting phone loose from her bag. A bolt of frustration ran through him. He wanted to take the phone and dropkick it out the window. He wanted to kiss her until she forgot about Schiller and the Sanctum and all the weeks and weeks of lies.
“Hi,” he heard her say, a culpable edge creeping into her voice. “Yeah, sorry. I went home for a couple of days.” She let out a feeblehem-hem. “I’m sick.”
Colton peeked out from the bathroom. Lane was an atrocious liar. If he knew it, then Mackenzie Beckett definitely knew it. He watched her fidget, a stray beam of afternoon sun lancing through the jade of her eyes. Shifting her weight from her left foot to her right and back again, she did a guilty soft-shoe across the carpet.
“What? I—What?” She plucked nervously at a loose thread on her sweater. Colton had the sense she was trying very, very hard not to look at him. “No,” she said, too defensive to be believed. “No, I’m at my— Mackenzie, why would you even ask that?”
A period of nervous listening followed. Lane went perfectly, absolutely still.
“Oh.” A pause. “Oh.”
Emerging into the room, Colton propped a shoulder against the wall. Lane’s eyes flitted in his direction and away. The color was slowly draining from her face, leaving her ashen.
“Okay,” she said. “I will.” She shut her eyes. Took a slow, steadying breath. She looked as if a light breeze might be enough to bowl her clean over. “Okay. You too. Bye.”
She ended the call. Her gaze met Colton’s. He felt a million miles away from her.
“Mackenzie and Adya have been keeping tabs on Nate,” she said. “According to them, he checked himself out of the hospital about a half hour ago.”
The thing about men was that they always wanted to live forever, until they didn’t. They wanted to open Pandora’s box, peek in at what lay inside, and then close it back up, quick, once they beheld the ugly truth of what they sought. They wanted knowledge without travail, experience without suffering.
Discovery was not, the Apostle had learned, so easily earned.
There was always a cost. There was always a price to pay. Every step taken by man necessitated a sacrifice. An offering. An appeasement.
Devan Godbole had never quite grasped that concept back when he was still alive. He believed himself master of worlds, conqueror of time, god of space. He thought—as men of great intelligence often did—that he was clever enough to be rendered untouchable. Prideful, arrogant fool. He saw himself as a modern-day Victor Frankenstein, on the very cusp of creating life.
