“You already did.” She paused a beat. “Remember?”
I remember your sister coming to me in the middle of the night, he wanted to tell her.I remember Ben swearing to me that he was going to fuck you before you die.
I remember making you come so hard that you had to bite your lip to silence your cries.
Arguing with his sparrow through a locked door was not how he had envisioned the morning after their consummation. His jaw clenched as he considered the error of his own hubris and the scorn of his father that he still felt like a weight.
Tame your sparrow. Take her in hand.
“Don’t make me get the master key, Nadine.”
There was a silence. Cal had never considered the idea that a silence could feel defiant.
This one did.
“Nadine.” It came out as a growl. “You—”
She yanked the door open, glaring up at him with bloodshot eyes that suggested she’d been crying. Her wet hair—she had washed, that was a positive sign—had dampened the front of her T-shirt, rendering it near-transparent where it plastered against her skin. She noticed him looking and folded her arms.
“What?” she said hostilely.
“You’re pale.” She didn’t seem to have slept, either. Dark half moons hugged the underside of her eyes, which glittered too brightly, and there was a blotchiness to her cheeks that was nearly feverish in appearance.
“I heard there was a landslide.”
“Yes, a bad one.” Leaning over, he pressed the back of his hand to her forehead. Nadine went ramrod stiff, clammy to the touch. “You’re a little tense. Are you sore?”
She yanked away from him with a harsh noise. “Last night you said it was too late to leave. What did you mean by that? Did you know the roads were going to be blocked?”
“What are you accusing me of, Nadine? Acts of god?”
“Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god,” she snapped.
A laugh escaped him, low and relieved. He hadn’t broken her spirits then. Not completely. “Well. I was going to go hunting with Ben and Odessa, but perhaps I should stay here and tend to you, since you seem to be so agitated. There’s plenty I could do to make you feel better.”
He dragged the back of his hand along her side, watching her hold herself tighter as she set her teeth against pleasures too recent to be entirely forgotten.
“Especially,” he added, drawing out the word, “if you’re not sore.”
“Deena’s bringing me medicine.”
“Deena can’t do for you what I can.” His slow once-over was deliberate. “We could start by getting you out of those wet clothes.”
Nadine backed from him. “I thought you didn’t sleep with sparrows.”
Again, his eyes flicked down the hall. To his brother’s closed door. “Stop saying that,” he warned. “You don’t want the wrong person to hear you.”
“Why?” she demanded heatedly. “What does it mean?”
Cal braced himself against the door. Part of him was tempted to tell her—now that he had claimed her properly, she would be finding out soon enough. But his brother had alsomade the mistake of enlightening his sparrow prematurely and now she was dead.
“You’re in too deep, Nadine. The best thing you can do for yourself right now is to pretend. Pretend you’ve given up on finding Noelle, that you’ve turned to me in your grief. That you can’t get enough of me. From what I’ve seen so far, it wouldn’t have to be much of an act.”
The wounded look on her face hurt more than the slap she’d given him the other night. “This is sick. What you’re doing, it’s—mind games—”
“It’s more than that. You want to live, don’t you?” His fingers bit into the old wood. “There’s enough dead things in this house already, little sparrow. I’d rather not see you become one of them.”
“Screw you.”
