“I’ll be okay,” Clover says. “Listen to Valen, Madi.”
“Trust me. Please,” I plead. “Clover has me, all my cousins, Chief and Wrecks with her at all times. I promise you that she’s protected.”
That seems to soothe her worries. I just wish it had the same effect on me.
“Okay. Fine. But, Clover—” Madi’s voice softens its rough edges. “I love you. Be safe, you hear me? This is not the time to practice living out one of your thrillers.”
Clover takes the phone from my hand. She’s trying to bite back more tears. “I won’t, I swear. In fact, I might need a genre switch in my near future. Real-life thrillers are not nearly as much fun.”
Madi chuckles. “Maybe now you’ll write that why-choose romance with three heroes I’ve been begging for.”
The heads of six men all turn at the same time, faces wearing matching WTF expressions while Clover’s cheeks finally flood with some color.
“She’s joking,” Clover stammers. “Sort of. It’s fiction. I don’t— I wouldn’t— How does it?—”
Madi’s laughter stops Clover’s word vomit.
“Love you, Clove.”
The call ends, and Clover hands the phone back to Grant as though it weighs a thousand pounds.
“She was in Happiness,” Clover says flatly. “I knew she must have been, but knowing that she was that close to Madi? Watching them. Watching me…”
“But she didn’t hurt them,” Sterling points out. “She could have. She chose not to, which means?—”
“She’s not interested in taking unnecessary risks,” I say. “She’s only interested in Clover. Her friends are just pieces in the cog. Backstory, information.”
“They’re safe as long as Terra thinks she can still get to Clover,” Roman adds. “The second she feels cornered, that could change.”
“Then we don’t corner her,” Grant says. “We trap her. Carefully. Strategically.”
“How?” Clover’s voice is gaining some fire, but it’s still small, a wounded animal backed into a corner. “She knows everythingabout me. How do we fight that when we don’t even know where she is or who’s helping her?”
“By being unpredictable,” Chase says, flashing her a wink, and suddenly, I’d be okay if my cousin came down with a nasty case of pink eye. “She thinks she knows you, but what she knows are only snippets of your life. Things she’s learned by being on the outside looking in—it’s not all of you. And hell, I’d bet you’re not even the same woman who was writing those letters six months ago. Look at you now. You’re on a road trip with six handsome-as-fuck devils. Would the old Clover have done that?”
“No.” She sighs. “Never.”
“Exactly.” Chase’s voice is like an excitable puppy. “She’s created a formula of you that she thinks you follow because that’s what Clover Styx would’ve done. But you’re not Clover Styx anymore. You’re bigger, braver, stronger, and have an army behind you.”
“And we’re very good at war,” Sterling adds with a grim smile.
Clover scans the room, staring at each of us in turn. Grant, Sterling, Chase, Chief, Roman, me—and her expression shifts.
Not hope, exactly, but maybe the beginning of it.
“Okay,” she says with a solid nod of her head. “If it’s a war she wants, it’s a war she’ll get.”
That’smyfucking girl.
We eatas the sun begins to set. Not because anyone’s hungry, but because Chief insists and none of us have the energy to argue with him. Not after listening to a two-hour debate between him and Chase arguing over whether water is wet or not.
Chief insists that water is wet.
Chase says that water makes you wet, water just…is.
I’ve never heard such a stupid fucking debate where neither side will hear reason, and now my head is pounding because of their idiocy.
Clover picks at her food, managing three bites before giving up. But she drinks the tea that Sterling makes her, and she doesn’t flinch when Grant squeezes her shoulder. She even almost smiles when Chase tells a deliberately terrible joke about a dog and a duck.
