“I know.” I pull my knees up, mirror her position. “They caught me. They claimed me. They decided I was worth protecting and they put their names next to mine in a book that can’t be erased. I didn’t choose any of that.”
“And?”
“And I’m still here. Look, I entered the Hunt to win the Favor, to learn about my dad, and I lost. I became a Runt. The word’s a combination of rot and hunt, in case you didn’t figure that out. I’m here permanently. I’m not fighting it anymore. And some of that is survival and some of it is…” I trail off. “Something else.”
Mara watches me. Her expression is unreadable, not quite judging, not quite pitying. But I know she thinks I’ve lost my fucking mind. She doesn’t understand. But she will, in time.
“Okay,” she says. Not agreement, just acknowledgment that she’s heard me and isn’t going to push further. Not tonight, anyway.
“You sleep with them, don’t you?”
Fuck. I knew this was coming. “I do.”
“And…”
I throw my hands up, defensive. Why am I defensive?
“It’s amazing Mara. I mean, you’ve seen them. They’re hot as hell. I never thought I’d like tough, alpha guys like that. But I do. And sometimes they wear masks. Scary ones. I like that, too.”
She crooks up the corner of her mouth, like she’s skeptical. Then she changes the subject to another conversation I knew was coming.
“Have you found anything about your dad?”
She says it carefully. The way you’d touch a bruise to see if it still hurts. And even then the gentleness tells me everything I need to know, that her position on my father’s guilt hasn’t changed. She still believes what she believed the last time wespoke about him, that my father, the mayor of Rothwell, was part of the machine that ground this city into rubble.
She’s not asking because she’s changed her mind, that I’m sure of. She’s asking because she cares about me and she knows it matters to me.
I go still.
I’m not angry. Not yet. But the anger is there. It’s always there, saved inside me, ready to explode. But I don’t let it surface because Mara just walked through a wasteland to find me. She’s sitting on my bed with cracked lips and hollow cheeks, and I don’t want this to be the thing that breaks the first moment we’ve had together in a long time.
“Nothing yet about my dad, not really,” I say. “But there is supposedly some information.”
Her eyebrows rise and she nods but she doesn’t probe further. She doesn’t say any of the things she said last time, the horrible things that blew us apart.
What falls between us is different, like a wall built from what we each believe, the thing that separated us to begin with.
She falls asleep before I do. Her breathing evens out and within minutes, she’s out. She was running on fumes. I’m surprised she lasted as long as she did.
I, however, am wide awake. It’s no wonder, with the weight of everything that happened in the last few hours.
I need to move. I need to not be in this room with my sleeping best friend and my spinning brain.
I slip out and find the corridor dim, the few bulbs that are lit casting long shadows. Most of the residential section is settled for the night. A few voices behind thin walls. The distant clank of someone in the communal area.
Rogue is at the bottom of the stairwell, sitting on the third step, legs stretched out, head back against the railing. He’s got a cup of something in his hand. He looks up when he hears me.
“Couldn’t sleep,” he says.
“Me neither.”
“Heavy night.”
“Yeah.”
He studies me with those easy eyes that miss nothing, even though they look like they’re barely paying attention. “You good?”
“Um, not sure.”
