“Please,enough.” Clio’s voice cuts sharp between us. “Not right now. She needs air. She’ll talk when she’s ready and not before.”
Malia’s lips purse, but she lowers her head and pulls back. “I’m sorry,” she says to me, and seems to mean it.
Clio squeezes my hand, and Aura is there, hugging herself. “I’ll see you back home.” Clio is already moving, pulling me by the hand toward the stockroom, toward the staff exit at the back of the building. I let her pull me because my legs are not really in charge of themselves. I glance back once over my shoulder.
Malia is still standing in the hallway with the photograph in her hand, watching me leave, the bright curiosity back in her eyes now.
I turn my face to the door and can’t stop wondering if I’ve been wrong about these Alphas.
23
ADELAIDE
Clio’s sedan smells of strawberries and vanilla, and I roll the window down the second we pull out of the rear lot because the air in the car is too hot, too much, and my skin feels stretched over my body.
“You’re okay there?” she asks, eyes on the road. “Yep, you’re okay. Of course you are.”
“Are you saying that to me or to yourself?”
“Both.” She cuts me a quick look, wearing a nervous grin. The streetlights sweep across her face in slow stripes. The city is bright around us, people and cars everywhere, someone nearby playing music too loud, the bass seeming to thrum through my skull. It should feel alive, but instead it feels like a movie I’m watching through glass.
“Crazy traffic,” Clio is saying fast, her hands gripping the steering wheel. “But once we’re home, we order pizza, then put on a movie we’ve both seen fifty times. No decisions tonight, just survive the next twelve hours. In the morning, when your head is clearer, we figure out what to do. Yeah?”
“Do you think the Alphas did it?”
“Babe.”
“I’m not asking you to be sure. I’m asking what your gut says.”
She takes a breath. Holds it, then releases it slowly.
“My gut isn’t trustworthy right now because I’ve been your best friend forever and I’ve watched you get treated badly back at school. I know you’re still not fully over it, and I promised myself that I would do anything to keep you safe from now on. So I’m not a reliable narrator on this topic. Plus, we only have an old photograph of three men in masks walking beside a woman who disappeared. Then there’s the three masks that looked similar, and a hidden basement. But these Alphas you said have treated you very gently and even helped you with those men following you. So I don’t know. I don’t have proof, and it could mean one thing or a dozen other things, and we’re not going to know which until you can ask them. Phew, I said a lot for someone who doesn’t know.” She laughs softly.
“Right now, I’m so torn. I want to talk to them, but I also don’t.” I sigh and sink into my seat on the passenger side.
“That’s fine. You’re not obligated to confront anyone until you’re ready. And don’t you think Malia was a bit out of line tonight, pushing you like that? I need to talk to her.”
“She wasn’t wrong to push, probably thought she cracked the case with the photo she found.”
“Yeah, but she was wrong to do it like that.” She glances at me. “You’re very red. Are you too hot?”
“Burning up.” Despite the night air blowing through my open window, it does almost nothing to cool me down.
She reaches over and turns up the air-conditioning. “Stick your face out the window like a dog.”
“Right!”
“I’m serious. We’re going forty miles an hour. The wind is free.”
I almost laugh at her craziness. Except the ache that’s been sitting low in my spine all day chooses this moment to deepen. Not a twinge but a full, slow pressure spreading outward from the base of my spine, down the insides of my thighs. I fold forward in the seat and press both palms against my lower abdomen.
“Are you going to be sick again? Tell me and I’ll pull over.”
“I-I’m fine.”
“It doesn’t look that way.”
“I just need…”
