“He fucked me,” Dara said. The words tumbled out before he could stop himself. And the second they were in the air, he pressed one hand to his mouth like he could push them back in—but it was too late. Ames’s face had gone white, her staring at him and him looking back, wide eyed over the ridge of his fingers.
Shit.
Her tongue flickered out, wetting her lips. “What did you say?”
Too late. No taking it back now—no denying it.
“He ... we were having sex.”General Ames raped you,Noam had said, but Dara’s mouth wouldn’t work that way. Couldn’t put it in those words. It felt like that word belonged to Lehrer.
“Since fuckingwhen?”
“Since I was fifteen,” Dara said. “But he ... I could read his mind, so. I knew he wanted it. Before.”
That had been one of the more awkward conversations he’d ever had with Lehrer: the night they both witnessed the same scene playing out in Gordon’s mind, and Lehrer sat him down once they got home and tried to explain that sometimes people had certain thoughts, but that didn’t mean they planned toacton those thoughts. As if Dara weren’t a telepath. As if he didn’t know that better than anyone.
Only less than a year later, Lehrer raped him for the first time—and then Gordon decided he wanted to act on those thoughts after all, and after eight months of Lehrer, Dara had been so desperate to blot Lehrer’s touch off his body with someone—anyone—else that Dara didn’t even try to stop him.
Ames’s face twisted up, and for one horrible moment Dara was sure she was about to spit in his face—
“That’s gross,” she said. “He’s—hewasdisgusting. I’m sorry. Jesus Christ, Dara.”
Relief poured into him like ice water, shocking and cold. He let out a sharp, shaky breath. “It wasn’t that bad,” he said, tension still aching-tight in his shoulders; he lifted a hand to squeeze the side of his neck, trying to massage it out. “Relatively speaking. I don’t know. It pissed Lehrer off, anyway.”
Although that came later. At first Lehrer had laughed in his face and called him adesperate whore.
Lehrer’s anger had emerged in subtler ways, seeping up like rotten groundwater to poison them both.
Ames twisted in her binds again, rubbing her wrists against the zip ties. “Still. Fuck. I wish you would’ve told me. I mean—I get why you didn’t. But, like ... ugh, I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that my dad turned out to be a fucking pedo on top of everything else. I’m glad you killed him. What a creep.”
Dara snorted. “That’s one way of putting it, I suppose.”
He’d never seen it that way. Maybe it was too much to bear, to think that Dara had let himself get put in this situation not once, but twice—that if it kept happening, that meant there was something wrong with Dara. Something fundamentally broken, just like Lehrer always said.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “Maybe Lehrer’s right about some things. Iamthe common denominator here. Maybe I ... can we really blame your dad for fucking me, if I—”
“Don’t you dare say that, Dara Shirazi,” Ames snapped. “It wasn’t your fault. You didn’tdoanything to make Lehrer or my dad oranyone—you didn’t. Okay?”
Dara tipped his head down to press his palms against his brow and shut his eyes, long enough to take a steadying breath. Ames had told him the same thing after he confessed what Lehrer had done. He’d tried to explain it the way Lehrer would have explained it:I made Lehrer do it.
But Ames had refused to accept that explanation. And she hadn’t stopped fighting him on that point until Dara finally relented and agreed she was right.
If she was right then, she was right now too. Lehrer and General Ames were both grown men. Dara wasn’t responsible for the choices they made.
His burner phone beeped on the bed next to him. Time for another dose.
“Sorry about this,” Dara said, getting up and retrieving one of the syringes from atop his dresser. He made a face at Ames, and she mirrored it back but tilted her head to one side all the same, giving him easy access to slip the needle into her vein and depress the plunger.
“How many of those you got?” she asked.
“Not enough,” he admitted grimly, tossing the syringe into the trash—no sharps container—and retreating back to the bed. “So we’d better hope Priya gets back to us with more soon—or that Lehrer sends Noam home from Texas to figure this out.”
“Great.” Her mouth twisted up, but there was nothing either of them could do.
Theme of their entire friendship, really.
They just had to wait.
CHAPTERTWENTY-SEVEN
