“I’ve never encountered an entity like Alan Morrow,” Donny says. “The way he has planned ahead and shown how he can regulate his emotions—he’s operating on a level beyond anything I’ve documented in forty years of study, and he’s hunting you. If you leave this house, I can almost guarantee that he’ll find you.”
I have to stay here. I don’t have a choice. Choosing between a guy who thinks about strangling me or the very real risk of the Game Master is easy, but I still don’t like it.
“Can you assign someone else to be my bodyguard?” I ask, standing up from my chair.
“DJ can replace him,” Donny says.
Good. I carry my half-empty mug to the sink, then clutch my forearms because I don’t know what else to do with them. “Thanks for the tea. I feel so soothed.”
“Eden.” Donny stops me in the doorway. “You should know Nico wanted me to tell you everything as soon as you arrived.”
“If he wanted me to know so badly, why didn’t he just tell me himself?” I ask.
“I told him not to. I was trying to protect him, but I see now that was a mistake.” Donny sighs, suddenly looking every one of his many years.“I can only imagine what he said to you. Whatever it was,I suspect it was designed to frighten you into leaving. I believe he’s been trying to protect you, in his own misguided way. Nicholas is… a complicated person, but don’t decide he’s only one thing. People are more than the worst thing that ever happened to them. Or the worst thing they’ve done.”
“I need to go upstairs,” I tell Donny.
He nods, and I walk out of the kitchen, not stopping until I’m safe behind my closed door. I deadbolt the door and slide the desk chair under the knob.
I want to believe Donny. I really,reallywant to believe Nico was just trying to push me away and didn’t mean what he said, but wanting to believe something and believing it are two different things, and I don’t know which side I’m on.
If that were me? If I had killed somebody else, damaged some other person’s family the way Stanley Daniels did mineseven times, and if I had to live with knowing what I’d done?
I couldn’t do it. I’d rather be dead.
I spend a couple of hours reading some articles on my reading list because I don’t know what else to do with myself. By mid-afternoon, the walls feel like they’re closing in, so I grab Bob’s leash and head for the door.
Griffin catches me on my way past his room. “Where you headed?”
His color’s back. I haven’t been hearing him cough through the wall for the past couple of days. As glad as I am that he’sfeeling better, seeing him standing there all nonchalant like he hasn’t been keeping a huge secret from me makes me mad.
“Outside,” I say.
“Is something wrong?”
“I don’t know, Griffin, how about you tell me?” I ask. “Maybe about why you neglected to mention I’ve been living with someone who loves strangling brunettes my size?”
The easygoing expression drops off Griffin’s face. “You found out.”
The ease with which he says it pisses me off even more, like he was waiting for this, and it’s not a big deal to him. Probably because he’s not Nico’stype.
“Yes,” I snap. “I found out all by myself, with zero help from any members of the team I was supposed to be able totrust.”
“It wasn’t my place to tell you,” Griffin says.
“You realize my life could be in danger, right?” I ask.
“He’d never hurt you.”
“Are you sure about that? Because he told me that he thinks he could snap and hurt me at any second, and he has to stop himself from killing me every time he’s around me.”
Griffin shakes his head, his forehead wrinkling. “What?”
“Do me a favor and leave me alone.”
As Bob pees on the front lawn, I fish the bottle of Jim Beam from under the passenger seat of my car. Drinking might not be the smartest decision right now, but this is supposed to be a goddamn safe house, and I don’t want to be smart right now.
The wooden steps creak as I settle on the porch, unscrewing the cap and taking a long pull. The whiskey burns all the way down.
