“And you weren’t always a cretin,” Jesstin retorted, too tired for whatever argument Gennady had been whipping up. “But people change, don’t they?”
Gennady didn’t rise to the attack. “You’ve changed since the labyrinth.”
“How observant. The dead seem to think you’re omnipotent.”
“What did they say about me?”
Jesstin wasn’t going to answer, but Gennady asked again, and he was too tired to go back and forth. “They said Esme isn’t your mother, and that you already know it.”
Gennady was eerily quiet. “I didn’t know in life, but I can see so much more in death, and...” He trailed off and disappeared but returned a few seconds later.
Jesstin angled sideways. “How... What? It’s true?”
“I don’t think you should go to the netherworld. I don’t think you should do what any of them are asking, whatever they’re asking.”
He slammed his head back against the door and laughed. “But I should listen to you?”
“I can’t stay long, not here.” He flickered again. “You and Ellie need to get out of here.”
“Me and Ellie... of course.” Jesstin banged his head against the door. “Always fucking Elloven.”
“I’m not omnipotent, but I have a terrible, terrible feeling something really bad is coming, and I think you and Elloven both need to leave before you can’t.”
“And what is your fetid imagination spinning—” Jesstin’s words cut off.
Gennady was gone.
Chapter 16
A Man’s Guiding Hand
“Your death wish was almost granted tonight, you arrogant, reckless asshole!”
The door slammed.
Jesstin’s brief peace was ended by the rough syllables of Elloven’s charged entrance. His head felt like someone had thrown a handful of briars inside and shook him for hours. He didn’t remember crawling into the pile of blankets on the floor.
“Did you hear me? Are you mad? No, don’t answer that. Don’t bother with some clever, snappy little answer that means nothing. I already know you’re mad, Jesstin, utterly and irrevocably insane.” The floorboards shifted with her stormy approach. Her shadow slid over him like a threat. Derision blazed in her irises, her expression... Even her hair was like wildfire. She was still wearing that dense, uninspired lump of tan-colored fabric, which on anyone else would have been unmemorable, but it underscored the shelf of her hips, the arc of her ass.
Jesstin saw himself running his hands down her sides, feeling the rough scratch of the canvas on his palms and memorizing the path her curves led him on.
“Are you intoxicated? Is that why you’re just staring at me?” Elloven cried. “Is it why you... Why you did that?”
He propped himself up against a chair. He’d had the spirit kicked out of him before, but this was a litany of burns and throbs he couldn’t focus on long enough to identify.
“Are you going to say something to me? Anything?” Her mouth was wide with her incredulous anger. Her hands were shaped like claws at her sides.
“Something. Anything.” Jesstin inched his elbows onto the chair to stand. Nope. Not yet.
Elloven tilted her head toward the ceiling. “Are you really so strangled by two terrible men that you’d give them all this power over you? You’d just let them win?” Her head swung back down. She licked the corner of her lips with a scowl. “Or is it just easier for you to use your fathers as an excuse to be a jerk?”
Fury got Jesstin the rest of the way to his feet. The audacity to say such a thing, to him? She should know better. “Could it be any dumber than agreeing to fly through the air, the air, with people you just met? You can’t even defend it, because it was an absolute disaster.”
She shook her head in protest.
“Or... Are you really upset because you’ll never see the stable hand again?”
Elloven cupped one hand to her throat. “You don’t understand. You only think you do.”
