Chapter 35
Reid’s hair is damp and slicked back, his shoulders and abs glistening.
“I broke into your house.” Better to just get it all out there, right?
The tiniest hint of amusement. “I can see that.”
“It was an accident. I was…worried about you.” It’s hard to talk and have eyes right now. Reid’s body is just so male. Every lick of tan, tight abdomen. Every curve from shoulder down to wrist…wet hair, the scent of lemongrass invading my senses. It’s almost more than I can stand.
The humor fades from his face. His fist tightens on his towel. Now that I’m staring at him, he looks kind of wrecked. Like he’s been pacing for hours. Or drank too much caffeine. His eyes soften when he sees my arm. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
The words send my heart racing, but he turns toward his desk, and I clock his own first aid kit sitting atop it.
“I’m that predictable?” I shift on my feet. He’s dripping onto the hardwood floor.
“It takes a lot to get me inside the infirmary doors. Unconsciousness, heart failure…”
“You know what they say: ‘Stubbornness is next to godliness.’ ” I’m babbling.
Reid’s brows meet. “Do they say that?”
“No, I don’t think so.” My eyes find the ceiling. “Could you put some clothes on or something?”
His voice is a notch lower when he says, “Are bath towels your devil costume?”
My eyes lose their battle, lowering to the slight rise where something long and heavy is pressing against the terry cloth. “Something like that.”
His lips twitch and I’m hit with a jolt of giddy satisfaction. Yikes.
When he comes back from the bathroom in his athletic pants and long-sleeve shirt, he eyes the gauze on my arm once more.
“Take a seat,” he says, patting the corner of his desk like I’m a kid at the doctor’s office.
The implicit demand—his assumption that I’m going to do whatever he tells me to—makes my body hot.
The idea of being at the mercy of his will.
The yikes are plentiful this evening. I’m hoping it’s the blood loss.
While I head over, he goes to lock the cottage door and inspects my handiwork. The minute he touches the doorknob it clangs to the ground.
“I’ll pay for that,” I say, cringing.
“Thought your job doesn’t pay much.”
“Who told you that?”
Reid looks up, caught. “I…asked around a bit about you. Wanted to make sure you were doing all right after…the weekend.”
“The breakup, you mean.”
He swallows thickly, eyes still on the broken handle. “Mm-hmm.”
I tsk at him to hide what his concern does to my stomach. “Always stalking.”
I’m perched on the corner of his spotless desk, so my feet dangle like I’m five years old.
He washes his hands at his kitchen sink and then flicks on one dim light that illuminates only me.
When he comes over, he unwraps the old gauze on my arm, and his closeness gives me a head rush.
My eyes find the moon through the window over the sink.
Anything but his chiseled, dementedly handsome face.
Reid grabs a clean cloth and holds it tightly to the wound. When I wince, his eyes follow the subtle movements of my body. His hand brushes up my forearm soothingly, lingering at my wrist a moment too long.
“No coat? It’s thirty degrees out there.”
“I run hot.” It comes out like my voice is pure steam.
His has gone a bit hoarse too. “The anesthetic will take some time to work.”
“No need, just stitch it up.” I have to get out of here before I do something dumb like bite his earlobe. When he stares at me, I add, “Please.”
They weren’t kidding about that being the magic word. Reid looks like he can’t decide which sounds more miserable: hurting me or denying me whatever I ask. I remember how he caved and allowed me to join the asylum hunt the last time I uttered the word. Please. Like a spell.
All the more reason to speed this up and be on my merry way. I’m in dangerous territory, and not the kind I so often find myself drawn to.
As if he’s waging a similar battle, Reid admits his own defeat.
“Fine.” And pulls out a needle and surgical thread.
I wonder what it says about me that Reid’s tense jaw and slight frown as he inspects my arm make my heart skip a beat, but the sight of the needle that’s about to weave through my skin has no effect whatsoever.
“Stay still,” he instructs with a rasp.
“Yes, sir,” I mock. But it comes out almost needy. We swallow hard in tandem. He’s my teacher. What is wrong with me?
His fingers encircle my arm and my nipples pinch. His hand is so big, it loops around my entire bicep easily. I feel very breakable in his demon’s grasp. Not afraid necessarily, just…fragile.
“I’m sorry,” he says after a minute, so quietly I barely hear him. “That never should have happened today.”
My heart lurches in my chest. “Really, it’s okay. It was an accident.”
“I know what you’re thinking, though. Of course it happened. A Brood demon training hunters is like a cat babysitting a nest of baby mice.”
“I think I’m actually the cat in this situation. Hunter, remember?”
My attempt at a joke doesn’t seem to land. There’s a thorough sadness in Reid’s eyes as his needle slides into my flesh. Crisp pain splits through my arm.
“I’m your instructor, and I hurt you.” The words come out like he could rip himself open for what he did. It twists my heart.
“Hey,” I say, holding his eyes. My hand brushes his lightly and his needle stalls before my skin. “All that stuff I said about you was wrong. You’re more than the brand on your neck, Reid.”
Something about my words seems to shudder through him.
He says nothing as he works dutifully on the wound, and I wonder if I’ve overstepped.
But I don’t regret the words. In fact, they’re long overdue.
Somewhere between the burgeoning attraction and the way he’s helped me and my friends and repeatedly saved my life, I’ve stopped equating him with the men who killed my father. He deserves to know.
“Plus,” I add, “nobody could tell exactly what happened. And I’m not going to say anything to anyone.”
“You don’t have to cover for me.”
“If you get fired, who’ll bully the students into becoming decent fighters?”
Finally, a dimple curves in his cheek. “That was almost a compliment.”
When my heart stutters, I look anywhere but his face. Neatly made bed with one pillow through a doorway. Another nonfiction book on his bedside table. Even though his cottage is larger than my dorm, Reid’s housing feels smaller somehow. Emptier.
“Where are all your things?”
“What things?”
“You know.” I avoid his eyes and the way I know they’ll devour me whole. “Unfolded laundry, bags of chips, framed family photos…”
Reid stifles a laugh, and the needle sinks back into my flesh. “I don’t eat chips. And I fold my laundry.”
“And the photos?”
“Nobody worth framing.”
Ah. “So those parents you’d wanted to impress…”
“Dead. And they did not die impressed.”
“Disappointing everyone in your life?” I wince at a tug around the edges of the wound, and Reid’s thumb brushes against the inside of my arm to soothe me. It has the opposite effect. “I’m an old pro at that.”
He smirks to himself. “Not as old as me.”
Even though I can assume his job here has something to do with it, I still ask, “What’d you do to piss everyone off?”
Reid mulls this over, the methodical rhythm of his stitching more painful as we sit in silence. The rich tang of my own blood hangs in the back of my throat. I try not to fidget. Finally, he says, “I told you once to make peace with who you are.”
After the wraith attack, when I snapped at him. “I remember.”
“I was probably talking to myself as much as I was talking to you, that night.”
He’d said he knew a thing or two about fate dealing you a hand you didn’t ask for. That look of disgust when he admitted to glamouring the people attacked by the strzyga. The way I could practically taste his shame today when he hurt me.
I allow myself to look at him. He’s close enough for me to smell the evergreen of his skin. To see the few freckles like constellations on his cheeks. “You don’t want to be a demon any more than I want to hunt.”
His eyes lift to mine, and in the depths of them I find only suffering. “Why would I?”
“Reid…”
“I’ve felt this way as long as I can remember. Probably because the man who raised me was a monster.”
I want to cut the tension—to quip at him about monsters and reroute us to our usual destination.
Somewhere safe and feelings-proof. But I’ve crossed some kind of threshold.
I can’t even tell when I took the step—coming in here tonight?
Buying the devil costume? Trusting Reid to look into Kitty and the hidden garden?
At some point I steered us too far past our stop.
Now a new road winds ahead, pulsing, crackling, threatening to drop clean off.
All I can muster is “That bad?”
Reid’s gaze finds my nearly stitched-up flesh once more. “My father was as barbaric as any demon I’ve known. My older brother too. I was never like them. I didn’t want to be anything like them. But in the world I was raised in…they were the highest standard.”
Nora’s shining smile as she accepts a debate trophy and then one for gymnastics and another for academic achievement flashes in my mind.
“My father pitted us against each other, me and my brother. Wanted to see who could be more vicious or debase themselves more for his love. For his respect.” He sucks in a ragged breath. “It was usually me.”
I know the feeling so well it turns my stomach. It’s like catching your reflection in a mirror and wondering how long you’ve looked that rough.
“Did you kill them?”
At that, Reid’s eyes slam to mine. There’s an anger there, though not at me. A regretful fury. His hand is firm around my arm.
“No.” The evenness of his voice is at odds with the ruthless expression on his face. “But I probably should have.”
I bite my tongue as he tugs a stitch tight. “How does a demon with family like that end up working at Harker? You said the dean found you?”