22. Lilah
22
LILAH
I stared at the ceiling in my room, thinking about Rain Adakai. Her face was imprinted on my mind from the flyer. Her friendly smile, the light in her eyes. It morphed into the face of the girl behind the Dive, then back again.
She’d looked different behind the Dive. She was the same girl for sure, but the light had been gone from her eyes, her expression tense and scared. I thought she might have been thinner then too, and I wondered when the picture from the flyer had been taken.
I’d told the Bastards about it, had shown them the picture on my phone. They were going to do what they called “background” on her, which sounded like basic research into her history and life and stuff, but it was probably a lot more in depth than what I could do on my laptop.
I wondered where she was, if she was cold, if she was hungry, if she was scared.
If she had a brand like mine on the back of her neck.
It overwhelmed me, made my skin cold, my heart race, like I was having a panic attack. Maybe it was because I knew now what it was like to be a prisoner, to feel helpless and far away from anyone who could help you. Maybe it was just because now I knew her name, knew there was someone out there looking for her.
I didn’t know. I only knew that she felt both close enough to touch and totally out of reach.
And also more like me than ever.
I got out of bed and slipped my knife into my hoodie before going downstairs to find Jude. I couldn’t lie here, alone and thinking about all the bad things that might be happening to Rain, to all the girls who’d gone missing.
About all the bad things that happened to girls all over the world every day.
I found Jude not at the kitchen island but on the sofa, his pencil making a soft scratching sound on the sketchpad in his lap. A fire crackled in the fireplace even though it was May and officially spring, and the wall of glass — actually a giant glass bifold door — was open to the huge deck.
Outside, it already sounded like summer, the crickets chirping softly.
He looked up when I stepped into the room. “Hey.”
“Hey. Mind if I sit?”
“Never,” he said.
He was wearing gray sweatpants and no shirt, the military images inked onto his chest mere shadows in the light of the fire. His skin glowed bronze, his defined cheekbones and jaw even sharper in the dim glow, his eyelashes criminally long.
“It’s kind of cold,” I said, pulling the blanket off the back of the couch. The silky faux fur blanket had appeared there one day after I’d mentioned that every sofa needed a blanket for couch naps. I still wasn’t sure who’d put it there.
I wasn’t used to living on the mountain where the seasons were slower to change, but the truth was, looking at Jude in nothing but sweatpants made me feel anything but cold.
“That’s why I lit the fire,” Jude said, setting aside his sketchpad. He lifted an arm. “Come here. I’ll keep you warm.”
It was an offer I couldn’t refuse, and I scooted closer to him and sighed when he rested his arm across my shoulders, enveloping me in a delicious nest of faux fur and warm skin.
“You could try wearing a shirt,” I said.
He laughed. “Are you complaining?”
“Um, no, definitely not,” I said.
He kissed my head. “Hungry? Want a grilled cheese?”
“Not tonight,” I said. “I just couldn’t sleep. I keep thinking about Rain.”
“I can understand that,” he said. “It’s fucked.”
“I think we should talk to her family.” The thought had been there, rolling around in my mind like a loose marble, but I hadn’t really grabbed on to it until that moment. “Or whoever it was that put up the flyer.”
He pulled back a little to look at me. “You think that’s a good idea?”
I looked up at him. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
“I just… I worry about you, that’s all. You’ve been through a lot.”
“Not as much as Rain,” I said softly.
“It’s wrong what’s happened to them. And wrong that it’s not front-page news every day. But…”
“But?”
“I just want you to know that it wouldn’t happen to you,” he said. “Not like that. I just want you to know that we’d always look for you. That we’d reach the ends of the earth to find you. It’s not fair that everyone doesn’t have someone to do that for them, but you do.”
I swallowed the lump that had risen in my throat. “I do?”
He rested one hand against my cheek, slid it into my hair. “Fuck yes you do. Now and forever.”
“So ten years from now if I’m a boring married lady with a hundred kids and something happens to me, you’re going to come looking?”
I thought I saw a flash of pain in his eyes and was surprised to find that it was a reflection of my own. The truth was, I didn’t want to be married to some random guy ten years from now.
I wanted them. The Bastards.
I shut the door on the thought as soon as it materialized in my mind. Because it was stupid and unrealistic, and did I mention stupid?
“Yeah, boss,” he finally said. “We’re going to come looking. Consider us your personal lifelong search party. Okay?”
I nodded. “Okay. But I still want to talk to Rain’s family.”
“I expect nothing less.” His gaze softened and he stroked my cheek with his thumb. “Have I told you that I fucking love how much you still care about people?”
I shook my head. “That doesn’t deserve praise. That’s just… human.”
His brown eyes looked molten in the firelight. “Yeah well, a whole lot of people don’t act human anymore. Sometimes I think I’m one of them.”
I tipped my head in surprise. “You? You’re one of the nicest people I know. You help people for a living!”
“It’s not all that,” he said. “You know that, right? You know we’re not some kind of do-gooders out there, superheroes saving people under cover of night just because we’re so fucking altruistic?”
I sucked in a breath because I didn’t know what to say.
“We do bad things too, Lilah. And even when we do good things, we do them for money. I’m not sure that makes us good. I’m not sure that makes us human .”
His voice was anguished, and I held his face in my hands and looked into his eyes.
“You are human. I see it. I feel it. Don’t let that asshole Sandoval take that from you. Don’t let him tell you who you are. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“We hurt you.” His voice cracked. “We hurt you so much. I’ll never be able to forgive myself for that, and I’m not asking you to forgive me either. I’m not asking you to make me feel better because that would just make the whole thing more fucked.”
I shook my head. “I’m not going to do that, because you’re right, it would make the whole thing more fucked, but… I don’t know. I’m starting to feel like in some weird way, maybe things happen the way they’re supposed to. And I’m not talking in a ‘God’s will’ kind of way like my mom always said. I hate that. I don’t know why all the shitty things in the world happen the way they do. I don’t know why kids go hungry or innocent people die or some people are born with everything and other people are born with nothing. I can only say that in my own life…”
“In your own life?”
“In my own life, it kind of feels like everything that’s happened to me, including in high school, led me to the person I am now, to this moment.” I hesitated, even though the next words were already on my tongue. “And I’m starting to feel like maybe I’m right where I’m supposed to be.”
I hadn’t known it was true until I said it. I still wished things hadn’t been so hard, wished I’d had a chance to have a fun, carefree life. But that version of me would be somewhere else, and right now there was nowhere else I wanted to be than on the sofa with Jude in front of the fire, the house quiet all around us.
His eyes pierced mine, something quiet and powerful moving between us. When he reached for me, it wasn’t with urgency but a quiet certainty, like we’d been moving toward this place all along.
Like he knew it too.
He held my head in his hands and touched his lips to mine, lingering for a long moment, like he wanted to memorize the kiss. I closed my eyes and sank into it.
I wanted to memorize it too.
Then he licked the seam of my mouth, slowly and sensuously. I opened for him, felt heat rush to my center as his tongue met mine.
And then all the quiet certainty was gone, washed away by a torrent of hunger.