30. Lilah
30
LILAH
“Where are we going?” Nolan asked, leaving the long drive leading to the house and pulling onto the main mountain road.
I stared straight ahead. “I can’t believe you’ve been tracking me.”
“I’m sure it was a shock finding that out,” he said sympathetically.
“Are you therapizing me?” I glared at him from the passenger seat of the blue Lotus he drove when he wasn’t working. I still hadn’t figured out if the cars in the climate-controlled underground garage had specific owners or if the Bastards shared them, but the guys definitely had preferences.
He stopped the car at the end of the drive. “Not at all. Just acknowledging your feelings. So where to, sweetheart?”
I folded my arms over my chest. “Town.”
“Vague, but it’s a start,” he said.
He turned left, pointing the Lotus toward downtown Blackwell Falls.
I watched as the mountain landscape passed by on the other side of the window. Most of the snow was gone now, and there was even less of it as we made our way down the mountain. I saw the promise of spring in the buds on the trees, the sun that shone warm overhead.
It took me a minute to recognize the feeling in my chest as hope. I had no business feeling hopeful, not with my life on hold, my savings account dwindling, Vic out there with Mr. Suit doing god only knew what.
I didn’t want to admit it was because of Nolan and Jude. And okay, even Rafe in a way, because the truth was I’d started to feel safe with all of them, if safe meant not worrying someone was going to hurt you but worrying you were going to hurt yourself by doing stupid things with more than one treacherous guy.
The person I’d been when I’d fallen into the foyer of the mountain house six weeks ago would have felt sorry for this version of myself, a version who had started not only to tolerate the Bastards but to like them (two of them anyway), a version who had, without even realizing it, started to trust them.
A version who felt hopeful because of them.
Funny thing about hope: it was hard to feel when you were barely getting by, when you were working sixteen-hour days seven days a week and still had to worry about your electricity getting shut off.
It was even harder when you were alone in the world, when you knew one wrong move — or one unforeseen emergency — could send you flying off the tightrope you were walking. Could send you plunging to your death.
Being at the mountain house, living with the Bastards, had given me a kind of mental space I hadn’t known existed. Sure, I was eating through my savings to continue paying the rent and utilities on my apartment, but I didn’t wake up every morning and go to bed every night worried about keeping the roof over my head. I didn’t lose sleep wondering if I could survive on a can of soup, two slices of bread, and a half-moldy tomato until payday.
And something else had happened, something even weirder: I was breathing easier in my body too. I’d felt… vulnerable before, on my own. I’d done all this training to be able to protect myself — lifting weights at the gym, taking self-defense classes, carrying my knife, learning to grapple with someone who wanted to take me down — but I’d still been terrified.
Before Vic had chased me through the woods, I wouldn’t have been able to articulate the threat I’d felt, but looking back, I knew it was good old-fashioned fear.
Of everything.
Threats had seemed to be around every corner, and deep down I’d known I was deeply alone in facing anything that might crawl out of the woodwork. Looking back, I’d felt that way since I was a kid, my mom’s doom-and-gloom warnings working their way into my bones until I didn’t trust anybody or anything.
I was still wrapping my head around the fact that the three men who’d validated everything I’d been taught — that no one was to be trusted, that only God was a refuge — were also the ones now making me feel safe.
Talk about a mindfuck.
“Almost to town, sweetheart.”
I blinked and realized Nolan was right. While I’d been lost in thought, we’d made our way down the mountain.
“Go to Main,” I said, “then turn right onto Maple.”
“Want to tell me where we’re going?” he asked, following my instructions.
I hesitated. My instinct to keep everything about my life separate from the Bastards wasn’t going to work when one of them was acting as my chauffeur. “I need to see my brother.”
Nolan nodded, like he wasn’t surprised to hear about Matt, which made me wonder how much the Bastards knew about me.
“You know about him,” I said.
“Yeah.”
We started down Main Street and I took in the pedestrians walking from small business to small business. They were mostly locals now — the tourists wouldn’t come until summer — but they were as foreign to me as downtown Blackwell.
Straight to school, straight home.
Those had been my mom’s instructions every day when Matt and I had left for school. Participating in extracurricular activities, hanging out with friends (not that I’d had any) after school, lingering at the old coffee shop that was now Cassie’s Cuppa (owned by a girl I remembered from high school)… well, that was trouble in the making according to my mom.
Too much freedom. Too much room for error. Too many temptations.
“Did you do some kind of… research on me?” I shouldn’t have turned to look at him. Looking at him only made me want him all over again.
And who wouldn’t? His eyes were shielded from the sun with sunglasses that made him look like a movie star, but they didn’t hide the strong slant of his cheekbones, his chiseled jaw.
He navigated the Lotus lazily, one big hand on the bottom of the steering wheel, slouched just enough in the seat to make him look casually sexy, which was probably also down to the strain of his thighs in worn jeans.
I pressed my legs together, cursing my newfound lust. I hated to give my mom an ounce of credit for her evangelism, but in this case lust was definitely a deadly sin.
“The work we do is sensitive,” Nolan said, turning onto Maple. “We needed to know more to have you stay in the house long-term.”
I turned my head to the window. “It’s not supposed to be long-term.”
He reached for my hand. “I know. I’m sorry. We’re trying.”
We hadn’t talked about Mr. Suit since leaving Breakers the night before, but it was pretty obvious we were at a dead end. I kept thinking about Imperium Fratrum, the name of the shell company, hoping it would shake something loose in my head, but so far it was, as the Bastards would say, a no go.
“What else did you find out?” I asked.
He hesitated. “You were admitted to Oak Hill. After you left Blackwell High.”
“I’m not talking about Oak Hill with you,” I said around the lump in my throat.
“Whatever you want, sweetheart.”
“It’s that one.” I pointed at my mom’s house, glad to have a distraction from the conversation. “The blue one with the maroon Toyota in the driveway. But don’t park in front.”
He continued past the house and parked the Lotus around the corner, then reached for the door.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Coming with you.”
“Um, no, you’re not. You’re waiting in the car.”
The last thing I needed was for Matt to see me with one of the Bastards.
Nolan opened his mouth to say something but I stopped him before he could get the words out.
“That wasn’t a question.” I opened the door. “Wait here.”