Chapter 21
21
Sonny
T he Whitlock cabin is bigger than it looks from the outside. Under normal circumstances, I’m sure it would get cramped with all four of us living on top of each other. After being locked away, it feels like a mansion. I step inside behind Raze to make enough room for the others to pile in behind me, but leave myself the option to run back out as I assess the space.
The front door opens into a small family room that can hardly fit the two couches and sofa table sitting inside it with a wood-burning stove tucked into the corner. A modest dinner table is pushed against the back wall with two chairs beside it. The kitchen is to the left and is nothing more than a line of cabinets along one wall with a sink in the middle of them.
There are two closed doors on the back wall and an open one beside the kitchen that clearly leads to a bathroom. I want to cry at the sight of the toilet.
Indoor plumbing is something I will never take for granted again.
Ava, Beatrix, and Jonah stumble in behind me and take it all in with just as much interest as I do. Raze leans against the kitchen counter at a safe distance and waits with a bored expression on his face. Each of us is clearly still weary of trusting him and we’re doing nothing to hide it from him.
“No one is going to pop out and grab you, if that’s what you’re waiting for,” he mutters.
“I doubt you would need assistance taking us out,” Jonah bites back, crossing his arms over his chest self-consciously.
Raze ignores him, pushing off the counter to trudge through the living room and open the two doors on the back wall. “You can decide your own sleeping arrangements. This one has a bunk bed, and the other has a queen. Bathroom is right here,” he explains in that same dull, detached tone he would use during his lectures. “There’s a bathtub and shower. Hot water works, but you have to keep your showers short and give it time to reheat.”
The four of us share a look. The idea of a hot shower sounds like heaven right now.
“I brought in a small box of food earlier to last you for now. I’ll grab more and bring it as soon as possible. There are some random clothes in the drawers that you’re free to change into. We’ll have to wait to gather your belongings from your dorms when no one is watching. I wouldn’t use anything with heat during the day. It’ll throw up smoke and draw attention.”
“What are we going to do? Freeze ?” Beatrix whines.
“What did you do in the cells?” When she tucks her lip out in a pout that says that’s exactly what we did down there, he nods his head once. “There are blankets in the closets. You’ll survive.”
“What are you getting out of helping us?” Ava asks the question I know has been sitting on the tip of her tongue this entire time.
Raze raises his brows. “Nothing.”
“How do we know you won’t come back and repeat what they did to Matilda?” she challenges, widening her stance.
The dirt and grime staining her skin, paired with her tattered clothing, gives her a rugged appearance that even I would be afraid to stand up to. This is a woman who has experienced the hardest days of her life while he has been able to walk around a free man, and she’s still standing.
All of us are still standing. That has to count for something.
“They shouldn’t have done that,” Raze admits.
“She trusted you to protect her,” Ava retorts, and the accusation is clear in her voice.
He rolls his lips and carefully considers her. “Matilda was an asset to our movement and something like a second mother to me. I’ll miss her terribly, but she knew the risks. You all will, too.”
They stare at each other in silent challenge until Ava blinks and turns away. “Is this place even safe? It’s practically on Ravenshurst property.”
“It is on Ravenshurst property,” he corrects, and I raise my brows. “But it’s as safe as you can be while we get some things sorted out.”
“Who is ‘we’?” Jonah asks.
“You’ll find out soon enough,” is all he says before turning his attention fully toward me. “Can we talk for a moment?”
“Sure,” I mutter, feeling the weight of three stares boring into my back as he leads me into the room with a queen bed and shuts the door.
“Has anyone hurt you?” he asks the second the door clicks into place. I can tell he wants to step closer toward me, but is attempting to respect my personal space.
Wrapping my arms across my torso, I rub my palms up and down. “No.”
“That shouldn’t have happened,” he insists breathlessly. “They did that to send a message to the rebellion.”
“Which part?”
“Killing Matilda,” he answers, and I hate the lack of emotion he shows at the mention of such a brutal attack. They didn’t just kill her. They murdered her right before my eyes.
“They said it was a message for me,” I recall through the lump in my throat that reminds me I haven’t even begun to mentally process the trauma I’ve endured.
Raze frowns, tilting his head in that way he always does when he’s trying to figure me out. “What did they say?”
Shit. Maybe I shouldn’t have told him that yet. Am I playing my cards too early?
Exhaling, I roll my eyes toward the ceiling to buy myself some time to think.
“Tell me now, or I’ll go out there and force them to do it,” he threatens, extending his arm across the space to point at the door. At my friends, beyond it.
“No,” I growl, stepping toward him. “They won’t be used against me anymore. No one touches them.”
It’s an overreaction I blame on lack of sleep and proper nutrition. But my body still responds as if he’s already stepped out of the room and grabbed one of them.
The overhead light begins to flicker again as my anger rises. I refuse to move my gaze toward them, but Raze’s eyes lift upward, brows pulled together in confusion. The left side of his mouth slowly lifts, his frown loosening into an excited gleam.
“Would you look at that?” he muses, his smile broadening as my rage burns hotter and the lights blink out longer.
“That’s not me,” I insist. It’s a stupid, obvious lie. But what else can I do? I’m losing my grip on reality.
“Oh, I know for a fact that it is. I just didn’t think you were capable. Unless...” He rears his head back and really, truly looks at me. “No,” he dismisses weakly.
“What?” I try to demand, but my vision starts to cloud and I lose my balance. Raze crosses the room in an instant, holding his arms out like he’s ready to catch me, but I swat his hands away.
“Is this why you look so exhausted? You burned yourself out?”
“I’m not burned out,” I try to say, but the words slur together into an incoherent jumble of sounds. I want to add that I look exhausted because I’ve been imprisoned by him and his little cult but the words won’t leave my throat.
He tries to reach for me again, and I dodge him.
“Sit down. Please,” he begs, running his hand through his hair instead.
As much as I’d love to argue back, I lose the fight the moment my legs weaken and I have to catch myself on the bed.
“What did they say?” His tone is gentler this time—less of a demand.
I allow myself to fall back and stare up at the spinning ceiling as I recall, “They wanted to make sure I was watching. Said it was a message for me from the Midnight Syndicate.”
“Fuck.”
I crane my neck to look at him. “That wasn’t even the creepiest part.”
He tenses. “What else happened?”
“Matilda...she said the new Supreme is here and none of them would be spared.” My eyes are glued to his face, watching every minuscule movement his muscles make. I’ve spent enough time with him to know that he won’t give me an obvious reaction.
As expected, he keeps his expression schooled, offering nothing. It’s the most obvious sign that he does, in fact, know something .
“Who was she talking to?” His tone is conversational.
My head feels a little steadier, so I sit up in my spot and carefully explain, “Those two maniacs. It spooked them. They killed her immediately after.”
Large, strong hands cup my jawline and force me to look directly at him. “I’m sorry you had to see that. I’m sorry for everything you’ve gone through.”
I narrow my eyes. “Are you, though?”
He blanches. “Of course, I am.”
Jerking away from his touch, I scoot backward. “I shouldn’t have told you any of this...”
“Why?”
“Because you could turn on us at any moment.”
“Haven’t I proven that every step I take is to ensure your safety?”
My answer is immediate. “No.”
“Come on, Little Nightmare. You’ve made your point,” he growls the stupid nickname, brows pulling together into the same menacing scowl that would have had me backing off a few weeks ago.
Not today.
“Have I?” I spit, crossing my arms over my chest again.
Leaning forward, he buries his fists into the bed on either side of my thighs and erases the space between us. He doesn’t stop until our noses are nearly touching. “I get it. You can’t stand me because I killed your parents.”
The mocking lilt of his tone has my blood raising ten degrees.
“That’s a pretty good fucking reason to hate someone.”
“And I never suggested that you shouldn’t,” he calmly points out.
“Then what are we doing here, Raze? Why did you help me out of that cell? Why are you doing any of this?”
I can’t take the confusion anymore. The hot and cold attitude, the unsure footing. One minute, he’s threatening to slaughter me, and the next he’s handing me the key to my enclosure.
“Because you’re mine, and I’m done with the Midnight Syndicate thinking they can take things that belong to me.”
“I’m not yours,” I insist, rearing backward. He follows, his movements matching mine to keep the perfect distance between us at all times.
“You are. I’ve claimed you since the moment I saw your cousin’s name on the list of incoming legacies for this semester. I hadn’t even laid eyes on you yet, and I knew you were mine .”
My nose scrunches in a scowl. “You thought I was Poppy back then. It’s not the same thing.” And judging by how much he clearly hates Aunt Divina, having him claim me probably wasn’t a good thing back then.
He shakes his head, rejecting the thought. “I knew you weren’t her as soon as I saw you on that bench, staring up at the moon like you wanted to propel yourself onto it.”
“You treated me horribly.”
“I couldn’t stand the idea of falling for you. Of having a weakness. But it didn’t matter. None of it mattered, because you still walked into my classroom twice a week and were the only thing I could see. I may have started off claiming you, but by the end of it, I was yours.”
“Well, consider yourself a free man.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“It is,” I insist, my eyes widening. “You killed my parents. You wanted to kill me. ”
“I-I had no other choice than to do what I did,” he stutters out, struggling to speak for the first time since I met him. “I’ve had to live with that decision every single day since. But if I hadn’t done it—if I hadn’t been pushed to the edges of mania—I wouldn’t have been able to spare as many lives as I have.”
“You expect me to believe that my parents were some sort of...human sacrifice for your rebellion movement?” I stumble over the words, hardly able to mutter them.
How is this a real conversation? This man has taken people’s lives, and he’s acting like I shouldn’t be deterred by that.
“I expect you to believe the truth. What happened broke something integral inside of me. I didn’t walk away from that day unscathed. But I chose to take that weakness and turn it into something that fucking mattered . Something that has grown beyond what you or I can even fully fathom. I chose to continue their mission. I won’t apologize for that.”
His mouth sets into a stubborn line as the menacing glare of his eyes somehow grows harder.
“What do you mean?”
“I didn’t start this rebellion. They did.”
My head rears back into the wall. “That’s not possible. They were just regular people.”
I hate the sad, pitiful smile that curves his lips. “Carter and Constance Ellery are far from regular people.”
That thought jars me. It’s entirely possible that there are things they were hiding from me as an adolescent. Things they may have thought were too much for me to understand. Every parent does it.
But hiding a whole ass rebellion? That seems like something I’d catch onto, eventually.
It seems like something they knew would take them from me one day.
My heart drops into my stomach.
No. They wouldn’t do something so reckless.
I don’t bother arguing with him about it anymore. Mostly because I hate the idea that he may know more about them than I do. My own parents.
“I won’t apologize for resenting what you took from me.” It was so much.
Too much to fall for his hollow words and allow him back in.
“You can resent me all you want.” He brings his hand between us to tuck a stray piece of hair behind my ear, then replaces it with his lips. “But that won’t stop me from spending the rest of my life on my knees before you, begging for forgiveness.”
I scoff, rolling my eyes. “Don’t be dramatic.”
Sucking his bottom lip between his teeth, he watches me through narrowed eyes, thinking. “This isn’t some schoolboy crush, Little Nightmare. When I tell you my mind is set on you, I mean it in every sense.”
The rebuttal denying that sits bitterly in my mouth. In what world does a man staking his claim include throwing her into a dungeon and locking the door? None that haven’t been written by Stephen King, I’m sure. But arguing has proven to be useless, especially when we’re only standing in this bedroom because he helped me escape. So I keep my mouth shut this time.
I hate that I’ve even stayed in this room with him alone for so long. Ava, Beatrix, and Jonah are probably dying for him to leave so they can relax, and here we are playing little mind games.
As if I’ve said the thought out loud again, he checks his watch and stands from the bed. “I have to get going. Please don’t do anything to get yourselves caught out here. I’ll be back as soon as possible.”
I nod, and I can tell he wants to do something reckless, like reach out and touch my face, or kiss me the way he would when he left before. Thankfully, he refrains, giving me his back as he opens the bedroom door to find all three of my friends standing right outside of it with stern looks.
They step out of his way, allowing him to pass through toward the front door. He throws the same warning not to get caught over his shoulder at them, then leaves without saying goodbye.
“Ava won the game of rock, paper, scissors to take a shower first. You’re going to have to be last,” Jonah explains as soon as the lock clicks into place. Then, as the three of them plop onto the couch, he throws over his shoulder, “We made you a bowl of rice.”
Smiling, I follow them to the kitchen and grab my warm bowl of food. We may not be out of the woods yet, but at least we have each other.