Chapter Six Lysander #2
The smile slips off his face. She didn’t say it to hurt him. She never does. Deep inside his chest, a familiar red ember of anger ignites. He shuts his eyes and takes a single, steadying breath.
When he opens them again, Viola is still there, hovering on the threshold. He recognizes the slack set of her jaw. The glass of her eyes. She’s caught in a flashback. He knows, from experience, that there’s no reeling her back in, once she’s adrift. It doesn’t stop him trying.
“Mom,” he says.
Her eyes snap to his. She looks clean through him. “You’re doing so well,” she says softly. “You’re being so brave. My little boy blue.”
Sometimes it takes considerable effort to remind himself it’s not his mother he’s upset with. Some days he can’t even stand to look at her face—at the damage he did.
There’s a reason he’s alone. A reason he’s exiled himself to the north.
He can’t afford an attachment. No distractions. No weaknesses.
No small-town girls with defiant eyes and gold-spun hair.
He very nearly kissed Shea Parker tonight, and that would have been a mistake.
Quietly, he tells Viola, “I’ll get someone to walk you back to your room.”
When she’s gone, he sends for Boyce. The younger Mercy Boy appears not long after, skidding into the doorway.
He’s tall and gangly, black skin shining from a feed and his hair in twists.
Aiken Boyce was one of the earliest recruits, back when Lysander first opened the doors of Mercy Ridge.
He’d been eleven years old—too small to pledge—but he’d come north with his older brother.
There’s no one left. If I join the watch, there won’t be anyone to look after my kid brother. This way, we stay together.
“What’s up?” Boyce asks. He’s not eleven anymore, but he’s still too young. His arms and legs are growing faster than his brain. He nearly elbows a lamp off the dresser as he ambles into the room, bristling with his usual energy.
“Cy gave you your assignment?” asks Lysander.
“Yeah,” says Boyce, setting the lamp back onto its base. “I have to babysit the watchdog.”
“Sniper,” Lysander corrects him, and Boyce’s eyes go wide.
“Are you bullshitting me?”
“I am not.”
The first glimmer of interest appears in his eyes. “So, he’s deadly?”
“Not as deadly as you,” says Lysander. “He’s staying in the guest rooms. Go down and get him. Tell him I’d like to talk.”
Asher Thorley is slow to arrive. Lysander waits, prying loose the baseball card he keeps in his jacket. Mickey Mantle. 1952. There’s a bit of blood in one corner, so faint it could be mud. A fingerprint, smeared. He fits his thumb against it and feels a careful sort of nothing.
He hears the watchdog well before he appears. It’s impossible not to—Asher Thorley walks like an elephant. He stomps in through the open door at a pace suitable for a death march, his left eye swollen shut. Lysander tucks the card out of sight and waits for him to say something. He does.
“I guess you’re too important to come get me yourself.”
Lysander tips a smile in his direction. “Are you impressed?”
“No.”
His tone is blunt. Unapologetic. It doesn’t escape Lysander’s notice, how startlingly like Shea Asher is.
“Do you really have a hundred kills?”
Asher’s good eye narrows to a slit. “Something like that, yeah.”
“Does it eat at you?”
“I sleep just fine at night. How about you?”
Lysander’s smile broadens to a grin. “I’m more of a day sleeper.”
“Right.”
The conversation flags. The smell of blood scrapes at the back of Lysander’s throat. In the quiet, Asher shifts his weight from one ungainly boot to the other.
“Did you call me up here just to compare kills?”
“No,” says Lysander. “I have a job for you.”
The steady current of Asher’s pulse is loud in the quiet. “I don’t work for you.”
“True,” agrees Lysander. “But I can’t ask anyone else.”
“You don’t trust your own crew?”
“Not with Shea.”
A pause follows. Shea’s name hangs untouched between them in the silence.
Lysander is met with the faint sense that Asher Thorley will do anything for Shea Parker.
The understanding twists something ugly inside him, though it shouldn’t.
It’s a good thing. He can use that sort of allegiance. He can bend it to his will.
And he’ll have to. He thinks of what the emissary told him—that Paris Keeling is watching his every move.
Assessing him for weak spots, inspecting him for cracks.
Waiting for the chance to hit him where it hurts.
If they’re going to get close enough to Paris to kill him, Lysander will need to be untouchable.
And there’s no denying that Shea has become an exposed nerve.
“What do you need?” Asher asks.
“You and Shea have history. You grew up in the same town. You went to the same school. And now here you are, braving the dangers of the Gravewood together. The love story practically writes itself.”
There’s an incredulous pause, and then Asher barks out a laugh. He sobers the instant he realizes Lysander is serious. “There’s not a chance in hell.”
“You asked me what I need. This is it.”
“You want me to seduce her.”
Seduce . He hates the way it sounds, the way it coils in his gut like a snake.
“What’s the matter, Thorley?” he asks. “Not a closer?”
“You—” Asher gapes at him. “That’s not the problem. I don’t want a part in whatever sick head game the two of you are playing.”
“You inserted yourself in the middle of our sick head game,” Lysander reminds him. “And now, thanks to your enterprising mind, the three of us are about to walk into the lion’s den. I’m trying to keep her out of harm’s way.”
“If you really cared about keeping her safe, you and I could have done this alone. Parker could have gone home. She should have gone home. The road to the Flatwood is going to be dangerous, and she’s never even left Little Hill. There was zero reason for you to drag her into—”
“I need her.”
He hadn’t meant to say it like that. Desperately.
The admission pings off the walls of his room .
I need her. I need her . The smell of blood is making him twitch.
He drags the flat of his hand along the nape of his neck, feeling half mad.
He thinks of the envoy: He knows exactly where to push to make you break.
“Here’s a scenario for you—you’re Paris Keeling. You want me to submit. How would you make me do it?”
Asher is too quiet, sighting him like a hunter. “I’d go after something important.”
“Exactly.”
Lysander has him by the throat. He can feel it. It isn’t just that Asher Thorley will do anything for Shea, it’s that he’ll do whatever it takes to keep her out of the hands of the devil. Lysander tips back against the mantel, cool as ice. Inside, he’s coiled tight enough to snap.
“From here on out,” he says, “assume we’re being watched. Keep close to her. Be seen with her. It doesn’t have to be real, it just has to be believable.”