Chapter Seven Shea #2
“No,” Shea admits, too surprised to say anything else.
The woman’s left eye glimmers curiously.
The other is clouded white. A pale, opaline stare that seems to gaze clean through her.
“It’s Oliver’s favorite. Although he’s going to lose this game.
He went with the Sicilian Defense tonight.
Aggressive, but he’s left himself full of holes. He must be in a bad mood.”
As if he’d been waiting for his cue, the door swings wide with just enough force to send it dinging off the drywall. Lys appears, looking treacherous. In the hall behind him, Tristan peers nervously over his shoulder.
“Leave,” Lys tells the woman.
She sets the pawn into a space, unhurried. “But it’s your move.”
“And I’ll let you know when I’ve made it. Get out.”
“There’s no need for histrionics,” she tells him, rising out of her chair. “I’m being perfectly well-behaved.”
Lys doesn’t answer as the woman glides between them, light on her feet. She pats his cheek, and then she’s gone, the door swinging shut in her wake. Alone, the silence bristles.
“That was rude of you,” notes Shea.
On a normal night, the casual condemnation of his character might amuse him. On a normal night, he might laugh. Tonight, he stares dead ahead, unsmiling. He looks as tired as she feels, his eyes bruised and his cheeks hollow, his hair a messy fall of black.
“You shouldn’t have come here.” His voice is tumbled stone. It scrapes clean through her.
“I needed to talk to you.”
He still hasn’t looked at her. “I didn’t send for you.”
“Well, that’s too bad. I’m not one of your lackeys, I’m your—”
She falters and he pounces, quick as a cat. “My what?”
“Never mind.”
“Don’t stop now,” he goads, fixing her in the full-black of his stare. “I’m dying to know what it is you were planning to say.”
“Nothing. It doesn’t matter.”
“It does to me.” He stalks nearer, predatory in the gloom. “What are you, Shea? My iron supplier? My human blood bag? How many more ugly phrases can we think up to give this thing a name?”
“You are in a bad mood.”
His smile is humorless. “What gave it away?”
He looks as waspish as she’s ever seen him, and she suddenly regrets coming at all.
Everything feels different, now that the rules have changed.
Like she and Lys have been stuffed into an airless box and then rattled.
His agitation drones in the air between them—a palpable buzz that sets her blood humming.
“I wanted to talk to you about Turning, but clearly I came at a bad time.”
She manages to get the door partway open before he pushes it shut, his hand splayed against the grain. Pinned, she can smell the clean, cold scent of him. Smoke and pine, like the forest in deep winter. Without a fire, a chill has crept into the room. The knob is ice-cold beneath her palm.
“I’ve changed my mind,” he says. “Let’s talk.”
Pulse fluttering, she turns to face him. A half inch away, Lys is a study in shadow. Hunger threads along his throat in pale blue rivers. It takes her several heartbeats to gather her courage.
“I’ve thought it over, and I think I’m ready.”
“You think?” His voice is hard as glass. “Or you are?”
“I am.”
He contemplates her for a long moment. “Your toes are turned in.”
“What?”
“You go pigeon-toed when you lie.”
“I do not.”
“Do too.”
The careful way he’s studying her makes her cheeks heat. Her heart gives a single hard thump. He hears it, the hunger in his skin splitting into tributaries of dark. She resists the urge to reach out and trace the lines with a finger.
“You’re starving.”
He makes a face. “I’m always starving.”
“Lysander!” There’s pounding at her back. “Open up!”
They step away from the door just as Conall Sullivan bursts through it.
He’s gangly and thin, his head a mess of ginger curls, his pale skin freckled with remnants of a former life lived in sunlight.
He takes silent note of their proximity in the dark—no signs of a feed to mark what they’d been doing.
“Sullivan,” says Lys, suddenly sober. “You’re not where you’re supposed to be.”
“It’s Nkosi,” says Sullivan. “He and the others caught someone breaking into the Parker house.”
At the news, everything in Shea shuts up tight.
Mom , she thinks, going cold. Her vision tunnels, ears ringing.
She shouldn’t have left her mother there alone.
She shouldn’t have thought she could get away with it, straddling the thin line between night and day.
Lys’s voice swims toward her in the narrow channel of her panic.
“Where is he now?”
“He has the suspect in custody,” says Sullivan. “He and Cyrus are out there with a small recon crew. The watchdog is with them. They’re waiting for your orders.”
Lys is already shrugging on his jacket. “I’ll deal with it myself.”
“Lys, wait.” Shea moves with him as he presses past her. “Wait, I want to come.”
He doesn’t slow. “Absolutely not.”
“It’s my house.” She tails after him, undeterred. “I’m coming.”
His response is reflex-quick. A half step, and then she’s pinned beneath him, her jaw cupped in the hard cradle of his palm and her cheek pressed flat against the wall.
Bracing himself, he leans in until his mouth is at her ear.
Every part of him is cool and controlled, save his heart.
It slams against her chest, thrashing like a wildebeest at the bars of its cage.
Sometimes she thinks that when it finally gets free it’ll tear her apart.
“Keep pushing me like that where anyone can see,” he hisses into her ear. “You’ll get both of us destroyed.”
He’s gone before she can ask him what he means, the door to his bedroom slamming shut in his wake.