Chapter 45
Morrow’s weakness was his certainty. He believed so completely in his understanding of human nature that he never considered he might be wrong. He saw what he expected to see and missed everything else.
—Case notes from inside Alan Morrow’s file, written by Donald Dellman
Nico doesn’t understand. I scoot closer until my chest presses against his.
I take his arms carefully and guide them around me, one at a time, like I’m showing him it’s okay to touch me.
His hands settle against my back, fingers splaying wide.
I can feel the strength of him as he holds me, feel the way his whole body is wound tight like he’s holding himself back from crushing me against him.
“God.” He leans forward until his head rests on my shoulder, his nose brushing the curve where my shoulder meets my neck. He pauses there, suspended in that almost-touch, and the anticipation of it is beyond pleasure. “Do you have any idea what you do to me?”
“Trust me,” I say. “It’s extremely mutual.”
The way he’s holding me makes my entire body feel carbonated. I’m dizzy with the impossibility that this is actually happening.
“I need…” He cuts himself off with a sharp inhale.
I trace a slow circle on his upper arm, feeling the muscle jump under my fingertips. “What do you need?”
“I need you to not disappear,” he murmurs against my hair, and the words hit somewhere behind my ribs. “I need this to be real.”
I bury my nose into his chest, inhaling the smell of him baked into the leather, masked by the tang of blood and sweat from the past few days. “Me too.”
On the wall behind us, one emergency dome light flickers to life, bathing everything in a dim red glow. The gleam catches the angles of Nico’s face, turning his pale skin shadowy and making the blood on his split lip look black.
He’s being so careful with me, it’s almost painful. I need him to know he doesn’t have to be.
I push my hand into his hair. The moan that escapes him goes straight through me like liquid heat.
“Eden,” he breathes my name.
I cup the back of his head. “Yes, Nico?”
I try not to think about the fever radiating from him, how unusually warm he is in this freezing room. All I can focus on is how beautiful he is. Even bleeding and beaten, and in this terrible red light, he’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
I lower my hand to hold his cheek. He drops his head into my palm, and his eyes flutter closed.
“You have no idea how hard it was to pretend I didn’t want you,” he mumbles, lids heavy as he blinks up at me. “I’ve never felt this out of control.”
“I don’t need you in control,” I say. “I just need you.”
His eyes open fully, and he’s looking at me with so much softness, so much vulnerability.
“You’re really not scared?” he asks.
“There’s nothing about you that scares me,” I say. “Can you stop trying to scare me off already?”
I can feel the restraint trembling through his muscles. His eyes track my face like he’s preparing for it to disappear, and he wants to remember it.
“Are you sure you want this?” The question comes out carefully, but I can hear the desperate hope underneath.
“I don’t know where Donny gets off calling you a good profiler, because your emotional intelligence is about as sharp as the Game Master’s,” I joke.
He laughs, rough and low. I love his laugh. It’s the kind of sound that could cure any disease I’ll ever have, or at least make me capable of ignoring that I’m missing half my hand and bleeding out in an abandoned building.
He goes to cradle my face, his fingers hovering just millimeters from my skin.
I can feel them quivering in the red-tinged space between us.
I want him to touch me so badly. I want to grip his wrists and bring his hands against my face myself, but I let him reach slowly.
His hands are so big they engulf my head.
The pad of his thumb traces over my cheekbone.
I worry about the damage to his fingers—I can see a slight tremor in them—but they’re moving.
He gathers my hair between his fingers, tugging just enough that my head tilts back. A whimper escapes me. With anyone else, I’d be embarrassed to sound so needy, would have swallowed it down, but I want him to hear it. I want him to know exactly what he does to me.
His smile stretches into the biggest, most boyish grin I’ve ever seen on his face. He looks just like he did in his yearbook photo from before he was possessed. Seeing him look so happy and unguarded obliterates me.
“I’m obsessed with your smile,” I say, and I’m smiling too, so widely my face hurts. “I wish I could’ve seen it more.”
“I only smile like this around you,” he says, and the confession makes my heart stumble. “I wish I could see you better.” He traces my bottom lip, and I watch his eyes follow the movement of his thumb. “I want to draw you so badly.”
The meaning behind his words takes a few seconds to settle, and when it does, his eyes change. I shove the grief down hard because he will get to draw me. We’re getting out of here together.
I need to stop him before he disappears into whatever dark place he’s headed. I reach for him with both arms like I can physically pull him back to me.
A bolt of pain rips through my stump and races up my arm, burning through every nerve so suddenly that I let out a strangled scream.
I had temporarily forgotten the pain, but it comes back with a vengeance.
I hunch over my hand, trying to make the pain stop, but there’s nowhere to put it that doesn’t hurt. The agony keeps coming.
Just like that, the moment is over. Nico’s hands drop from my face. One slides to my shoulder to steady me while the other moves to grip my wrist, supporting my arm before I can jar it more.
“Focus on breathing,” he says, and his voice has shifted back to that commanding tone he uses in the field.
I try to breathe, but no amount of breathing is stopping this pain.
I know pain is information. I know Dad dragged his buddy to safety on a dislocated shoulder.
I know I’m supposed to be tough enough to push through this, but knowing something and doing it are two very different things when your arm feels like it’s been doused in gasoline and set on fire.
I tilt my chin toward where the other half of my hand must be somewhere beyond the red glow. “Do you think we can reattach it?”
“I can play Dr. Frankenstein,” Nico says. “But no promises you’ll be able to move your fingers after I’m done.”
I begin hysterically laughing as I picture myself with four limp fingers dangling from my hand like one of those gummy neon hands you buy at the dollar store that you fling against the wall.
“Would you still hold my hand if I can’t use four of my fingers?” I ask.
“I’ll hold your hand if you have no fingers,” he says.
I make a quiet promise to hold him to it as he carefully raises my arm above my head, explaining how it’s going to help staunch the blood flow, but it’s like I’m in the cargo hold of a ship being rocked by waves.
I realize with a pang that he’s also holding his arms above his head now, which can’t be good for his hands, but when I try to move away, he won’t budge.
I need to think about something else other than my hand. Anything else.
“How do you do it?” I ask. “Your whole mind-over-matter thing?”
“There’s a place I go. In my head.” He adjusts his hold on my wrist.
I try to focus on his touch, but it’s not strong enough to drown out the pain.
“Somewhere nothing can touch me, no matter what’s happening to my body,” he continues.
“Is it where you build your walls?” I ask.
He nods, and I feel the movement against my temple. “I found this hiking trail when I was fourteen. A five-hour climb up this mountain. You can see for miles up there. I used to go camping every spring. Get up early and draw the sun burning fog off the trees.”
I imagine the crisp mountain air filling my lungs, the smell of pine sap, and the soft light that only exists at dawn.
I used to tell people I’d rather die than go hiking, but now I wish I could go, and look out across the tops of the trees in the early morning light with Nico by my side. “It sounds perfect.”
“I used to love being in the woods until Billy decided they were the perfect place to…” He gathers himself.
“I never went back into those woods. But when things get bad, when the pain gets too much, I go up that mountain in my head. Billy may have ruined those woods for me, but he never made it up there.”
I hold onto his words and try my hardest to block out the throbbing in my hand.
“Maybe this will become where I go,” Nico says.
“This place?” I ask, smiling. “Really?”
“Obviously not.” His free hand comes up to brush my hair off my shoulder, tucking it behind my ear. “This. You.”
It’s like the sun comes out on me. For a second, the pain doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except the way he’s looking at me.
Morrow is going to take this from us. He’s going to rip this away from us before we even get to have it. Nico has already been through hell, survived things that should have broken him. It’s not fair. I’m done with lonely, egotistical men taking things from me that don’t belong to them.
I won’t roll over and let Nico die for me. I need a plan.
“Hey.” His voice cuts through my spiraling thoughts. “Where’d you go?”
“I’m just thinking about how much I want to murder the Game Master with my bare hands.” Well, my one remaining hand.
He tips his head back against the column behind him, and he does a sleepy smile that I can see clearly now. “There’s my angry girl.”
I smile so widely at being called that.
“What if we force an exorcism?” I drop my voice to barely a whisper, brushing my nose against the hollow of his throat. His stubble scratches my cheek. “Get the ghost out of him somehow?”
“We’re in no shape to fight an entity,” Nico whispers. “You saw what happened to Griffin. It could do that to us and worse.”
“What if we lure him down here?” My brain is racing now, grasping for anything. “Get him close enough to tie him up on the pole?”
“Morrow would flee the body the second he sensed real danger,” he says.
I force myself to think past the exhaustion. What do we actually know about the Game Master?
“Morrow thinks he knows how this is going to go,” I say, working through it. “He expects us to work together in the trials because he knows we care about each other, but once he turns up the heat, he also expects you to turn on me.”
“What are you saying?” Nico asks.
There’s a tightening in my throat because I know exactly how well this is going to go over, but it’s the only thing that makes sense. The only way I can see us getting out of this with the rest of our limbs still attached.
“I’m saying we give him what he wants.”