Chapter 11 Blindside #3
I glanced at him, but he refused to look at me.
The evening air around us was cool, scented of flowers and petrichor from the rain earlier.
A half-moon lent only tinges of silvery luminosity to his face.
I could barely make out his expression, but his eyes?
His eyes picked up the low light, and in my silence, they finally darted in my direction.
“I can’t take your bike,” I said.
He raised his eyebrows, all stern like he was about to start bossing me around again.
“It’s just,” I said before he could start, “why would you give me this?” My chest burned with a flaming desire to understand his motives and grasp his objectives. I wanted to know why. All the whys. I needed them.
My focus bounced between him and the bike.
“Shut up and take the bike, Sophia.” He said it like a plea, a friend begging another to do something for their own good.
My stubbornness reared, and I crossed my arms. “Don’t tell me to shut up.”
Something changed. His stance, maybe. Or perhaps the sharpness of his expression. Or maybe part of me was hard-wired to respond to internal changes in him—a protective instinct brought on by the danger he represented.
He didn’t move, but suddenly I felt crowded by him. Suffocated. Not threatened, exactly, but overwhelmed, and I couldn’t pinpoint why.
Then his voice dipped into that satiny, razor-ish register that sent tingles down my legs. “Maybe I will when you stop saying stupid things.”
The insult stiffened my spine, and he practically lit up, waiting for my response.
Did he want to fight with me?
I hesitated, staring into eyes that were far too pretty to belong to a man. “You may be the most confusing person I’ve ever met.”
A crooked smile spread over his face like honey, further confirmation of his humanity. “And it only gets worse from here.”
Definitely true. He wanted something from me. Maybe it wasn’t my body, but there was a reason he’d asked for someone like me, and the anxiety of waiting for the next blow to land had my entire life rattled. I left him, ignoring his taunt of Don’t crash! as I rode away.
The bike cut my commute by several minutes. I stored it with the other bikes and headed straight to Theo.
I ran into Adam near the stairs.
“Nice bike,” he said.
I kept walking. “Yeah. I know, right?”
“Where’d you get it?”
I spared him a glance as he rushed to keep up. “Theo gave it to me.”
His grin was so familiar, I found myself reciprocating despite that my heart was still pounding with confusion and nerves.
“I won’t ask Harrison whether that’s true if you do my KP duty next week.”
I could probably have asked Theo to corroborate my story, but Adam and I had been playing this game for years.
“Deal,” I said.
He wiggled his eyebrows at me. “I hear there’s a big mission tomorrow. You know anything about that?”
I pasted on a bewildered expression and hoped it was believable. “Why would I know anything?”
He eyed me. “Come to the meetup tonight.”
“I’m not in the mood.”
His hand ghosted over my shoulder. “Soph, don’t do this to yourself.”
I slowed. “Do what?”
“You’re locking yourself away. You don’t have to. It’s me.”
His words tugged at something deep inside. The remains of my heart, maybe. Adam was one of the relics from my past, one of the only ones still living. His presence should have been comforting, but looking at his face made me ache.
We stopped in the hallway near Theo’s office, where I tapped my hand on the permanent bronze dog statue by the door in silence.
“I hate that you’re so alone,” he said.
“You sound like Zara,” I muttered.
What did it matter if I was alone, or if I pushed them away? I wasn’t going to make it out of this intact, even if I lived, and neither would they. Caring for people only caused pain. Hadn’t he figured that out by now?
Still, Adam had always been strong for everyone. He’d held us together time and again. Who held him together? Had anyone ever offered him solace?
I blinked several times to stave off the tears and stared down the hall to avoid the disappointment in his eyes. But in the end, he broke me.
“Sophia.” His tone was so soft, so sad, that the tears finally tore through my resolve. “None of them would have wanted this for you.”
I still hadn’t found the courage to ask Lucas about Tekqua, fearful of what he might find, and my heart twisted from guilt and grief. “I miss them, Adam.”
His face crumpled when I glanced his way.
“Why is no one helping us?” I whispered through the tears.
“I don’t know,” he said, because it was an unanswerable question. Was Haynes stopping any foreign aid from reaching us? Was the world siding with him? Did anyone care about us at all?
Adam touched my arm. “What can I do?”
“Nothing.” I turned and said the next words as I walked away from him. “They’re dead, and I may as well be.”
I stand under a bridge in the pouring rain. Lucas faces me, silent, twirling his infamous scalpel around his finger like a simple pencil.
“Why are we here?” I ask.
“I told you to stay safe.”
I look up and down the roadway, heavy rain obscuring the distance. The world is nothing but wet smudges of gray and green, soundtracked by the din of the storm. No immediate threats pop out, but I search for them anyway.
When I find none, I turn back to him. “Protect myself from what?”
He says nothing, but his eyes gleam bright in the gray. The scalpel spins and spins.
How can someone so innately treacherous be this magnetic? One small move with that scalpel could end me, but I drift toward the danger regardless.
What stays his hand? Why is this predator not attacking his prey? If I turn, will he haunt my steps? Will he stalk me with that blade until it finds my throat?
What do you want from me? I long to ask. What are you looking for? Why are you doing this?
I take a single step toward him.
His brow lifts. “Behind you.”
I barely turn before Lucas grabs me, his familiar hands yanking me against him as a faceless stranger arcs a blade where I’d been standing. Lucas buries his scalpel in the stranger’s neck. The guy falls dead at my feet, his blood mingling with the rain and asphalt to create a morbid watercolor.
“Watch your blindside, Sophia,” Lucas whispers against my ear.
Heart fluttering, I bolted awake. My hands clenched the blankets while I blinked in the dark, trying to ignore the image of a knife swinging my way.
He’d saved me. Even in my dreams, Lucas Scott protected me. Why on earth would my subconscious seek him for sanctuary?
Ignoring the implications, I forced myself to go back to sleep, then woke anxious the next morning, my stomach in knots for everyone heading into the Lily Wyatt mission. Jayden took me in his arms before he left, and only then did it occur to me we hadn’t slept together in weeks.
“A kiss for luck?” he asked.
I smiled through the nerves and gave him a quick peck. The team set out, and I couldn’t hold back one last warning to be careful, even as a pair of intense, multi-colored eyes flashed across my thoughts, paired with a bolt of unease.
Was I… I couldn’t be worried about Lucas?
I tried to laugh at myself, to talk myself out of my own stupidity, but really, I was just trying not to throw up.
Later that evening, our team returned safe and healthy, gloating at their success.
Only one of ours had fallen—not Lucas’s kill—while nine of theirs had.
They took Lily Wyatt to a safe room for holding.
I barely caught a glimpse of her screaming as she was escorted upstairs.
My ears perked for news while the soldiers debriefed, but since no one gloated in ecstasy, I assumed none of the Hunter deaths included a certain shifty Blood Colonel.
Relief and confusion stirred, along with something else.
Something dangerous and warm. Foreign and unwanted.
If I were forced to put a label on it, I would’ve fought that label with every word and weapon I possessed.
Lucas Scott was not someone who engendered this sort of emotion.
Or at least, he wasn’t supposed to. Not this emotion.
But at night, when I closed my eyes, it flashed in neon across my mind.
Hope.