Chapter 2
Chapter
Two
As if she sensed me, Delani’s slim figure came racing out of a door to my right. She threw herself around me, her arms clutching my neck so tight that I couldn't draw a breath.
“Oh my gods, how I have missed you!” she squealed, squeezing even tighter.
“I bet I missed you more,” I choked out with the small amount of air I had conserved. Her hair covered my face and I soaked in the familiar scent of her berry shampoo.
She released me, and I studied her features that seemed to have changed so much since I last saw her. Her hair had grown a couple of inches and she had a few new freckles on the tip of her nose.
Tears tried to form in the corner of my eyes. “I thought you were gone.”
“You can’t get rid of me that easily,” she choked out, her own eyes turning cloudy. “Your boyfriend is hot,” she added with a one-sided smirk.
Typical Delani.
“Not much has changed with you, I see. Still have the same thought process: men.”
She bit back a laugh then rose to her toes to glance over my shoulders. “So…you met Dad?”
“Yep.” My voice lowered. “Doesn’t this seem…weird to you?”
“Oh, absolutely. Weird as all hell. But I’ve had a bit longer to adjust than you have. Not much, but give it a few days. It will make all the difference, I promise.”
“I’m not so sure I’ll adjust to all of this in a few days. I still don’t know half of what's going on.”
She squeezed my upper arm in comfort. “I know it’s a lot. And with Mom being gone…” she swallowed what was likely a knot lodged in her throat, “it’s just a lot.”
Salty tears swarmed my eyes, blazing hot as they tumbled down my cheeks. “I can’t believe you're actually alive.” I threw myself back into her arms, not pulling away until the light surrounding us darkened.
A shadowy figure appeared behind her, a smile dawned on his chiseled, lightly freckled face.
“Maevey baby! Glad to see you out of bed. It was beginning to be a little too funeral-like in there with all the flowers and shit,” Sawyer quipped.
Delani stepped aside, allowing Sawyer to pull me into a hug.
His chin idled on the top of my head, his palm settling across the apex of my spine. “Are you doing okay?”
What a loaded question.
My head tossed ever so slightly, just enough for him to notice. “Not even close,” I whispered into his embrace.
“It’s a lot to take in,” he agreed, retreating and releasing a heavy breath. He gestured for me to follow him the way he came. “Come on.”
I looked back at Archer, silently asking him for approval—not that I needed it.
“Go catch up with everyone. We’ll talk more later,” he said.
With a nod and a soft grin, I followed Sawyer through a set of double-doors, then into a dimly lit room where I was met by Pia’s death-grip of a hug. Kohen followed in pursuit, squeezing me harder than he ever had before.
Meanwhile, Sebastian was tucked away in the corner, lounging in a chair and flipping through a book that I assumed he pulled free from the shelf behind him. I imagined his silence was his way of giving me space. Or maybe he was pissed at me, too, for some unknown reason.
I glanced around the fully furnished room at all of my closest friends. The walls were an emerald green and the brown leather couch perfectly accented the woven chairs across from it.
“I’m so beyond relieved that you all made it out.” My eyes lingered on Sebastian for all of a second, but when he didn’t look up from his book, I deflected with a question. “Do you guys believe all of this crap?”
“It’s hard not to believe when we’re standing in the midst of the proof,” Pia cheerfully supplied. “I mean, look at this place. It’s incredible!”
That, it was. But it didn’t make the situation any less strange. “So you guys made it to the tunnel in time? I mean, you’re all here, so obviously.”
“Yeah. We ran for a while, then stopped about halfway through so I could heal Kohen as much as possible,” Pia answered.
“Once he was conscious and stable, we continued. We heard the castle fall, and not gonna lie, we all thought you were as good as dead,” Sawyer pitched in, dropping into a free chair.
“So glad to hear you had faith in me,” I sneered with an eye roll.
“Dad says it's a coincidence that he passed the exit of the chambers at the same time they all crawled out, but I feel like the gods had something to do with that,” Delani marveled. Her eyes brightened to a fascinating shade of gold when they settled upon my forearms. “Woah. Those look even more impressive when they aren’t covered in blood and bruises.”
“You came to see me?” I questioned, though I didn’t know why their visitation surprised me.
“Of course! We all did. Your boyfriend would hardly leave your side.”
I cringed. Again, that word. Boyfriend. Maybe it was just my anger taking over, but I couldn’t bear referring to Sebastian as that right now. Boyfriends shouldn’t lie to their significant others—especially not lies as big as the ones he's told me.
“I don’t even know how I’m alive.” I moved further into the room, throwing my body—that still very much ached—onto the cool material of the sofa.
“Last I remember, rocks were piling on top of me.” My entire body winced with the reminder of the agony I’d felt when cement squeezed me like a tube of toothpaste.
“Your dad healed you,” Kohen said, taking a seat in a lounge chair across from me, Pia settling herself on his lap.
I raised an eyebrow at Delani as she sat down on the couch by my right side. “How? Dad isn’t gifted.”
“He had an herb of some sort. I can’t remember what he called it, but he gave it to you, and your body began to heal. Slowly of course, but it did the trick until he got you here. The menders handled the rest.” She poked at my arm.
“Ow,” I whined, tearing the limb away from her reach.
“Still hurts? That part was one of the worst. You’re lucky that your arm is even attached after what it went through. It was half torn off at the shoulder and hanging on by some bloody, fleshy—”
“Jeez, Delani. I’m glad you're here, but shut up.” I gagged from her words, rubbing my shoulder in the process.
“Don’t even get me started on your head,” she added, glancing to the side of my skull.
Leaning back in my seat, I put a hand over my mouth while I drew in a deep yawn. “Alright, can someone please explain to me what's really going on?” Once more I glanced towards Sebastian, still nose deep in his book. Asshole.
“How much did your father tell you?” Sawyer questioned.
“Well, I know that my formerly presumed-dead father is very much alive. I know that I narrowly cheated death and am living in some hidden kingdom created by the gods themselves. I have the mark of a goddess on my arms and can apparently manipulate the cosmos, but besides that, I have no clue what’s going on.
” I did a quick glance between them all. “Anything I’m missing?”
Four pairs of knowing, wide-eyes settled upon me, while Sebastian—still fucking engrossed in his reading—said without looking up, “I told her. Some of it, anyways.” He flipped the page. “She wouldn’t let me tell her the rest.”
“Oh, yeah. There’s that bullshit, too,” I lashed, sweeping my enraged gaze away from him.
“Listen, Maeve, I know how it seems. But try to cut him some slack. We all have,” Kohen encouraged, soft-spoken as usual while his gentle eyes gestured around the room.
“Easy for you to say. You guys weren’t the ones he knew secrets about,” I snapped, the comment coming out ruder than I’d intended. Then again, maybe they also were, and I just didn’t know.
“I was pissed at first, too, when he told me,” Pia chimed in. “But in the midst of everything else that has happened in the past week, what he hid from us seems so small. We’re all alive, and that’s what matters.”
I grunted. Yes, but she wasn’t in a relationship with him. She didn’t sleep with a man who had been lying to her for the better portion of a year.
“You wouldn’t have believed him if he told you about your mother anyway,” Sawyer attested, selecting a new seat on my free side and passing me a bowl of fresh fruit that he secured from a food cart by the doorway.
“And be honest with me right now—if he told you that he thought you could control the cosmos, you would have thought he was psychotic. Right?”
My teeth almost cracked as my jaw snapped shut. “What about my mother?” I growled slowly in Sebastian’s direction, my mandible a cage for my words to break through.
“I was going to tell you when you woke up, but you told me to get the fuck out,” Sebastian retorted, still refusing to look up from that godsdamn fucking book.
“Trouble in paradise?” Delani queried under her breath.
Ignoring her, I addressed Sebastian directly. “Maybe if you told me before shit hit the fan, I wouldn’t be so upset. But since you didn’t, I’ll ask again. What about my mother?”
As if it didn’t matter to him at all, and maybe it didn’t—or maybe he felt as though he had nothing left to lose—Sebastian answered simply, “I knew that she was going to die.”
The bowl of fruit fell out of my lap, scattering across the hardwood floor as my mouth went utterly slack and all of my words deserted me.
“I also knew that Jocelyn was going to die,” he added, twisting the edge of the jagged knife he had stabbed into my godsdamn chest.
My eyes dashed between my friends, none of whom looked shocked or even upset for that matter.
“Does this really not bother any of you?” I practically yelled, tossing an opened palm out in Sebastian's direction.
Sawyer answered first while he hunched at the waist and began cleaning up the mess of fruit. “It did when he first told me. But like Pia said, we’re all alive, and that's what matters most. I can forgive all the other shit that happened in between.”
Dumbfounded was the only word that came remotely close to describing how I felt.
“He knew that the girl you had feelings for was going to die, and you're just going to disregard that?” I enunciated every single word. “I mean, hell, Sawyer! You didn't talk to us for weeks over that!”