Chapter 17
I take my heart pill at the bathroom sink. Chin tipped back, two swallows of water, same as every night of my life.
Or most nights. Not after Killian tossed them down the drain.
I still haven’t forgiven him for that.
I brush my teeth and turn off the bathroom light but stop in the doorway.
There's a book face-down on the nightstand that I'm halfway through. A pile of Calder's clothes on the chair that I've started folding. The lamp's on the side of the room I like because I moved it there.
Somewhere in the last few days I quit calling this the room they put me in.
Now it just feels like mine. As crazy as that sounds.
I turn out the dim lamp and crawl into bed, pulling the blankets up to my chin.
The rain's going steady on the window like it has been for days.
The constant pitter patter is calming, like a metronome for my heart.
The sheets are warm and somewhere through the wall I can feel exactly where Calder is, the way I always can now.
The pull's quiet. He's close, but he’s been giving me the time I asked for.
I pull the blankets up over my shoulder and curl onto my side.
I don't know what I'm going to tell Calder. I know what I want. I want him. That part isn't confusing at all.
It's everything else that comes with it.
Because if I say yes to him, that's it. That's forever. Teeth and all of it, no take-backs, and I'd be choosing one thing in a house where—
I turn over.
Where Vincent still hasn't looked me in the eye since my heat. Where I laid in his bed for three days breathing him in like he was mine too–telling myself it was the fever, the heat, anything but my own desires. Now there’s a wall between us he’s erected and I can’t figure out why. Or why it bothers me so much.
I turn over again.
And then there’s Killian.
I haven't laid eyes on him in days and I still go still when I hear a truck on that road, thinking it might be him. Every time.
Some part of me is scared he's coming back to the house or to find me and the other part of me is scared he isn't.
I'm afraid of him. That's true. He put a fist in my hair and dragged me down a staircase. He tossed my pills. He’s been angry with me since the moment he laid eyes on me. I can’t read him. He’s like a furious fire raging out of control.
But I can’t help but be drawn to the heat.
When he touched me, inhaled me in the kitchen, my body lit up for him. I felt good–desired. Like the monster had set its sight on me and I was somehow worthy of that attention.
That… can't be the bite. Calder's teeth don't explain Killian.
Which means all these pent up feelings… Calder, Vincent, Killian…
They’re all mine. And that’s–that’s so fucked up.
If I say yes to Calder—if I put my teeth in him and finish it—then that's the end of the question. Bonded is bonded. I'd be his and he'd be mine and there wouldn't be any room left in me for wondering what would happen if Killian or Vincent wanted me too.
I'd be safe. I'd be picked.
And I'd never find out what my life might look like with the others.
I punch the pillow into a different shape, sighing as I swear off any and all thoughts. No alphas allowed in my dreams. I have enough of them in the daylight.
I fall asleep somewhere around one, the raindrops lulling me into a light slumber.
The door handle turns.
It's a small sound. Metal on metal, slow, like whoever's doing it is trying to be silent. The sound snicks straight through the middle of whatever I was dreaming and I come up out of sleep in a bit of a paralyzed daze.
The door opens. Floorboards take somebody's weight.
And then his scent hits me.
Smoke and whiskey and cold night air. Something metallic under like dried blood. The back of my neck prickles and my stomach drop at the same time as I inhale him in.
Killian.
I don’t make a sound. Fear claws up my throat and chokes me.
I open my eyes, terrified to move.
He’s standing four feet away, not moving.
Even in the dark he takes up too much of the room.
He always does. Same frame as his brother—all shoulders, all that height—except Calder stands like he's trying to fold himself smaller and Killian has never once done that in his life.
He's soaked. Rain still sitting across his shoulders, hair pushed back off his face with his fingers instead of anything else, a black shirt gone darker at the collar.
He's just standing there looking at me, breathing hard, like he's been running.
"Killian,” I whisper.
"Don't get up."
His voice is wrecked. Scraped raw, like he's been shouting at somebody for an hour.
I sit up anyway, dragging the blanket with me. I reach over and click the lamp on.
He squints against it and turns his face, and that's when I see the rest of him.
There's a bruise coming up along his jaw, dark and fresh, and a split through his eyebrow that's stopped bleeding but hasn't been cleaned. His knuckles are raw. There's blood dried down the side of his hand that isn't coming from his knuckles.
"You've been fighting."
"Yeah,” his voice rumbles from deep in his chest.
"Who with?"
"Nobody you know." He wipes his mouth with the back of his wrist and winces. "Some guy at a bar who looked at me wrong. Or didn't. I don't remember."
Okay…
The tension in the room intensifies as his scent envelopes me. All alpha, pumped up with adrenaline and violence and looking for an outlet. Something inside me almost purrs as I let myself inhale him, fill my lungs with Killian.
But what the hell is he doing here? Is he back to finish me off? Make me pay for good?
My mouth goes dry and my hands fist the blankets. "What do you want?"
He doesn't answer.
His chest rises and falls with his heavy breathing. Raindrops fall from the tips of his hair as his eyes move from my face to my shoulders to my stomach, then dance along the blanket as if he’s imagining what the rest of my body looks like.
I’m about to ask him what he wants again when he opens his mouth.
"I don't know."
And something in his voice makes the fear turn sideways in me. Because that's not a threat. That's not even close to a threat. I can see it all over him… he wasn’t planning to come here. It’s as if he just realized where he is.
"You don't know?”
He shakes his head. "No."
"You're in my room at—" I look for the clock. "—two in the morning and you don't know why."
"That's right." A short, ugly laugh, and there's no humor anywhere in it. "You want the funny part? This isn't the first time I've been in here."
Everything in me goes cold.
"What?"
"You heard me."
I tug the blankets closer. "When?"
"Every night." Fury coats his words. "Every single night since they let me out of that cellar. And before that, when you were down the hall in his bed—I stood in that doorway too. Watched you sleep in my father's sheets. Didn't even have the decency to feel bad about it."
My hands have gone numb around the blanket, my pulse thumping in my throat. "You've been—"
"Watching you sleep. Yes." His jaw works.
"Hours of it. I come in here about one and I stand right where I'm standing now and I don't do anything, I don't touch anything, I just—" He breaks off and drags a hand down his face hard enough to pull the skin.
"Last night I was in that chair until it started getting light.
You didn't move once. You sleep like the dead, do you know that? Anybody could walk in here."
"You did walk in here."
"Yeah." Flat. He doesn't look away from me. "I did."
I can't get a breath that goes all the way down.
"Why?" I whisper.
"Because I can't sleep." He's pacing now, three steps one way, three back.
"Because I haven't eaten a proper meal in days and I can't hold a thought in my head for longer than a minute without it going straight back to you.
Because I can smell my brother on you from the end of the hall and it makes me want to put my fist through the fucking wall. "
My hand goes to my throat.
The scab's still raised under my fingers and I press it too hard, the way I keep doing, and a bright little spike of pain goes through the whole side of my neck. I wince.
"You can smell him on me?"
Killian stops pacing.
"It's all over you." His voice drops into something low and ugly. "Every room you walk into, he gets there first. I can't get near you without smelling him."
His jaw flexes.
"He put his name on you," he says. "That's what that is."
I take my hand down.
He watches me do it. And something goes out of him when I do—his shoulders come down off his ears, and when he talks again it's quieter, and I can hear what it's costing him.
"But that thing… it doesn't change anything," he says. "He's all over you and I still come up here. Every night. I stand in the dark like an animal and look at you and the noise in my head just—stops."
He shakes his head slowly.
"Then the sun comes up and it starts all over again."
The rain fills up the quiet.
"Why are you telling me this?" I ask.
"Because there's nobody else in this house I can say it to."
"Killian—you were going to kill me." My voice cracks on the word and my eyes sting.
My hands have started shaking. I put them under the blanket.
He doesn't move. "Yeah," he says. "I did."
No excuse. No explanation.
"Then why are you in here?" I ask again. Because wanting to kill me might be a reason but he sure as hell doesn’t look like he came to finish the job tonight.
He takes a step. I slide back, and he sees it, and he stops so fast it's almost funny.
"Okay," he says. "Okay."
He crouches down instead. Right there on the floor at the side of the bed, forearms on his knees, which puts him lower than me. As if for the first time, he’s handed me the smallest bit of power. I slide forward and look down at him.
"You want the truth," he says. "You're not going to like it."
"I want somebody in this house to tell me something that's true."
That gets a sound out of him. Almost a laugh.
"Fine." He looks up. "I didn’t drag you down the stairs that day to kill you."
The rain goes on.
"What?"
"You heard me."