Chapter 14
It took four days for Tristen to put his life in such an order that he was comfortable leaving it.
Personally, Nyx thought it could have taken less time, and he was dragging his feet because he was afraid to leave.
She kept these suspicions to herself, as she didn’t think voicing them would have any positive effect on the speed with which Tristen moved.
Mostly, she stayed out of his way while keeping a close eye on him to ensure he didn’t disappear right under her nose.
Putting his life in order mostly amounted to ensuring the Chance Foundation would run itself in his absence, and that involved a lot of time spent with Valerie, who he was placing in charge.
Valerie did not particularly like Nyx, which Nyx considered fair since she had lied to her face to get an introduction to Tristen, and she was now taking Tristen away.
“I still don’t understand why you need to leave,” Valerie said, during what Tristen had sworn was the final final meeting before they could go. “Where are you going? And why is she always with you?”
“I told you—she’s an old family friend. And I am going to visit that family.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You don’t have to.”
“We need you here,” she insisted.
Tristen shook his head. “You don’t. Most people don’t need a miracle, Val. They need routine medical care and someone who gives a damn about them. You know that better than anyone. That’s why I’m putting you in charge.”
They argued some more, but in the end, Valerie signed the papers he put in front of her, and they walked out of the building, back toward Tristen’s penthouse.
“She likes you, you know,” Nyx said as they walked.
“She doesn’t like me,” Tristen said flatly, “she worships me. She thinks I’m some kind of saint.
That’s the problem with this planet. No one understands magic.
They see it and they think if you wield it you must be a god or a devil.
And neither of those two things is safe to be, because one way or another, they’ll be disappointed in you in the end.
And it’s dangerous to be around fanatics when their devotion breaks. ”
Nyx studied him for a minute in silence, then said, “That’s a bleak view of people.”
“It’s an honest one,” he countered. “I don’t need to be seen as anything other than what I am. And I certainly don’t need devotion.”
“Then why leave her in charge?”
“Because ten minutes of me being gone and she’ll realize the only thing she ever needed from me was money. She can run this foundation better than I can. She’s been doing it for years.”
“Then why didn’t you just sign the entire thing over to her?”
He didn’t answer until they were outside his building. “Maybe I don’t have much of a life here. Maybe I am broken and lonely like you said. But I have a life here. I don’t out there.” He gestured at the sky.
“You can always build one,” she said.
“Is that what you did?”
“Yeah. Those people up there”—she pointed to the penthouse, where she and the others had been staying for the last few days—“are my family. I chose them, and they were there to remind me of that when I needed them to. When no one else would have. You can find that too.”
He looked like he was about to answer her seriously, then opened the door to usher her into the building and flashed a smile instead. “If I do go searching, I think I’ll leave out picking up one who looks like he wants to murder me all the time.”
Nyx snorted. “Don’t take it personally. Kaden looks at everyone like he wants to murder them.”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure in this case it is personal.”
She frowned as they stepped into the elevator. “Did you do something to him?”
He gave her an incredulous look.
“Am I supposed to know what that look is for?”
“You know the guy’s gone on you, right?”
They reached the elevator, and Nyx rolled her eyes as she stepped into it. “Trust me, we sailed that ship a long time ago and it’s never going out to sea again.”
He held his keycard up to the button for the penthouse and pressed it. “That is the oddest metaphor for a relationship I’ve ever heard anyone use, but putting that aside, you might want to tell him that.”
“I would, if he actually needed to hear it.”
“Someone’s living in denial.”
“Is there a reason you’re so invested in my personal life?”
“Yes—I don’t want him to cut my head off in the middle of the night. He’s freakishly quiet when he moves and not even I can recover from a severed head.” He paused, then added: “I don’t think.”
Irritation bubbled underneath Nyx’s skin.
“For one, you have no room to talk. For another, Kaden is not psychotic. Even if he cared that you and I slept together, which news flash, he doesn’t, he’s not some unhinged possessive asshole who would feel the need to murder people who look at me.
If I told him to leave right now, he would. ”
He raised an eyebrow. “Interesting.”
He was rubbing her the wrong way, and it hit a critical mass that culminated in the veins in her hands creeping up with black. “What’s interesting?”
“A lot of things,” he said as the elevator came to a stop. “But mostly that you haven’t.”
“You don’t know the first thing about—” The elevator doors glided open and she cut off. Kaden stood on the other side. His gaze flicked down, taking in the black veins that had now crept up to her elbows.
“Everything alright?” he asked.
“Everything is delightful, thank you for asking.”
She stalked past him, then turned back in time to see Tristen raise his hands and tell Kaden, “I didn’t do anything.”
Oh for fuck’s sake. “Tristen, can you please make a decision about what to do with the man downstairs in the coma so we can get the fuck out of this city? Kaden, where are you going?”
Kaden looked her straight in the eye and said, “Out,” as the elevator doors closed on him.
Tristen looked at her and said, “I can.”
She waited for Tristen to elaborate, until she finally realized he wasn’t going to, and the reason why dawned on her. “Are you really grammar policing me right now? Fine, will you make a decision about the man in the coma?”
Tristen shrugged. “No need. He won’t wake up or die in the next six months. There’s a rotation of nurses who come by daily and will continue to do so while I’m gone.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Do I?”
“Keeping him hanging on the cusp of death isn’t emotionally healthy.”
“On the contrary, I find it highly therapeutic. Besides, if I kill him now, there will be paperwork. And lawyers. And irate distant family contesting my inheriting everything. We won’t leave for months.”
She threw up her hands. “Fine. Leave him in the coma. Does that mean we’re ready to go?”
All traces of humor fled Tristen’s face. “Yeah.”
Okay then. She dug her phone out of her pocket and texted Kaden: Please come back. Tristen’s ready to leave.
Ellipses appeared on the screen briefly before his reply came back: No point. Morgen and Evra are out.
She wasn’t really surprised they were gone.
Tristen hadn’t wanted anyone to come with him while he put his Dead Earth affairs in order, but Nyx hadn’t been willing to risk letting him out of her sight when it was Griff’s freedom on the line if anything happened to the Shaman.
Tristen had condescended to let her come with him, and no one else.
Since there wasn’t anything else useful for them to do, Evra and the others had been living up the New York City tourist experience while Nyx played bodyguard to the Shaman.
Replying to Kaden, she typed: Where are they?
Kaden: Ask them.
She typed out You are infuriating. Deleted that and wrote Would it kill you to answer a question? Deleted that too and stared at the screen before giving up and texting Morgen.
Where are you two?
Evra’s reply of Why are you texting him and not me? beat Morgen’s reply of At the movies by half a second.
She responded to Evra first: Because since you got a phone, you have done nothing but bitch about how much you hate phones.
To Morgen she wrote: You shouldn’t be texting during films.
Evra: The screens are too small and I must frequently correct the system’s attempts to change my wording.
Morgen: It just ended. What’s up?
Nyx to Evra: Predictive text—
—or whatever it was in coding that made your phone change the words you’d actually typed into the words it was convinced you’d meant to type—
—sucks.
Nyx to Morgen and Evra in group text: Can you come back? Tristen’s finally ready to leave.
Morgen: On it.
Nyx: Could you get Kaden to come back too?
Evra: Where is he?
Nyx: His word was, and I quote, “Out”.
Evra: Eyeroll emoji. She actually typed this out as two words, as neither Nyx nor Morgen had managed to get it through her head that emojis should be sent as actual pictures instead of texting a description of the expression in question.
It wasn’t that Evra didn’t understand emojis existed, it was more that she took issue with the ambiguity involved in the visual interpretation of them.
Morgen sent back the actual eyeroll emoji, then: We’ll find him.
They did not find Kaden for four hours, and only then because he returned on his own.
After Morgen had called him, to no answer, Kaden had ditched his phone because he was smart enough to know that Morgen was smart enough to figure out how to track it.
After that, there was really nothing to do but wait.
When he finally walked in, it was carrying two nondescript shopping bags.
“We sat around for four hours so you could go shopping?” Tristen asked.
Nyx wondered where Kaden had even gotten money.
All of his assets had been seized by the Council after the Harvester had gone missing.
She was sure—well, she hoped—Jevryn paid him for working for him, but it wasn’t like he could have a bank account given his current status as a wanted fugitive.
If he had physical money lying around somewhere, he hadn’t asked the Station to convert any of it to US bills, and when Nyx had tried to give him money when they’d left the Station—because she’d given everyone money so they would have resources in the unlikely event someone became separated from the rest of the group—he’d refused to take it.
Kaden gave Tristen the kind of direct stare that made most people uncomfortable. “We sat around for four days so you could drag your feet, didn’t we?”
Nyx suddenly wondered if the number of hours Kaden had been gone had symbolic significance. It would be just like him to casually say fuck you in a manner no one was likely to pick up on.
Tristen’s lips twisted. “And you couldn’t have gone shopping sometime in those four days?”
“No.”
Nyx cut in before it could go any further. “Everyone grab their stuff and let’s go.” She set off toward the bedrooms they’d been staying in. A suspicion had coalesced in her mind into a near certainty, and she didn’t know why she needed to confirm it, but she did.
When Kaden had lived in Dead Earth with her, he hadn’t been able to get legal work.
She’d known he wasn’t in the country legally, and that had made work hard to find.
He’d done any job he could get, and most of the time that had ended up being construction work.
The kind that paid daily under the table for a fraction of what the work was worth.
Most days he’d left early and come home late.
The past four days, she hadn’t seen him leave, and she hadn’t seen him come in.
She’d hardly seen him at all. She slipped into his room, knowing she couldn’t be more than fifteen steps ahead of him and not caring.
She spotted the laundry hamper in the same place the one in her own guest room was—next to the closet entrance—and made a beeline for it, flipping the lid open.
She pulled out the top two items—a long-sleeve cotton shirt and a pair of jeans.
“Find what you’re looking for?” Kaden stood just inside the room, the shopping bags on the dresser next to him.
She had. The clothes in her hands were stiff with dried sweat and covered in concrete dust. The feel of it was so familiar that for a moment, she saw a very different apartment than the one she stood in.
A much smaller, drabber one, where she’d spent a lot of time doing shit like cleaning and cooking and Kaden’s laundry, because while she’d also worked any job she could get, her mother’s Hiding had ensured she had difficulty getting them and more difficulty keeping them.
She’d been a homemaker during that time more often than she hadn’t.
“If you needed something, I could have bought it. You didn’t have to do this.”
“I never minded this,” he said. “And I don’t want your money.”
“Yeah, you made that perfectly clear.” She felt something she couldn’t pin down with words, something angry and helpless.
Maybe it was just that she’d been so dependent on him when they’d lived together, in more ways than one.
She’d had to swallow her pride and let him pay for almost everything.
Now their situations were reversed, and he wouldn’t take anything from her.
He crossed the room and took the clothes out of her hands, tossing them back in the hamper. It didn’t erase the feel of the grit on her skin or the memories it had dredged up.
“It wasn’t real,” he said softly. “It never could have been.”
She jerked back. His eyes weren’t harsh or mocking. If he’d been anyone else, she’d have called the look in them regret.
She walked out without another word.