Chapter 16
sixteen
Saturday morning, Cassius comes home before the sun. It was only a few hours ago that Logan dropped Victoria and me from Mirage. He drove her home; she kissed my cheek and disappeared inside.
I’m not convinced I didn’t dream him until he kisses my forehead and whispers he’ll miss me.
I stay still, eyes closed, pretending to sleep.
For a breath I think it’ll be easier this way, better than him seeing how tightly I’m holding on.
But then I remember I’m trying to be brave and hook two fingers in his sleeve and tug.
“Come back,” I murmur.
He stills, then folds, bracing on his palms as I drag him down by his tie.
His mouth takes mine, not careful, starved, and I open for him, catching the cool edge of his wedding band at my hip, the scrape of a cufflink along my thigh.
I fist his tie tighter and pull until he’s over me, until heat and weight erase the space between us.
His thumb finds the hollow at my throat and I tip my chin, shameless.
When I hook a leg over his, he groans into my mouth.
“Lindy,” he says. I think it’s supposed to be a warning but sounds much more like a plea.
I answer by biting his lower lip, tugging him closer, letting him feel exactly how not-asleep I am.
He kisses me harder, deeper. The mattress protests.
My breath trips into threes and fives. He breaks only to press his mouth to my jaw, my cheek, the corner of my lips, little claims, quick and rough, stealing time in pieces.
He pulls back an inch, forehead to mine. His voice is ragged. “You make leaving hard.”
“Hard,” I whisper, tugging once more on his tie, “or impossible?”
He huffs a laugh that sounds wrecked. “Both.” His thumb drags once along my lower lip.
“You went to Mirage. Men had their eyes on you. I don’t want to cage you, I swear I don’t, but I needed to see you with my own eyes.
Needed to breathe you in. But, if I stay another minute, I'll take you half-awake and begging. You looking at me, asking… I'm thinking there’s a God after all.”
“I’m asking,” I breathe. His eyes go darker. For a heartbeat I think he’ll give in. Then he tears himself back an inch at a time, like it costs him skin. He straightens my strap with careful fingers, presses a kiss to the center of my palm, then to the pulse inside my wrist.
“Unfortunately, my darling, God is nowhere near where Travis needs me.” He looks at me like he’s making a bargain with himself. “I’ll have Travis start calling Sava.”
“Sava?”
“She’s the Monster to my Machine.”
Jealousy prickles my skin before I can stop it. I picture some dark-haired goddess stepping into his world where I can’t follow. “Monster how?”
Cassius reads it on my face immediately. His thumb strokes across my cheekbone. “She’ll love you, Lindy. Protect you. We were… created the same way, molded into killers from childhood.”
I try to steady the thump under my ribs. “Why call her?”
“Because if she starts taking more of Travis’s calls, I can be here. Mornings with you.” He tilts my chin with his knuckle. “Coffee, breakfasts, fights over the covers. That’s what I want.”
“Did you really go to Mirage?”
“I would’ve, but no. I was occupied outside the city, but I happen to know a man who can access any camera.”
I should tell him it’s too much. Instead my pulse beats faster. If he’s watching, I’m wanted. I like being the line he dares the world to step over, so I nod, swallowing a knot. “Come back safe.”
For a moment his face rearranges. Surprise, then something that looks like hurt.
“Nobody’s ever told me that before,” he says quietly.
“That’s… new.” He rubs his thumb over my ring.
A spark of mischief cuts through the wreck in his voice as he hooks a fingertip under the lace at my hip. He pauses, searching my face.
“Yes,” I breathe. He draws his knife with the opposite hand and with one whisper of steel, the lace parts.
He ghosts the flat of the blade up the inside of my thigh, cool, obscene, careful.
He’s close enough to my now drenched pussy that my breath snaps.
His mouth curves. Eyes locked on mine, he slides the back of the blade through my center, coating it, then lifts it to his tongue and licks up one side and the other.
My heart staggers hard; heat punches low.
My hand slips between my thighs and the chill of his blade is somehow still there.
He slides the ruined scrap from my thighs, tucks it into his pocket, and sheathes the blade.
“Every man in that room with you last night thought he’d found a new religion.
But never forget, I’m the only one who will truly kill for it,” he murmurs, kissing my forehead. “Lock the door, Lindy girl.”
The second the door clicks, I roll to his side of the bed and bury my face in his pillow. It smells like steel and soap and something dark I can’t name but crave anyway. The heat he left in me finds its twin in another night.
A streetlight.
A man stepping into the glow. My pulse had miscounted then the way it is now, static skittering under my skin. I’d felt awake, lit from the inside, under that streetlight in a way I’d never felt before.
And I feel that way again now.
I try to breathe it quiet. Three in, five out, seven in.
I line the pillow seam with the mattress edge.
It doesn’t help. My head fills with what-ifs.
What he’s doing. Where he is. Who’s with him.
Sirens. Him getting caught. Him getting hurt.
Detective Blake’s stupid card. The possible truths hidden in the ghosts pushing.
I picture him bleeding in a room I can’t get to, or caged by a system that won’t care that he saved me.
The ache in my chest refuses to dissolve. So I get up. I wash my face, tie up my hair, put clothes on, and start digging.
I start on my phone. The screen brightens and changes on its own.
I don’t touch it as Google pops up and the search bar reads Spiderweb crime ring.
Spiderweb international. Spiderweb symbol organized crime.
The ghosts want me to look, to name the thing Cassius is hunting or is hunting him, them, me.
I go through article after article, and some have enough smoke to suggest a fire, others are straight-up conspiracy theories, I hope, that make my skin crawl.
There are threads written in all caps, anonymous blogs that trail off mid-thought like the writer vanished.
A handful of rumors about secret factions and criminal empires that no government can touch.
But nothing solid. Nothing real. Nothing I can use. I don’t have the slightest clue how to enter the dark web and I’m pretty positive that’s not a place I want to explore even if I could find it.
The dead crowd the edges of the screen. Bolo-Hat leans against the doorway in my peripheral vision, brim dipped low, murmuring, nothing in this house could get you in trouble.
Others hiss in counterpoint: dig deeper.
If you trust him you wouldn’t need proof.
You’re already doubting his feelings. He’s using you to protect himself.
You’re the perfect fall girl. Their whispers crawl through the glow of my phone until I’m not sure which thoughts are mine and which ones belong to them.
“So,” I whisper to them, “show me nothing.” And I start searching our house.
It’s not spying. Not really. It’s my place too. Because if I’m going to be a part of his life—truly in it—I need to understand what I’m standing next to. Who I’m sleeping with. Who I’m letting fall in love with me, and who I’m falling in love with.
I move from room to room, careful not to leave anything out of place.
I start with his office. The drawers are locked, of course.
All except one that’s filled with pens and a calculator that’s missing its batteries.
I rifle through bookshelves, tapping along the backs of hardcovers to see if any of them ring hollow.
I check the underside of his desk. The top of the door frame. The seams in the wall.
Bolo-Hat murmurs, second from the bottom, and the lights flicker.
I try it. Still locked. He tips his brim, try again. The key I don’t remember picking up is already in my fingers, cold. The drawer slides open on a hush of cedar and paper.
Not evidence. Memories.
A stack of photographs: a woman with Cassius’s eyes laughing into the sun; four boys on a curb with baseball gloves, skinned knees, and matching grins; the same boys a few years older, wearing suits and crooked ties, Caleb’s hand on Adrian’s shoulder, Atlas’s mouth stained blue from the popsicle he’s holding; a winter street in London, someone out of frame making them all smile; their mother at a kitchen table, flour on her knuckles; a rare formal shot of both of his parents in a doorway, his mother’s laugh mid-spill, his father’s palm heavy at her waist; a Polaroid of a birthday cake crowded with uneven candles.
My throat tightens. This is where he keeps the things that could hurt him without ever being illegal. Love is a weak point, Bolo-Hat says, to him it’s always paired with pain.
At the bottom, a small glossy print stops me. A little girl with a gap-toothed grin and a pink bow in her hair. On the back, in the same handwriting as the note Cassius left me: London, age 5. And beneath it, smaller, pressed hard enough to dent the photo: I’ll find you.
The room tilts. Missing girls. Ask about London. The ghosts weren’t lying. They were pointing. London is real.
My hands shake. I stack the photos exactly as I found them, slide them back into the cedar-scented drawer, close it until the latch clicks. The key is gone from my fingers like it was never there. I push the chair back under the desk, wipe my palms on my thighs, steady my breath.