18. Van
VAN
TADGH DALY – WHAT IF
“What the fuck is this?!” she snarled—my infuriatingly clever little vixen—slamming a crinkled slip of paper against my chest.
I grasped it reflexively, trapping her hand beneath my own.
I couldn’t help but notice the extreme differences between them—hers, pale and ice-cold; mine, golden and toasty.
Maybe Beck’s Ice Queen nickname had more merit than I’d originally given credence to.
But I still didn’t think it quite fit her.
She was so much prettier and more layered than an animated princess.
Addie tried to snatch her hand back while I was yet again lost within my ever-moving mind. But I didn’t let her. I might not be as ripped as Beck or Deklan, but I was stubborn as either one.
And I happened to like her hand right where it was, pressed against my sternum, knowing she could feel the pounding of my heart against her skin.
Oh shit, she can feel the pounding of my heart against her skin. Is it racing? It must be racing.
“Release my hand or lose yours, Sir,” she growled through gritted teeth, unwittingly inciting a feverish kind of amusement beneath my skin.
My heart rate sped up. My lips twitched, their corners tugging upward, despite my best efforts not to show her how thoroughly she was undoing all my tightly laced seams.
Addie scowled, amusing me further. “And quit smirking at me.”
She got her wish—though not in the way she expected. My smirk slid, instead, into a full, charming grin.
Annoyed, she pulled her hand back again—this time, I let her.
Peering down at the slip of crumpled printer paper in a bid to stop staring at her beautiful fury, I realised my mistake in an instant.
My smile dropped and I almost followed suit with the sheet of paper.
Ice splintered out in razor-sharp needles from my seizing heart as I ran through the myriad ways she could have gotten hold of this particular—rather incriminating—printout.
“Where did you get this?” I asked softly, voice low and carefully devoid of inflection.
“Where you left it,” she snapped. “In your top right desk drawer, where anyone could have found it.”
“No one else seems to have been rifling through my things, Sinclair.” I looked up at her then; watched her fury shift into something infinitely more telling. “Adelaide,” I rumbled, drawing out the third syllable. “Spill.”
She bit down on her lips like she could prevent the truth from tumbling out, and—God help me—the urge to steal it with my own pressed down on me.
I froze, not trusting myself to move the slightest muscle. Well, except for the one feathering in my jaw as my teeth clenched so hard they audibly creaked.
She tracked the movement, her lips finally parting as she admitted, “Mercy found it, actually.”
Fuck.
“Mercy Lopez was snooping through her superior’s belongings in order to find… what, exactly?”
Addie looked away. She shrugged, feigning nonchalance. “I don’t think she was looking for anything specific—except maybe more booze—but neither of us were expecting her to find that.”
Ah. That explained the faint malty aroma surrounding her.
“I see. I’m assuming that means she also found the bottle of vintage bourbon in the bottom drawer?”
Her eyes crashed back into mine like a breaking wave—sparkling with amusement. “She did. But you’re deflecting.”
I cleared my throat. I had, indeed, been deflecting. How was I supposed to explain to her what this was, what it meant, and why I had it?
“You’re right,” I admitted.
“I usually am.”
A snicker slipped out unbidden, prompting an equally unexpected grin from the woman who’d somehow passed an unpassable test. She was the smartest woman I’d ever met—certainly the only one who’d ever outsmarted me.
Adelaide Sinclair was an enigma.
And I never had been able to let a problem go unsolved.
Hence the paper.
I leaned back against the armrest of the wingback chair I’d been tucked into before a tiny blonde hurricane came whirling through the library and beelined straight for it. For me.
She jerked her chin at my hand. “Explain that.”
And while I was contemplating the right words—the least creepy ones—her shoulders dropped as she heaved a heavy sigh and slumped against the windowsill. “Please.”
It was that one word—that solitary, defeated please—that broke through the sludge of my muddied mind. Surely, if anyone was owed the truth around here, it was the girl who’d just lost her best friend and had to continue on in arguably the hardest assessment they’d ever been given.
I couldn’t fathom it. If I had been in her position and lost either of my brothers, there wasn’t a chance in hell I’d be functioning as well as she appeared to be.
It would be absolutely out of the question that I’d make it through a compound assessment with live rounds and a psychopath hellbent on killing me like Sebastos was her.
Beck, Pearce, and I had done the exact same things—gone through the Academy’s training, been thrown together in the gauntlet that was its crash course in killing, endured torture, derision, injustice, and faced people who probably wanted us dead. But we’d made it through.
Fleur didn’t.
And Addie almost hadn’t, either.
Technically she still had a week to go. A week in which Varco’s hellspawn could choose to act on his hatred of her.
I rubbed the bruised corner of my chin, absentmindedly considering all the ways I knew how to dispatch a man, and if any were appropriately inconspicuous enough to take out the Commander’s son.
“Instructor Lockwood?” she ventured, reclaiming my attention.
Gone was the furious woman who’d stormed over here demanding answers. In her place, now stood a woman quietly astute. Her gaze fixated on my empty hand—the one massaging my jaw—and her expression looked almost… guilty?
“I’m sorry I couldn’t stop him sooner,” she breathed, shifting to look out the window.
Snowflakes danced gracefully in downward spirals, littering the ground in a soft blanket of white.
But her eyes weren’t lingering on their trajectory.
No. Instead, she stared at the lonely cemetery adorning the land beside the abandoned cathedral—used only for ceremony, and not of the religious kind. It was decorative, mostly.
It wasn’t convenient to bury every body that fell before Graduation.
Some were street urchin nobodies—like the girl standing before me.
Some weren’t even in enough pieces to send home in a shoebox—those were the ones we cremated and then mailed a sand-filled urn in the least ceremonious fashion imaginable.
Some were whole, but were sent here by families who hoped they’d either make something of themselves—or die in the process.
We buried them.
And some, like Fleur, were notorious enough—loved enough—to warrant being sent home, whole, to their families.
What they did with them when they arrived was up to them.
I knew in Fleur’s case, her parents held a grand, elaborate funeral on French soil, because they couldn’t bear for her to be anywhere else.
But in doing so, it meant that Addie, the person who’d arguably loved her most, was left with nothing. Just a stone in the snow with her name on it.
In a graveyard filled with strangers.
“It’s not your fault,” I offered quietly. Half in answer to her guilt-riddled apology, half in reference to her fallen friend.
Addie jerked as if I’d slapped her, then threw up a mask of derision to cover whatever it was she was actually feeling.
“Of course it is,” she snarled. After visibly backtracking, she dropped the second subject thread to pick up the first. “If I didn’t run off and hide, Sebastos wouldn’t have taken it out on you.”
Taking a chance, I took a step closer—inexplicably drawn to her like a magnet. I ventured another, tilting her face up with my index finger, resting my thumb on her chin. Immediately rewarded by her sharp inhale, I leaned down.
Her eyes darted to my lips and back again, and for a moment, I wondered if she’d let me kiss her.
Not just yet, pretty girl.
“If you hadn’t, you’d probably be dead.” My thumb traced the curve of her jaw, brushing along the underside of her bottom lip, almost of its own volition. “And I’d take any beating in place of that.”
Her exhale stuttered, her eyelids blinking rapidly, as she tried her damndest to understand my meaning.
I’m going to take my time with you.
I cleared my throat and stepped back, dropping my hand down to my side.
“It’s my job as your instructor to prevent your death if I’m able. But it was also my job as mark to deal with whatever came of that scenario.” Then, almost as if I’d wanted her to understand more—to read between the lines like I knew she was more than capable of—I added, “on Varco’s orders.”
Her expression hardened. “I see.”
“And as for this,” I said, holding up the incriminating piece of paper with her face printed on it. “These were your capture orders.”
Her brows creased adorably in the middle. “Capture?”
I hummed an affirmative. “The orders my team and I were given to retrieve a”—I read from the notes on the page like a script, like I didn’t already have every detail memorised—“five-foot-three blonde, with a slim-to-athletic build, blue eyes, no distinguishable scars or tattoos, no known home address or phone number, a penchant for petty theft, and a habit of frequenting Cardinal Place.”
She fidgeted with the cold, white sill beneath her.
I hated that I’d made her uncomfortable. That I’d reduced her to little more than a sentence.
“And if you’d looked at the rest of the papers in that drawer, you’d have noticed that they were the capture sheets for the rest of your classmates.”
It was a bald-faced lie.
I hedged a bet that she and Mercy had stopped at the top sheet—Addie’s sheet—without going further. Because if they had, then they’d have only discovered a stack of code printouts, a pad of neon yellow Post-it notes, a pack of strawberry gum, and a handful of half-full pens.
I knew I’d guessed right when the most beautiful pink I’d ever seen stained her cheeks and she refused to meet my gaze.
Thank fuck for that.
The truth was vastly more complex.
The truth was that from the moment we’d been handed this particular capture sheet, Beck, Pearce, and I had been caught off guard by the woman staring back. Even more so when we met her in person.
When Dek pulled up curbside—after Beck wrapped his arms around her, dragged her in, and I’d thrown the blindfold over her head—Adelaide Sinclair had sunk her dainty claws into each of us.
She didn’t fight; didn’t cuss us out, or plead for her freedom.
She just sat there in the back of the van, quietly accepting her fate—whatever that may be.
I dug into her after that. And what had I found? Three fifths of fuck all.
Adelaide Sinclair was a ghost. She had no digital footprint to speak of—and what twenty-four-year-old didn’t at least have an old social media profile or embarrassing teenage email address professing their love for Justin Bieber or a deep, obscure Taylor Swift lyric?
She had no education record, no medical record anywhere in the country or overseas.
She didn’t even have a locatable birth certificate.
And when I reported as much to Beck, who had in turn reported it to Varco, it was dismissed with an indifference that was so out of character it inherently threw red flags up all over the place.
Beck told me to keep looking. Dek tried another tactic: getting close to her. And I kept watch. Always watching through one way or another.
And yet—she snuck up on me anyway.
“Thank you for explaining and not calling me out for my shitty behaviour, Sir,” Addie said, straightening into military-precise posture.
I nodded, knowing I couldn’t do anything else—say anything else—without giving something away.
Something that wasn’t mine to give.
So I watched her leave just as thunderously as she’d arrived.
She had unsettled me. Not on the outside, but internally, where my heart was askew. Knocked sideways by her mere presence and the fact that I was so close—and yet so far.
Adelaide Sinclair was an enigma, alright—I just didn’t know if I had the time to work her out.
Graduation Day was coming.
Then she’d be gone for good.