Chapter 31
“Hey!” The upside-down man called from the other room.
I ignored him, stuck on looking at a sketch of myself so precise it felt as if I were peering into a mirror.
“Hey, girl! Hurry the hell up, you need to get out of there—oh shit.”
Footsteps stopped behind me.
I turned around, meeting Dig Graves.
“What the hell?” He asked.
I splayed open my arms to the museum of Delphine De Astor.
There were a few people who had tried to connect with me before.
Mostly for monetary and influence reasons.
People liked my family’s pockets and the position my brother held in government.
Being my Soulmate would have assisted them in their goals, monetarily and influentially.
Once, a woman had tracked me down to my yoga class and flung me against the wall and pressed her chest into me, trying to force a connection.
Another, a man, tried to connect with me during one of my brother’s speech rallies, trying to pass it off as a hug.
Honestly, I did not care why Dig Graves had memorised my face. If he wanted to connect with me, he had to get in line.
Dig stood in front of me, his leather jacket freckled in blood, a spray of it across his cheek. His black hair was dry now, the ends just flicking up under his earlobes as he tore down his hood and ruffled back his hair.
He held a bouquet of wildflowers and a plastic shopping bag.
His mouth parted, taking me in, taking in all of me. The real Delphine De Astor mixed into all her portraits.
I pointed to a painting by the windowsill. “Why am I pregnant in that one?”
“No.” He dropped the bouquet of wildflowers and the plastic shopping bag. From out of the bag spilled packets of face masks and bottles of nail polish.
“So, you’re an artist.” I stretched my arms over my head. “That’s nice. I did watercolours for a while, I was very good at painting puddles. Oh! Did you bring food? I ate all the apples.”
“Get the hell out of here!” He flung his finger to the door.
“Do you know how hard it is to get a man to remember my eye colour? And here you are, having remembered every curve and freckle and mole and strand of my hair.”
He lowered his hand pointing out of the door.
I dragged my finger over the crook of my nose he had sketched on the wall.
Dig Graves had a room of me; I supposed I had a room of him too.
My shrine to Dig Graves was stuck in my head, behind a locked door I only opened when I wanted to stick my hand between my legs and quench the ache that lulled there on occasion.
I had also mapped out the features of him I had memorised from our single night: his strong physique, the depth of his laugh, the cocky grin, the heart-shaped sunglasses.
“I’m not going to have babies,” I said.
“What?”
I pointed to the painting of me pregnant. “I’m infertile, found out a year back. Nasty business with my ovaries. I tried to cry but it didn’t work.”
He nodded in understanding and punched a hole through the wall of my pregnant belly and tore out the plaster piece by piece until he had demolished the thought of me being pregnant and then turned and looked to me for approval.
“Yeah.” He cleared his throat and leaned casually against the wall. “I, uh, I don’t want to have babies either. They’re shit. I hate them.”
“I love babies.”
“I love babies too.”
“I just can’t have them.”
“Me either. Fuck having kids. It looks awful. Childfree, that’s the way to go.”
“I want to have children, but through adoption.”
“I also have plans on doing that.”
“But sometimes I think I’d rather focus on my career, so maybe not.”
“Okay.” He nodded. “Maybe not.”
I pursed my lips.
“Get out of here.” He snatched my arm and hauled me out of his Delphine De Astor room and closed the door. “What are you doing?”
“Renovating.”
He found the bent forks on the carpet and looked toward the upside-down man. “Were you trying to unpick the rope?”
“Only a little bit.”
He grabbed me by my throat. Unfortunately, it was not a very strong grip, just enough to cause me to jolt. “I told you to relax.”
A knock pounded at the door.
Both of us turned to glance at the front door to the apartment.
A quiet pressed into the air.
“Dig.” A voice called on the other side. “It’s Glory.”
Dig’s shoulders lost their tension, he kept his hand around my throat and twisted his face to the door. “Come in.”
The door opened and the small, slender, dark haired young woman I had seen at his other hideout came in. Wearing her aviator sunglasses, she looked at me, to the spare room where the back wall held a painted portrait of myself and then to Dig with his hand around my throat.
“Hello.” I smiled, pulling on Dig’s hand around my throat, trying to make him squeeze me. “How are you?”
She ignored me. “I just need some water.”
Dig nodded.
She walked over to the kitchen sink and filled up her water bottle and strode back out, closing the front door.
“So, that's your sister?” I asked.
Dig kept his hand around my throat. “My half-sister, Glory.”
“Aw, that’s nice.”
“Yeah, she’s a nice person.”
“What’s she doing in the Battle?”
“She got charged with murdering all of the people she connected with.”
“She sounds really nice.”
“She didn’t do it.”
“A twist, how fun.”
“And now she’s stuck in here being hunted down by her current Soulmate who’s a psycho. She can’t hide from him because he can find her with his heart, which means she’s permanently on the run. I try to help her out when I can.”
“Family holiday. Magnus and I sometimes go to Spain in the summer.”
“What’s happening?” The upside-down man called out. “I can’t see over there, and I can’t hear anything. Girl, did you kill Dig? Did you get free?”
Dig let my throat go and walked into the spare room and punched the upside-down man in his temple, knocking him unconscious, and marched back over, snatching the bouquet of wildflowers off the ground and handed them to me. “I got these for you.”
I took them. “Thank you.”
“And these.” He flipped through the facemasks, cocking his head to read them. “You like the retinol ones?”
“Are there any with hyaluronic acid?”
He tossed them one by one over his shoulder until he handed a green foiled mask to me. “It's got vitamin C too.”
“Perfect.” I took it from him. “You’re home early.”
“I have to head right back out, but I came to check on you.”
I arranged a stem. “Oh, well, you can go back out now.”
He leaned back, deep in some thought that made him grin. “Go over to the back of the couch and bend over.”