Chapter 16
You Should Have a Bad Feeling About This
HARPER/RAVEN
‘Do you want to go on a date with me?’ I ask. I kick my feet against the mattress, tangle the blanket between my ankles. ‘Before you leave me like you did this morning.’
I don’t mean to sound clingy. What I really mean is that we came home last night and I wove my own shelter around Tia and myself, curled up tight in our universe.
I hadn’t expected Tia to leave our haven so early in the morning.
Hadn’t expected to feel ripped prematurely from my cocoon, and I spent all day crouched in the memory of last night, desperate to stay in my illusion of happiness.
‘I told you I had a meeting with the government,’ Tia breathes, her voice strained through my phone speaker. ‘I keep forgetting how dramatic you are.’
I roll my eyes and bury my face in my bed sheets, balancing the phone so it rests between the bed and my head. ‘Okay, rude. We don’t have to go on a date. I don’t care, it’s whatever. Goodnight.’
‘Save your theatrics. I’ll be home in a second, make sure your windows are open.’
I can’t stop the grin across my face as I get up to push my windows open. ‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah.’ And then a blazing white figure appears in the night sky, streaking over Singapore’s skyline and heading straight for Lain.
Lune lands in my bedroom with a gust of air and crashes into my desk chair.
She shucks her helmet and drops it to the floor, revealing a panting Tia, cheeks flushed, her bangs stuck to her forehead with sweat.
‘My dear, frustrating kit,’ Tia says as she unsticks her ponytail from her glistening neck, ‘I would love to go on a date with you, but have you ever heard of situational awareness?’
‘As a concept, maybe.’ I toss a towel at Tia, which she only accepts after a quick sniff. ‘There was no one for me to annoy in the labs today.’
‘You can say you missed me.’ Tia unclasps her blasters from her wrists and ankles. She tosses them onto my desk and slings the towel around her neck, which has to be the hottest thing I’ve seen in my life. ‘Come here, I missed you.’
‘Not if you boss me around like that.’ I rest my elbows on my knees and look up at her with a fake-sombre shake of my head. ‘I’m not that easy.’
Tia’s brows shoot up. ‘Not what you were saying last night.’
My cheeks burn. Last night’s memories surge through my head – we hailed a taxi home, our fingers laced in the backseat.
Tia showered while I blasted obnoxious pop music.
I showered while she made mug cakes in the microwave.
We collapsed into her bed, and I lay on her chest to hear her words echo straight into my bones as she spoke about her childhood.
At some point, I slipped a hand over Tia’s collarbone as we kissed, and revelled in the way her heartbeat quickened against my thumb.
When I confessed this, Tia’s cheeks had gone dark with embarrassment, but she flipped me over and pressed her lips to mine and, God, I’d never been so glad to be at the receiving end of a Sentinel’s strength.
I don’t realize how quiet I’ve fallen until I notice Tia watching me with a suppressed grin, her eyes twinkling with laughter.
I kick her chair, sending her spinning into the desk. ‘You’re annoying. Why weren’t you at dinner?’
The laughter on Tia’s face fades. Exhaustion claims her slouched shoulders.
‘Nagas are tearing up the Singapore–Malaysia highway again. Something about it being the busiest causeway in the world and carbon emissions, which I understand, you know?’ She tips back into the desk chair.
‘But if they’re attacking a bridge and people will die, do they seriously expect Sentinels to sit back and watch? ’
It’s so difficult not to stare at the tight tank top that was apparently hiding under Tia’s armour, black fabric cutting across her soft belly, baring broad shoulders and flexing biceps as she buns her hair.
But the subject of her frustration catches my attention, and I force myself to sit upright. ‘Was it a bad fight?’
Tia throws her head back against the chair’s headrest with a sigh. ‘We managed to arrest most of the Nagas without casualties, but there were so many. Also, there were a bunch of Foxes helping, like aren’t they already busy stealing moonstones? It’s so brutal.’
My body drenches in cold. The cocoon around me falls apart. The universe collapses, and I take it all with a pounding heart and sweaty palms. Why wasn’t I notified about the Foxes? ‘What did you do to the Foxes?’
‘Caught most of them, turned them over to the police for arrest.’
Oh, Tia. That means there must be a bunch of Foxes who need to be bailed from the station. As if on cue, my phone begins to buzz. ‘Hey, um, I have to go. Just realized I have something on.’
Tia’s brows knit and she straightens. ‘Oh, sure. Is everything okay?’
No, you just put my clan members in jail.
As the Fox leader-to-be, a protectiveness rises in my chest, bitter and tough to swallow.
It’s hard to look at Tia – so unaware of what she’s done, so contrary to the family that raised me – and know I’ve fallen for someone who hurts the people I’ve lived to protect.
Obviously, I knew this when I confessed to her; I just thought we’d have more time before it caught up to us.
‘I—’ I cut my gaze away. ‘I don’t know.’
I don’t know what Tia senses, but she gets off the chair and stands before me, resting her arms on my shoulders and forcing me to look at her. She tucks a lock of hair behind my ear. ‘Are you all right?’
I shrug, train my eyes on my knees. ‘Those are my clan members, you know.’
Tia hesitates. ‘But you’re not affiliated to them, right? You’re not like them.’
‘I’m not—’ There’s a sudden lump in my throat. ‘Um, what do you mean like them?’
Tia frowns. ‘A criminal? What’s wrong?’
It feels like drowning, as if we were play-fighting and now I’ve been held underwater a few seconds too long. ‘Can you . . . can you not make that distinction? Please?’
Tia’s brows knit almost imperceptibly. ‘If it bothers you, then of course I won’t. But I don’t want you to think I have anything against you just because I arrest people in the clan. I know you’re dif—’
‘Tia.’ I inhale sharply, close my eyes and massage my temples. You’re so wrong. You’re so wrong and it hurts and I don’t even know how to correct you. ‘I . . . Look, I really have to go. See you later, okay?’
I grab my duffel with my suit from under my desk, ignoring the way Tia’s eyes track me.
My hand brushes the door-handle when Tia speaks. ‘Kit? I’m sorry if I said something. Can we not leave things like this?’
I must be quiet for too long, because she makes to close the space between us.
On instinct, I take a step back, and Tia stops an arm’s length away, her fists clenched.
‘Don’t apologize when you don’t know what you’re sorry for,’ I say, hating the sting of the words. ‘Can we do this tomorrow?’
In the halo of the moonlight, Tia swallows. ‘Okay. Stay safe, and send me your location?’
It feels awful. Tia stands in front of me with a crown of moonlight, her eyes so sad that it’s impossible to fathom anyone would call her cold, and all I can muster is a non-committal sound before I leave.
TIA/LUNE
I flip a fried egg in a sizzling pan as I knock back a shot of espresso. Every muscle in my body aches after last night’s altercation with the Nagas and Foxes, but I stayed up until four a.m. tossing and turning, too anxious from my conversation with Harper.
She never came home.
What if she thinks the whole thing is a mistake?
I shove the thought away, but it sours the coffee in my stomach, and my gut burns with shame.
I’d woken at eight a.m. to my default phone alarm, an empty bed, and a text from Harper that’d been sent at five a.m., which said: Not coming home, but I’m okay. See you in the labs.
I want to kick myself. The text is so short, so curt.
But when I turn to put my egg on a plate, I find Harper standing there, her shoulders slumped, her face pale, an elbow leant against the kitchen counter.
‘You said labs,’ I blurt. Crap, it sounds like I’m complaining. ‘When did you get back?’
Harper doesn’t respond.
I raise my hands experimentally, and am rewarded when Harper steps forward and collapses into my embrace. ‘Hold on . . . Hey, what’s wrong?’
‘So tired,’ comes her muffled voice from my chest. ‘Sorry about last night.’
Last night. The thing I still can’t parse, the thing that keeps slipping through my fingers. I press a kiss to the crown of Harper’s head. ‘It’s okay. Where’d you sleep?’
‘I don’t really want to talk about it.’
Sometimes it feels as if Harper’s hiding something from me, like there’s a whole side of her I don’t know. It was noticeable back when we were rivals, but it’s almost painfully obvious now that we’re so close.
What don’t you want to tell me?
But Harper’s warm and tiny, and now isn’t the time. All I focus on is how good it feels to hold her, to know she’s finally safe and home.
I press a kiss to the crown of her head. ‘I’ll call Niko and tell them we both have a cold. Let’s stay in and watch something, okay?’
Everything else can wait.
It’s very dangerous, my mother once told me, to stake your happiness on someone else. It is very dangerous to depend on anyone at all.
But it’s impossible to hold on to that when I have my side pressed into Harper’s, a laptop at the foot of my bed, our pinkies flirting against the backdrop of a romcom.
It’s difficult to imagine that at some point in time I’d never known Harper like this, that I’d been kept from the contentedness of having her ankle crossing my own, her head tucked into my shoulder.
I sling an arm around Harper’s shoulders, playing with the chain around her neck, and something goes very cold in my heart.
‘You don’t have to respond,’ I whisper, because the room is quiet, because maybe this is something I’d rather no one hear, ‘but do you know Raven?’
Harper goes stiff. ‘Why?’
There’s no way of revealing that I’ve analysed a medallion just like this without exposing that I did so when Raven lay injured in my bed. ‘I heard her mention you, once. In a fight.’ A white lie. Harper wouldn’t know.
‘Raven keeps tabs on every Fox.’ Harper turns to look at me, her gaze searching. It puts us close enough for me to see the tiny mole by her eye, to watch the way her lashes curl.
What would you look like in a mask? I superimpose it onto her face in my head, imagine her with black fabric cut across her cheeks.
I’m met with an image of a teasing, devilish gaze that’s torturously familiar.
I tear my eyes from her face and cling to reality like a shipwrecked man on a buoy. ‘Makes sense. Sorry, your medallion reminded me.’
Harper grips the medallion in her fist. ‘And if I said I knew Raven?’
Black mask, wind-whipped hair, glinting eyes. A smirk – no, I’ve never seen Raven smirk, for obvious mask-related reasons. But I imagine it, and my mind finds Harper’s lopsided smile under Raven’s mask.
‘I mean . . .’ I clear my throat and trace her lips with my eyes, willing the thought away.
It’s nothing. It can’t be anything. Harper’s clear, Niko made sure.
‘I’d have to report it to the other Sentinels.
I’m really glad you’re not affiliated with her, honestly, because we can’t have anyone in the company associated with her. I’d have to cut you off.’
Something dark flits in Harper’s gaze, a flash of a knitted brow, a quick tightening of her lips.
And then it’s gone.
‘Good thing I don’t know her at all, I guess.’ Harper turns back to the movie and leans into my hold.
But the air in the room feels different, and Harper’s eyes look wet. She seems to catch me looking, because she turns her face away and sniffs. ‘Movie’s sad.’
Then let’s stop watching, I want to say, because it hurts to see you sad. Before I can say anything, though, my phone buzzes.
It’s a text from Niko: Moonstones moving tonight. There shouldn’t be Nagas or Foxes, but I want all Sentinels on scene just in case.
Crap. I tuck my phone away. ‘Kit, I have to go for a Sentinel thing. I’m so sorry. I’ll be back tomorrow.’
Harper closes the laptop and shoots me a smile. It doesn’t reach her eyes. ‘It’s okay. See you tomorrow?’
It’s only our second day together, and already it feels as if there’s a dark rift between us, a void I can’t parse the width and depth of. Something needs to change, but it’ll have to wait. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’
Lune leaves Lain Co. with Tia feeling like the world is falling apart.