Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
Jessa
Zaheela says my daughter is mending, and I still can’t unclench my hands.
Two mornings after the festival, I’m holding up the doorframe of the spare room while the gray-haired healer bends over Mia, working her fingers along the small jaw, pressing behind each ear, tipping the girl’s chin up toward the lamp.
Through the whole exam, Mia sits patient on the cot, one socked foot swinging.
“Better.” She straightens with a hand pressed to her lower back. “Much better than the child you brought me. Her color’s back, her pulse runs steady.” She studies Mia’s eyes a beat longer. “You’re doing well, little one.”
Relief loosens my chest, though I don’t let it show. “So she’s all right then.”
“She’s on the mend,” Zaheela allows, packing her satchel without rush. “I’d keep her in the same surroundings a while yet. Familiar walls, familiar faces, no upheaval. It helps the body recover.”
Mia’s head lifts. “Does that mean I can’t go to school?”
“You can go to school.” Zaheela starts on something more, then bites it off, her gaze cutting to Marcus at the window.
He answers with a small nod, and she starts over. “You can go to school,” she says and leaves the rest unsaid.
Marcus pushes off the sill. “The girls stay close to the house for now. I’ll be here with them. So will Jessa.”
I come off the frame. “Both of them? Here?”
“For now.” His eyes stay on the healer instead of me, which sets my teeth on edge.
Zaheela slings the satchel over one shoulder, pats Mia’s knee, and lets herself out into the hall. I wait until the front door clicks shut. Then I turn on him.
“Is there something you should be telling me?”
Marcus meets my look without flinching. “I’ve told you what you need to know for now.”
“That’s not an answer.” I cross my arms. “You’re keeping half of this from me, I can feel it. If it touches my daughter, I get to know everything.”
He crosses the room and stops an arm’s length off. “I asked you for a few days, and I meant it.”
“You keep asking me for things.” My voice climbs, and I drag it down before it alerts the girls. “Days. Trust. I hand them over, and I’ve gotten nothing back.”
“You’ve got a roof over your heads where neither of you has to look over your shoulder.” His voice is quiet. “Mia’s here because nowhere else is safer for her. We don’t know who slipped her that poison. Until we do, it could happen again.”
“That was at a festival, though. She won’t be near another one for—”
“It won’t be a stranger with cotton candy next time.” He cuts across me, and my breath stops in my throat. “Next time it’s a needle in a crowd, a package left at your door. The hand could belong to anyone, Jessa, and the only place I can watch every door at once is right here.”
Blood drains out of my face. I feel it go.
“Why would anyone go after her? She’s just a kid.”
My hands are trembling, and Marcus says coldly, “She was targeted because she was a kid by someone who was watching her for a long time, who knew exactly what she wouldn’t say no to.”
“You’re scaring me,” I whisper.
“Good.” He holds my stare, unblinking. “Fear’ll keep you careful. But you’re safe here, both of you. Nothing gets through that door while I’m in this house.”
Watching him stand there, so certain, I believe every word. That’s the problem. “I know,” I say. The words give me away, and I don’t try to take them back. Under all the fear, I trust him with her. I don’t know when that happened, and I don’t like what it means.
Marcus’s throat moves. His mouth opens on an answer he doesn’t give, then his eyes drop from mine. “For now,” he says, quieter. “Just hold on to that.”
I don’t answer. But as he walks away, the tension won’t leave my shoulders.
Sleep doesn’t come to me that night. I lie on my back listening to a house that isn’t mine tick and cool around me, until midnight slides past. Giving up, I pad down the stairs in bare feet, past the girls’ door, into the front room that opens straight onto the kitchen, where a single lamp burns low.
The bottle of wine is where I left it. I pour a glass, more than a glass, and drop onto the couch with my phone.
The email’s still sitting there when I open it. A firm three states over wants me. The title’s better, the salary’s fatter, and they’ll put us up in a company apartment until I find my feet. It’s in a good school district too, a better one than we left behind in the city. Four days left to say yes.
So why am I stalling? I turn the glass in my hand and make myself count the reasons to go. Someone poisoned my daughter here, and I still don’t know who did it or why. It’s been one incident, only one, but I’ve spent every hour since braced for the next.
Part of me wants to tell him. I feel it most when he tucks Mia’s hair back without thinking or crouches to hear whatever she’s babbling about at eye level.
Then common sense hauls me back by the collar.
The tug is real, and that’s what makes it dangerous.
I followed it once, and it’s the reason I’ve raised Mia alone.
I’ve watched enough of these stories play out to know the ending. The rich man is generous right up until he isn’t. He turns on you, or gets bored, or some lawyer whispers custody in his ear, and the woman with no money, no family, learns exactly where she stands.
What happens to me the day Marcus Steele changes his mind?
I trusted Derek once, let his easy kindness talk me into leaning on him, and he answered it by vanishing under a debt that nearly buried us both. And even knowing that, here I am thinking about staying.
I’m well into my second glass when the stairs creak, and Marcus appears in the lamplight barefoot, hair a mess from the pillow, a T-shirt pulled over low-slung sweats. “It’s past midnight. What are you doing down here?”
“Relaxing.” I lift the glass an inch off my knee. “Trying to.”
His eyes drop to the phone face-up beside my thigh, the screen still lit. I move to flip it over. He’s faster. The phone’s in his hand before mine lands on it, and I watch him scan the email.
When he looks up, his face has gone tight. “You’ve got another job.” I don’t give him an answer.
“Where?”
“I applied a while back.” My tone stays even. “I just got an answer.”
He sets the phone down slowly. “Where is it, Jessa?”
“Three states over,” I tell him. “The firm’s in Brenton.”
Marcus studies me for a long beat. Then he crosses to the cabinet, takes down a glass, and pours himself a generous amount of the wine. He drains it in one motion, his knuckles white around the glass, then sets it down slowly.
“What are you planning to do?” he asks.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want to leave? Take Mia and go?”
I look at him and don’t answer. The lamp throws half his face into shadow, and I can’t read the other half. When I do speak, it comes out smaller than intended. “Isn’t that the smart thing to do?”
He steps toward me. I lift the glass for something to do with my hands.
He takes it out of them before it reaches my mouth and sets it on the side table, out of reach.
Then he’s standing over me, close, his knees brushing mine where they part around him, his hand coming up to cradle the side of my face.
“Do you really believe that?” His thumb moves once across my cheekbone. “That leaving is the smart thing?”
“I don’t know.” It comes out on a breath, barely there.
The room’s dim, his body bent over mine, the space between us gone to almost nothing. I’ve never felt this exposed.
“Stay.” His voice drops. “Mia’s happy here. Why are you trying to uproot her?”
I try to turn my face out of his hand. “You saw what happened to her, Marcus. What if the next one gets through? You keep telling me to trust you, and you won’t tell me a single thing. All I actually know is that I can’t even stay in my own apartment, and every night I sleep in a stranger’s h—”
“I’m not a stranger.” He says it right over me, low, his eyes pinning mine. “Am I?”
My whole body locks up.
He watches me before he goes on. “I don’t want you to leave. Give me some time. Let me handle this, and the two of you can have a good life here.”
My eyes drop to the phone. “I get it. You don’t want Bella losing her playmate.”
His hand’s easy against my jaw until I say those words. Then his fingers tighten. He tips my chin up until I meet his eyes. “Is that what you think this is? You think I’m keeping you here so my niece won’t lose a friend?”
I don’t answer him. “You think I’m stupid?” His voice has gone rough. “You think I don’t know?”
My heart trips over itself. I search his face and come up empty, his jaw set, his eyes giving nothing back. “Know what?” The question comes out unsteady. “What are you talking about?”
He goes quiet. A muscle jumps at his temple, and for one held second, I’m sure he’s about to say the one thing I’ve been dreading.
He doesn’t.
“This isn’t about Bella,” he says instead.
“It’s about Mia, about what’s best for her.
This town is good for her, Jessa, and that scholarship comes once in a lifetime.
It could take her anywhere in the world.
” His thumb strokes my jaw. “So why are you so set on taking it from her? I told you nothing will touch her. Nothing forced me to bring the two of you into my home. I did it because I can’t stand the thought of either of you hurt. ”
Straining back as far as his hand allows, I hold his eyes. “You’re still not telling me everything. Now I’m supposed to sit here and swallow it? You’re throwing ‘trust me’ around while you keep me blind to my own life.”
“I can’t tell you.” It comes out sharp, almost before I finish. “If I tell you what’s happening, it puts you in more danger than you’re already in.”
That does it. I shove up off the couch, knock his hands away, and put the coffee table between us. “Then let us go. If we’re not here, we’re not in your danger. Problem solved.”
“You don’t know that.” He draws up to his full height, and the room feels smaller for it.
I go still. “What’s that supposed to mean?”