30. Chapter Thirty Lakey #3
That ball of darkness that normally sat heavy in my chest had loosened.
Not gone. It would never be gone. But it wasn't crushing me, either.
Instead of acting on my impulses, hunting, killing, feeding the thing inside me that screamed for blood, I was creating memories.
Normal memories. The kind any other person would make on a Tuesday afternoon.
And somehow, that knowledge made me feel guilty.
Specifically knowing what they did to me, to Rose, to all those girls who didn't survive, and not being able to find my daughter.
What if something was happening to her while I was playing house here? What if she was scared? What if she was calling for a mother she'd never met, and I was sitting on a couch eating cold lo mein and braiding Rose's hair?
Stop. Fucking stop.
"You know," I said, because talking was better than thinking, "we're kind of a weird little family now, aren't we?"
Cam's head snapped up from where he'd been checking the window one final time. "The fuck are you on about, Lakey?"
I shrugged, running my fingers through Rose's hair. She'd leaned into me, her head on my shoulder, and I hadn't pushed her off. A month ago I would have. "Just saying. It's kinda nice, having someone to look after. Makes me feel almost... normal."
"We're not normal." His voice was flat. "We're fucking monsters, remember? And she's a fucking adult, Lakey. She's not your child."
He didn't mean it to, or maybe he did, but it hit the exact spot he knew it would. Because my child was out there. And Rose wasn't her. Rose was a twenty-year-old woman who happened to need us, and I was using her to fill a gap that couldn't be filled by anyone except the daughter I couldn't find.
I rolled my eyes because rolling my eyes was easier than letting him see that. "Yeah, yeah. Big bad wolf and all that shit. But come on, admit it. This is different."
For a second I thought he'd argue. He opened his mouth, the muscles in his jaw working, and I braced for whatever cutting thing he was about to say, but then his shoulders dropped. Just a fraction. The fight went out of him the way it always did when he knew I was right and hated it.
"Maybe," he muttered.
I almost didn't hear it.
He was coming around. I knew he was. He was just scared of what it meant.
The closer we got to Rose, the closer we came to admitting that things were changing inside us.
That constant fight mode, the one we'd lived in since we were kids, since the homes, since Carmen and Bill and Ed and all the rest of them, had eased.
We were enjoying the quiet. Enjoying having someone around who didn't want anything from us except to not be alone.
And Cam wasn't ready to say that out loud.
Not to me, not to himself, not to God or the devil or whoever the fuck was keeping score.
That was okay. He'd get there. He always did. I just had to wait him out.
As the night settled in, Rose curled up next to me on the couch, her legs tucked under her, her breathing slowing. Her voice came out soft, half-asleep already.
"Thank you." She shifted closer, her forehead pressing against my arm. "Both of you. I haven't had anyone care about me in a very long time."
My throat locked up. I swallowed hard, looked at the ceiling, blinked fast. Don't you dare, Lakey. Don't you fucking dare.
"Right, well. Sure," Cam said from across the room. His voice had gone rough. Not his angry rough or his turned-on rough. The other one. The one I heard maybe twice a year when something got past all his walls at once and he couldn't shove it back fast enough.
I caught his gaze over Rose's head, and held it. His jaw was tight, his arms crossed, everything about his posture screaming that he was fine, he was unaffected, this was just another person in their apartment and it meant nothing.
But his eyes, his stupid, dark, beautiful eyes, they told a completely different story.
We were both thinking the same thing. The exact same thing.
And it wasn't soft. It wasn't sweet. It was the cold, sharp knowledge that this, right here, this warm quiet feeling, this almost-peace, was going to destroy us if we let it go too far.
Because people who cared about things had things to lose.
And people with things to lose made mistakes.
And mistakes in our world got people killed.
We needed to hunt. Before our savage instincts dissolved into whatever the fuck this was. Before we got so comfortable we forgot what we were and what we were capable of and what was still out there, circling, watching from treelines at abandoned amusement parks.
But not tonight.
Tonight, Rose slept on my shoulder. Cam checked the locks one more time.
And I sat in the dark, fingers still moving through Rose's hair, thinking about a daughter I'd never held, and a girl I was holding right now, and how neither of them had ever been given a goddamn thing in their lives, and how I was going to fix that or die trying.
Probably both.