Defiance

Great. What? “Okay, sure. Look, Christophe—”

He reached up. I almost flinched, but he only tucked a fallen curl behind my ear. His fingertips brushed my cheek. Warm skin, soft and forgiving. But my shoulder hurt, the bruise throbbing. His fingertips slid down, touched under my chin, and I found out I was staring at his chest before he pushed gently and I was forced to look up at his shadowed face.

“Will you at least consider me an option?” A bitter little half-smile, and his shoulders hunched slightly. “I don’t know how much more open I can be. About how I . . .”

Oh, my God. The tangle of feelings inside me snarled even further. “I like you.” There, it was out. It was said. Had I been lying to Graves, or to myself? “I really do. You’re . . . different.”

I could have kicked myself. “Different”? That was all I could come up with?

Now there was a ghost of amusement in his expression. One half of his mouth curled up, a quiet, companionable almost-grin. “Is that the word you’d choose?”

I grabbed my courage with both hands, so to speak. “Yeah. One of them, anyway.”

A single nod. Then he went still, in that way older djamphir have. “What happened between you and the loup-garou?”

Oh, for God’s sake. But then I realized he probably wasn’t asking about the state of the union, so to speak. He was asking about something else. Or at least, I was only going to answer him as if he was asking about something else. “You mean, that day? He, uh, he found me. After Anna and I had a . . . a fight. She had the gym cleared and came to do something, I don’t know.” I leaned back against the wall, because Christophe’s attention was so focused. It was like having a laser drilling right through me. All this time, and he was the only person who really looked at me.

Even Nat sometimes didn’t see me. She saw a svetocha, that was all. Something I had to live up to. Something I had no idea of how to live up to, when I was just regular me.

Just Dru.

I swallowed hard, continued. “I got busted up a bit. Graves . . . he wanted to know who’d done it. I didn’t want to say.” I couldn’t get the words out. I was stupid. “He got mad. Stamped off.”

Another single nod, breaking his eerie stillness. “Leaving you unprotected.”

Defending Graves was like defending Dad. The urge was immediate, overwhelming, and instinctive. “I didn’t—”

He made a sharp slashing movement with one hand. “I know you’ll hear no word against him. But no matter how angry he was, leaving you alone should not have been an option.”

Meaning, probably, I wouldn’t do that. But Christophe had left me alone before, hadn’t he? Or let me think he wasn’t hanging around.

I slumped against the wall. “Can we get off this subject?”

He shrugged. I waited for him to say something else, but he just rose, fluidly, and held out a hand. I took it— there was no reason not to—and he hauled me up as if I weighed less than a feather. The leashed strength was frightening. Especially since I’d seen him use it.

When I had my balance, I tried to pull my hand back. His fingers tightened, briefly, before he let go. Just to make sure I knew he was choosing to turn me loose, I guess.

Or just because he didn’t want to let go.

“Dru.” He was looking away now, up the deserted, shadowed hall.

The busts gleamed as they watched with blank eyes, each one a djamphir famous in the Real World for something or another, but not to be found in any ordinary history books. I suddenly wondered if they minded. Brought myself back to reality with a twitch. “What?”

He kept staring away. “I don’t mistake you for your mother. She was the closest I had to . . . a friend. A real friend. She taught me much.” He stopped, inhaled sharply as if the words pained him, and dropped his chin a little. “But I didn’t have trouble sleeping or eating when I thought of her in danger. I didn’t feel my heart tear itself out of my chest when she looked sad. I did not ever fear for her the way I fear for you.” The aspect settled over him in a wave, and I could see it rising from him like heat shimmers from pavement on a scorcher of a day. “I don’t blame you if it’s not . . . enough. I’m tainted, I know as much. Just . . . let me stay near you. Please.”

What could I say to that? Especially since my heart gave a huge painful leap. Somehow I crossed the space between us, and when I put my arms around him, he hugged me back. I didn’t smell his blood now. I just smelled him, that maddening apple-pie-and-male blend that yanked everything inside me sideways. It helped that when I laid my head on his chest I could hear his heartbeat going like a clock. Tick-tock, tock-tick, each beat strong and steady.

Right then it didn’t matter that he was like a twister, or that he was infuriating when it came to sparring, or that my shoulder still hurt. What mattered was the way he slumped against me, sighing a little, and the way I finally felt like I was . . . home. It mattered that he always came back for me, and it mattered that he’d said those things to me.

Nobody had ever said anything like that to me, ever.

That was the first time I ever really kissed him. As in, the first time I kissed him without waiting for him to try for me.

And it was great.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

It was the middle of the day, the long sleepy time when sunshine comes down like golden honey, and someone was shaking me awake. I wanted to roll over and stick my head under the pillow. The thought—it’s not time for school, leeme lone—was familiar because it’d hit me every morning when the alarm went off, no matter where in the country we were.

“Milady.” Nathalie, whispering fiercely. “Dru, please, wake up.”

I sat straight up, almost cracking my forehead against hers because she was bending down. She jerked back gracefully, and I got a good lungful of her perfume. She wore a strange musky blend from a little blue bottle, and it suited her. Right now, though, it had a weird coppery edge.

I know that smell. Fear.

“Christophe?” It was the first word out of my mouth. I blinked, rubbed at my eyes. “What the hell?”

“He’s gone. Benjamin is down the hall. It’s Ash.” Her dark eyes were wide, and her sleek hair was mussed. Just a little. “We’ll take you to him, Shanks and me. But hurry up. Please.”

I scrambled up out of the white bed. I’d fallen asleep in Christophe’s arms, still wearing Graves’s coat. Sometime during the night I’d shucked the coat and my jeans and crawled under the covers. I was hoping I’d done it while I was alone.

I grabbed for my jeans, but Nathalie was quicker. She hooked them up off the floor and shook her head. “Clean clothes. You never know. It’s not that urgent.”

“Benjy could come along any moment,” Shanks hissed from the door. He was in a gray T-shirt and comfortably ripped-around-the-knee jeans, but his dark hair stood up wildly in all directions. It was such a change from his usual emo-boy fringe I began to get a bad feeling. “He always checks when there’s a wulf on guard. Don’t trust us.”

Nat snorted. “She has time to get clean underwear on, Robbie. Jeez.”

I seconded that emotion, and I was damn glad I still had a T-shirt and panties on. I mean, it was just Shanks, but still.

“You’re such a girl.” He tensed, leaning toward the door and cocking his head as if he heard something.

“What’s going on with Ash?” I moved as quietly as I could toward the dresser.

“Best you come see.” Nathalie glided past me and in seconds had T-shirt, panties, and jeans in her capable hands. Today she was in a purple V-neck and a black scarf, and her jeans looked faintly tinged with purple, too. She even had purple Uggs, and they didn’t look ridiculous like they would if I was in them. “Hurry.”