He pulled away. “No. It’s fine.”
I grabbed for him again. “Tristen, just let me . . .”
When my fingers wrapped around his wrist, I felt something narrow and hard under the torn shirt, and I looked up at him, confused. “Tristen?”
“Let go, Jill,” he said, pulling back.
But I didn’t. I held on to him. “What is that?”
He yanked free of me. “That, Jill, is my best hope against the thing that is coming for me.”
I suspected then that Tristen was carrying a knife, and the thought made me sick. Only suddenly I wasn’t disgusted just because he might use it to kill again. As I looked at his brave, determined face, I was mostly terrified because the weapon seemed way too small to do any good against an enemy—especially one that had already shown such ruthless power.
“Tristen,” I said, all of the weak defenses I’d raised against him melting away, “did your father really say that he’ll hurt you again? You never told me what happened that night.”
He gave a short, rueful laugh. “No, you ran out, horrified by me, before I could tell you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No need to apologize,” Tristen said with a shrug. He resumed mixing the solution, avoiding looking at me. “But to answer your question: yes, the beast that controls my father, completely now, vowed to return, and if I haven’t drunk the formula and restored disorder to the Hyde family, he will kill me.”
I had sort of pieced all that together, but to hear him say it out loud . . . I got hot and nauseous. I was petrified for him. And how could I have played around with the formula? “Do you know where your father is?”
“No.” Tristen finally met my eyes. “That phone call, when we were in bed . . .”
He said that casually, like that didn’t matter, either. And maybe it didn’t to him anymore. That made me sick, too.
“That was Dad’s department head, asking why he’d stopped coming to the university.” He tapped the stirring rod against the glass beaker, frowning even more deeply. “He doesn’t still see your mother, does he?”
“No,” I said. Not professionally. “The treatment’s over.”
“Good,” he said.
“Tristen?”
“Yes?”
I found myself staring at the spot where Tristen’s bandage bulged just slightly. “Will you be able to fight your dad to . . . ?” The end. That’s what I meant.
As always, Tristen was able to finish my thoughts. “I’ll do what I need to do, Jill,” he said. He stared into my eyes, and I saw the same resolution I’d seen just before he’d drunk the formula, convinced that he was committing suicide. “When the time comes, I will do what I need to do.”
“Tristen . . .” But what could I say?
“Let’s keep working,” he said, picking up an eyedropper. “Although we know how this story ends, we’ll want to show the judges that we followed Dr. Jekyll’s notes from start to finish.”
“Sure.”
But I didn’t move to help him. I just watched, sad and confused, as Tristen . . . doomed Tristen . . . bent and chose a rat from one of the cages, cradling it in the crook of his arm. “This won’t taste good,” he warned, raising the dropper to its mouth.
The rat squirmed, and Tristen spoke softly, “Come now. I don’t like doing this, either, but it’s in the interest of science and a scholarship—for the greater good.”
He managed to squeeze a few drops into the rat’s mouth before it writhed out of his hand, tumbling back into the cage. “Poor thing,” Tristen said, watching it run in circles. “I hope it’s not in pain.”
Poor, poor thing . . .
I didn’t know what came over me, but I started to cry then, and I moved close to Tristen and wrapped my arms around him, comforting myself and hoping that I comforted him a little, too. At first he stood rigidly, not accepting my embrace, but as I held him, I felt his muscles start to relax, and soon he wrapped his arms around me, cradling me against his chest, rubbing his cheek against the top of my head, soothing me, too. “It’s okay, Jill,” he promised. “Don’t cry for me.”
But I wasn’t crying just for him. I was crying for me, too. I was crying for us.
“Oh, Jill,” Tristen said, raising my face to his. “What am I going to do with you?”
I studied his warm, wonderful brown eyes, knowing what I wanted him to do. I wanted him to kiss me. I wanted him to tell me that he still loved me. Because I knew that he had. We’d both been close to saying it, that day in Tristen’s bed . . .
He bent closer to me, resting his forehead against mine and closing his eyes, and I raised up on my tiptoes, thinking that I couldn’t wait one more second for him to kiss me. I would kiss him.
But before my lips could meet his, we both heard a sound and jerked apart, staring at the door as the knob twisted from outside.
Chapter 71
Jill
TRISTEN AND I stood locked together, eyes fixed on the twisting, rattling knob. “Tristen,” I whispered, fighting down fear, “who do you think—”
“Shhh, Jill,” he hushed me. “Quiet.”
My heart raced, but his remained steady. “It could be a custodian,” he suggested. “Or Darcy, returning.”
“A custodian would have keys, and Darcy would knock.” My eyes were locked on the knob, which rattled harder.
“True.” Tristen gently pried away from me—and removed the knife from its makeshift sheath. The blade, when he flicked it open, was thin, but looked reassuringly vicious.
The door began to shake—and then we heard a deep, growling, voice. “Tristen! Let me in!”
My entire body seemed to freeze at that terrible sound. It was Dr. Hyde’s voice—and yet not his voice at all. I edged closer to Tristen, terrified. “Tristen . . .”
He clasped my wrist with his free hand and
