My body felt so broken. Too much emotion had torn through it, too much fear. All I wanted to do was roll over, press my head against the covers, close my eyes, and make it all go away. I didn’t have that option, though. For, a second later, Max got down on his knees and leaned beside me. I had no option but to stare right into his eyes.
“Chi, there has to be some kind of mistake,” Max tried once more.
This time, I looked right at him unflinchingly. I shook my head. “No mistake. I am Fagan’s next victim.” I paled as I tilted my head back and saw the sun streaming in through the window. For the first time, I realized what it meant. “Hold on, what’s the time? When you took me to the police station, it was the evening. But now it’s sunny….” I didn’t finish my thought, just paled even further as a truly sticky sensation spread through my gut.
Max stiffened, too. “You were out for most of the night. You gave your head a nasty bang. I would have dealt with it, but unfortunately, you had to faint in the police station. They called an ambulance.”
I knew what Max meant when he’d suggested he would have dealt with it. He would have used his grass-and-sunshine magic to make me better.
That didn’t change the fact it looked as if it was late morning already.
When I’d gone to save Bridgette, it had been about 7 PM at night.
Which meant… which meant.
I brought up a hand, covered my eyes, and grit my teeth.
Again, Max was right by my side. “Chi, it’s okay. We’ll figure this out. There has to be some kind of mistake,” he began, but his voice was so weak, it was obvious he couldn’t finish his statement.
It was finally dawning on him that I wasn’t lying, ha?
Well, I wish I were lying – it would be a heck of a lot easier than facing the awful prospect that in seven or so hours, I would be killed. Violently. And some rich bastard with leather shoes would eat my heart out.
Tears began to touch my cheeks again, but this time, I didn’t fit around in a hysterical mess. Nor did I turn towards my pillow and use it to cover my distress. I pressed my lips together and faced Max.
He faced me, too. And though his gaze was unflinching, there was something about his pale cheeks, about his drooping lips that told me he was genuinely afraid for my safety.
“What do we do now?” I asked quietly, hesitantly, words little more than shaking gasps from my mouth.
Max didn’t answer right away, and that made me just feel all the woozier. If I hadn’t been lying down, I would have fallen down.
Max darted his gaze to the left, appeared to calculate something, then faced me. “Tell me everything you remember. Everything.” His voice rattled on the word everything.
So I did. I told him all about waking up on the plastic-covered floor. I told him about the strong lights. I told him about Fagan’s shoes, his suit, his sickening smile. I mentioned Dimitri, then… then I hesitated.
Max, as always, picked up on my hesitation and scowled. This time, it was softer than usual, just a bare press of his lips against his teeth. “What is it? I told you not to leave anything out. Chi, any details could mean the difference between life and—” he stopped abruptly. He didn’t need to say it. I’d been the one to experience my own death.
There was a problem, though. While I appreciated what Max was saying, I doubted he wanted to know the full truth. Though I’d already told him everything else, there was one fact I was keeping from him. That apparently the only reason Fagan had managed to capture me was that Max had abandoned me at the last moment.
Max pressed forward, his insistent glare coming close to my face. “Chi, if you hold back—”
“The only person to die will be me,” I snapped, but the move was soft, kind of defeated, little more than a gust of air.
I was so very confused. My heart was telling me one thing, but my mind was telling me another. All the warning signs were there – from my grandmother’s journals to Dimitri, to Max’s general secretiveness. Max, on the face of it, could not be trusted. And yet my heart – my heart kept promising me something completely different. It told me that no matter what happened, we would prevail in the end. No, not just me – we.
I shook my head.
He obviously took this as an indication that I had zero intention of filling in the rest of the tale.
“Just tell me,” he demanded one final time.
So I did. I tilted my head back and made eye contact. I really looked at him, too, using the totality of my analytical power to pick up every micro-expression, every shift in his darting gaze. “Fagan told me that the only reason I’d been captured was that you had abandoned me. That you left me to die. And that, Max, is everything.” Though I’d started off making eye contact with him, I quickly broke it. Because I simply couldn’t maintain it.
He’d been so determined to find out every scrap of information I had, but as soon as I admitted that he was the reason for my death, he broke down again. Just shattered. It reminded
