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“I’ll take it,” I replied faintly. I still couldn’t formulate anything intelligent to say after my body had gone rogue and decided it wanted to strip Mattie naked and make good use of the bed behind her.
She gestured to the coffee with her thumb and a familiar puckish smile lit her sharp features. “Hey look. Vitamins.”
Arhythmic tink, tink, click, tink, tink, click penetrated my restless, feverish sleep. I rarely slept well to begin with, but having a fever made the experience downright bizarre. I’d gone down my own rabbit hole and fallen into nightmares of ticking clocks and spinning teacups. Only, I wasn’t Alice, and this wasn’t Wonderland. I was the rabbit, and this was Hell. It burned me up from the inside, and even though cool hands touched my face now and then, and someone fed me potions that made me three times too big, and then ten times too small, the fires still licked at my skin.
Tink, tink, click. Tink, tink, click. The annoying sound stabbed my ears over and over again until my dreams popped through the surface of my consciousness. I took a breath like I’d been in a boiling lake. My eyes opened, and Kael’s bedroom came into focus. I remembered getting here, but the whole experience had run into my dreams like melted crayons swirling together. His safehouse had been built on the second floor of an industrial building that looked like it could have been a factory at one point. And his bedroom hung suspended over a second kitchen at the far end of the long space. It was a loft-style bedroom, but walls of glass encased the sides that looked out over the open living space.
I remembered liking it. I remembered thinking that the sleek, masculine furniture and dark, distressed wood matched Kael. Like a modern pirate. Like him.
Tink, tink, click.
I lifted my head from the navy-blue pillow, blinking bleary eyes around the room. I found Kael seated near one of the glass walls in a rounded armchair. He had one leg cocked up on the arm of the seat and a laptop balanced on his knee. In his hand, he played with something idly, like a fidget toy or something. His other hand clicked away on the trackpad as his eyes frowned at the screen in thought.
Tink, tink, click. My eyes followed the movement of the metallic, gunmetal gray thing in his hands. And then I realized it was a knife. It was one of those butterfly knives that snapped out of its casing in a flash before clicking back inside of it. Kael was skilled enough with it that he could flick it open, twirl it around his hand, and click it closed without even thinking about it. Fear seized the rest of my thoughts, squeezing so tightly, I had no room for logic. Each beat of my heart tapped in rhythm with every tink of the knife. Run, my heart whispered like a desperate metronome. Run, run, run.
I sat up fast, pressing my back against the black leather headboard. I’d never truly felt more like a rabbit with my heart beating fast and light and my instincts screaming. Kael paused, and his eyes found me. His expression shifted, pulling together with concern as he sat up in his chair. “Hey, Bunny,” he said cautiously.
His voice returned some reason to my scattered thoughts. I tried not to stare at his hand, but my eyes couldn’t seem to help themselves. The knife had been sheathed in its metal casing, and he held it loosely in his hand. “Hey,” I breathed.
His gaze strayed to his hand, and then back to me. “Not a fan of knives?” Even though his tone was teasing, he tucked the knife into his hand so it wasn’t visible.
Too close, I thought as my hammering heart calmed down. Sanity scrambled to catch up with my thoughts. He’s too close to seeing the truth. Rein it in. I forced my shoulders to relax. “I’m not a fan of irritating sounds,” I countered. I meant it to come out plucky, but my voice came out thin and strained.
Kael’s features settled into a calm, knowing look. The kind that said he saw straight through me. “Yeah, but annoying you is my hobby.”
“I thought that was freaking me out.”
“I like to diversify my interests,” he replied, smiling faintly as he stood. Behind his banter were two hawk-like eyes that were peeling open my layers.
It was enough to make me want to scream. I watched him cross the reclaimed wood floors, and I took in his appearance for the first time. He’d changed his clothes and wore a black, long-sleeved shirt with buttons going down from the collar to his chest. He’d left the top two open, and the collar folded over his rigid collarbone like an invitation to touch his skin. A leather bracelet wrapped around his left wrist, and he wore a smartwatch on the right. All the black he wore set off the shock of silver at his temples and matched the shadow of growth along his sharp jaw.
I forced myself to see things more rationally with him approaching me. He wasn’t going to hurt me. The knife wasn’t for me. It wasn’t going to slice along my skin and open a thin stream of blood that puddled and splashed…
I swallowed hard against a sore throat. I sucked at being rational, apparently.
Kael came to sit on the edge of the bed and reached over to place the back of his hand against my forehead. “You still feel like a pizza oven.”
“I like pizza,” I said solemnly.
“Right, but you don’t need to roast the pizza on your face,” he clarified, letting his hand fall. “You were pretty out of it for a while, there.”
“If only someone hadn’t chased me into a river,” I shot back. I clutched his heather gray comforter, resisting the urge to devolve into panic. Somehow, I’d been fully duped into walking straight into my captor’s house. Like it had been my idea. And now I was absolutely certain that if he thought I was lying, or he wanted to give me over to my parents, then that was exactly what would happen. Somehow, I’d allowed myself to be completely at Kael’s mercy and on his turf. I must have been way loopier than I’d thought.
“I had a perfectly respectable plan to stab you with drugs and cart you off like a dignified hostage,” he returned, totally non plussed. “You were the one who went rogue.”
I coughed, and it wrenched my lungs, burning as it was expelled from my body like a fucking exorcism. Admittedly, I knew this was a particularly bad case of influenza or worse, and if I hadn’t jumped in a sub-zero river, I might have fought the thing off better than I was now. Kael patted my back before reaching over to a floating shelf beside his bed and handing me a bottle of iced tea. “Consequences, Bunny.”
I glared from over the crook of my elbow where I had smashed my mouth. Still muffled, I said, “I’m uncovering my mouth next time.”
“Wow.” Kael pulled a fake, affronted face. “Biological warfare is a little dark, even for you. And here I thought we were getting along.”
I lowered my arm, taking the drink from him and unscrewing the cap. “Are we, though?”
“Yes.” Kael tilted his head a fraction, his gaze focused on me in a way that made it hard for me to swallow. “I believed you the first time, you know. But I did confirm your allegations while you’ve been asleep.”
I swallowed sweet tea, grateful for the burst of sugar and soothing liquid on my dry throat. I also took a moment to digest what he’d just said while I gulped the drink. He did believe me? Hope expanded in my chest like a solar flare. “Why are you making that sound so simple?”
“It only took me five minutes to dig through SynthoCare before I found what you were talking about,” he replied with blithe indifference. “They’re manufacturing cathynol and distributing it to criminals. Right?”
