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Fuck it. I’m gonna tell her. I need five minutes of rest anyway. My head throbs, my body aches, and she’s in my arms.
“My grandfather was a huge man. Old Norwegian family, from my mother’s side. Whalers and sailors, apparently. He was in the military. Tough guy. When I was first sent there, I moped and threw a hissy fit. Broke everything in the room I was assigned. He came, saw that and threw me against the wall.”
She lifts her head and frowns. “He hurt you.”
“He put me in my place. Nobody had ever done that. Nobody had ever touched me like that, with such disregard for who I was in the world—for how much money I was to inherit. He slapped me around, then set me down and talked to me.”
“Hawk, come on. He hurt you, admit it.”
“Nah.” I swallow hard, because this is something I can’t sort out in my head yet. Can’t talk about it. “He saw me.”
But nobody ever really touched me until you.
And this is not the time for sappy thoughts, I think as I disentangle the warm, exhausted girl from my side.
But I stop again because she looks miserable.
“What is it?” I stroke her smooth cheek. “I was just gonna check the exits, see if I find a way out. We can’t afford to be moved from here. At least here we know where we are.”
She shakes her head. “My dad. He knows about this. He allowed it.” She bites her lip, and I lick my own, fucking obsessed. “I hate him.”
Fuck, how can I focus on getting out of here when everything she does sends all my blood to my dick? When she’s talking about her fucking dad, and I get a hard-on just because she’s right here, with me?
I need to move. “So we’re going for Plan F.” I rub the crease between my brows, willing the maddening headache away.
Plan A was my watch. Plan B was Layla’s phone. And yeah, we’ve jumped to F in one fucking second of back luck.
“That’s F for fail?” she whispers.
“Nah. F for Fuck it. Time to escape. Any ideas where I could look?”
She pushes herself to her feet, and I grip her arm to help her.
Which brings us flush together.
Hell.
“You should have left, Layla. If you get hurt, I don’t know what I’m gonna do. Kill them all, for one. Then resurrect them and kill them again.”
That earns me a ghost of a smile. “You’re crazy. But look. You said you’re responsible because your parents were part of it. Well, my dad is part of it too, and that makes me responsible.”
God, I like her. I realize now I never really knew her. Never tried to get to know her, what with keeping my distance and shit.
But it was also that I never thought I’d like her. When I first met her I thought she was pretty, but that was it. Guess this makes me sound like a self-righteous prick, but I thought she was shallow and boring. I thought she only cared for some fun and for her next pedicure appointment.
As time passed, she grew on me, and now… Never thought I’d be happy just to talk to her, to hold her. That we’d think alike, and put ourselves in danger alike.
That she’s so brave, and crazy at the same time, and that she might understand me so well.
“I need to do this, Layla.” I cup her face, meet her gaze full-on, letting her see I’m being honest with her, one hundred percent transparent. “Need to set things right. In my dreams, my grandpa asks me who he raised me to be. And I can come up with only one answer: he didn’t raise me to be a coward and a selfish bastard, someone who values his life above that of others. He raised me to be fair and… I dunno. He died two years ago, but I owe it to him to try. I owe it to the people the Organization destroyed. To the future. Is it too corny if I say I owe it to the future generations?”
She smiles. “Not corny at all.”
And we set out to check this fucking basement for a way out, hand in hand.
Together.
Never once has this hand-holding, togetherness thing felt so right before, and damn if that isn’t scarier than the mess we’re in.
