“Of course you know you can trust me. You’re holding me an emotional hostage with my sister. You know I’ll do anything you tell me to in order to get her back. The question is can I trust you?”
A deep, slow smile draws one side of his mouth upward, his eyes sparking with sudden amusement. “Should you trust me? Absolutely not. Can you trust me?” he lets me wait a moment, still smiling down at me. Ding, ding, ding. The car persists in its chiming, announcing that the door is still open. Zeth steps forward, lifting a hand to carefully cup my cheek in his palm. He softly brushes his fingertips against my temple, leaning into me a little. He tilts his head at an angle so he can dip down to inhale deeply from my hair. “Yes,” he exhales. “You can trust me. You gave yourself to me back at my apartment; I’ve never done it before, but I gave myself in return. I may not have wanted to, Sloane, but I didn’t have a fucking choice in the matter. That means we belong to each other now. And it means I’ll come back for you soon. I’ll do my best to find your sister, and I’ll do whatever I can to make those bastards pay for what they’ve done to her.”
Zeth’s words plague me until I give myself a migraine from overthinking them. I wake before dawn and lay there, turning them over and over in my head, wondering what the hell he meant by what he said—I gave myself in return. I may not have wanted to, Sloane, but I didn’t have a fucking choice in the matter. From the mouth of absolutely anyone else on the face of this planet, it would be fairly obvious what they meant. And yet, from Zeth Mayfair, they could mean everything and then again nothing at all. I want to ask him. I want to pick up the phone and demand to know what the hell he was thinking, saying that to me. I can’t do that, though; my pride just won’t let me. And I shouldn’t want to know, either. I get the impression the sound of the dial tone in my ear as I’d wait for him to pick up would be like sitting with a sealed envelope in my hands. One that contains the results to some terrible blood test that will tell me if I’m going to survive something or succumb instead. Because it seems that drastic to me—this whole having Zeth in my life and how he is in my life. And I still essentially know nothing about the man.
Fuck. I need to stop thinking about him. As soon as the first rays of daylight sneak over the horizon and craftily work their way through the blinds of my room, I get up and shower, mentally tidying the whole mess away to deal with another time. I’m good at that.
Instead, I have a houseguest to focus on. Lacey is an enigma. She’s up before me, sitting at the breakfast bar, spooning Lucky Charms (I don’t own any Lucky Charms) into her mouth when I come downstairs. Out of the floor-to-ceiling windows, she is watching the city slowly come to life, a lumbering, grey machine seemingly defrosting, remembering its purpose. When she sees me cautiously approaching, her slight body tenses, spoon clattering into her bowl.
“I’m sorry. I used your milk. I was hungry. I brought my own cereal, though,” she tells me softly.
“That’s okay. You’re welcome to make yourself at home here, Lacey. Help yourself to anything you want.” I smile to back up this statement. I mean it. I don’t have a clue what she’s been through but I know it was enough to make her want to die. Repeatedly, in fact, given the scars I witnessed on her wrists. She slowly picks up the spoon again, like I’ve given her the permission she needs to continue eating.
“You’re just a resident, aren’t you?” she asks me.
Half in the cupboard, reaching for a cereal bowl of my own, I stiffen. Just a resident is a strange thing to say. Becoming a resident is perhaps one of the hardest things a person can do, and yet the way Lacey says it makes it sound like I’m an underachiever. “Yeah, well, I guess I am,” I tell her.
“How much money do you earn in a year?” She hoists her Lucky Charms to her mouth; her teeth clack on the metal of the spoon.
“Just over forty-seven thousand,” I tell her. I would probably kick the ass of another person who asked me that question in that particular tone of voice, but when you’re mentally damaged you get special privileges. Lacey appears to understand this privilege as she continues with her abrupt line of questioning.
“So how come you can afford this place? Up on the hill, out of the city. Killer view.”
“My grandmother left me an inheritance. A lot of money, I guess. I sank it all into this place.”
Lacey mulls this over. Eats some more of her Lucky Charms. “Are you working today?”
“No. We’re going to see my friend Pippa. You remember, the woman I told you about?”
“The shrink?”