“If I go after Ezra, and I bring you along, you’ll get killed. If I leave you here, they’ll follow my scent back, and you’ll get killed. If I try to put you on a plane to get out of here, you’ll probably do something horrible in bloodlust, and get yourself killed. There’s nothing I can do except stay here and baby-sit you!” Peter growled.
“I don’t…” I started to stumble out some kind of protest about needing a baby-sitter, but everything he said was true. After the initial sting of that wore off, I thought of something even stranger, especially given the way that Peter talked to me. “What do you even care if I die? So what? Let’s just go out there and give them hell.”
“Like you could really give them hell,” he laughed hollowly. “You’d just slow me down.”
“Maybe,” I admitted. “What you’re saying … or thinking… If Ezra isn’t coming back and they’re only going to come after us… Why don’t you just go? I don’t want to slow down your fight. But it’s better than the both of us waiting here to die.”
His expression changed instantly into something foreign. It took me a minute to realize that it resembled concern for me. Even when we had been bonded, he’d never looked at me like that.
“That’s an idiotic plan,” he shook his head.
“That’s pretty much what your plan is,” I said
“I’m not gonna just leave you here.”
“But you’re saying they’ll kill me no matter what. At least this way you can get in a few good punches, take out some of the bastards that-” I stopped myself before I said anything about Ezra being dead. It was too terrifying to say aloud.
“You’d be completely unprotected. You wouldn’t even stand a chance,” he shook his head again, sounding tired of the conversation, and stood up.
“So what? You almost killed me once before and now you’re suddenly my body guard?” I wrinkled my nose at his hypocrisy.
“Oh, god dammit!” Peter rolled his eyes. “I’m so sick of having that thrown in my face! I did that because I loved you, Alice!” He immediately regretted saying that and stared off anywhere but at me.
“Yeah, cause that’s a healthy way to express love! By killing another person!” I was purposely pushing his buttons. If the only chance at a rescue mission was Peter going off without me, then I had to piss him off enough to leave me.
“I wasn’t trying to kill you! I was trying to kill me!” He rubbed his eyes, looking as if he’d said too much and not knowing how to take it back. “Jack was in the house. I knew he was tuned in to your heart. When I grabbed you in the kitchen, he came flying in to save you. I thought if he found me, draining the life from you, he wouldn’t hesitate to kill me.” Tiredly, he exhaled. “I knew he was a better match for you than I was, and I didn’t see any other way out.”
I was too stunned to say anything. I’d always suspected Peter hated me. But he loved me so much, he’d been planning to die for my happiness. My heart thumped dully in my chest, and I tried to think of something say to him.
“Stop looking at me like that,” Peter snapped when he finally met my eyes again. “I don’t know why it’s so shocking that I wouldn’t want you to die. Do you really think Ezra would be so willing to sacrifice himself for me if I was such a psychopath?”
“Peter, I am so sorry,” I whispered, unable to muster the full strength of my voice.
“Stop!” Peter repeated. “Ezra is the one out there! We need to be worrying about him, not us! Because there isn’t even an ‘us’ to worry about!”
“You’re right.” I shook my head, clearing it of any confused thoughts about Peter.
It was hard, though. It changed the way I thought about everything. All the time I had been messing around with Jack, falling in love with him, the one thing that had given me the green light was that Peter had tried to kill me.
But when I thought about it as his own suicide attempt, that he had loved me so much he had been willing to give me up... We had been bound together, and he had truly loved me, but I had run off with his brother instead.
Peter didn’t say anything, and neither did I. I’m not sure if he was really trying to come up with another plan, but I certainly couldn’t. Part of me was really trying to, but I felt like all the wind had been knocked out of me.
The door to the hotel room thudded softly, interrupting my thoughts. Not a knock exactly, but more like something falling into it. I looked to Peter, his eyes already fixed on the door. He moved in front of me, blocking me in case the lycan announced their entrance.
When the door slowly swung open, we were greeted by something almost as bad.
- 10 -
Ezra leaned on the doorframe, looking worse than I could ever imagine him being. His clothes, the same black sweater and jeans he had worn the night before, were torn and dirty. His skin was gaunt and pale. He staggered into the room and Peter rushed to him.