I heard the words, but they didn’t make sense. “What are you talking about? You didn’t even know my mom.”
“No. But I wanted to.” Jared pressed his face into my hands, still holding my wrists. “I wanted to find all the members of the Legion. I thought they’d be stronger together, like the journals say. I didn’t believe my dad when he told me Andras was always hunting them—that it was too risky. So I started researching on my own, piecing together information from conversations I overheard between my dad and my uncle with things my father told me. If I didn’t have two family members in the Legion, I probably never would’ve figured it out. But I found them all. Even your mom, the one nobody else could find.”
“How?”
“My uncle was looking for the member who dropped off the grid. One day, I heard him tell my dad that he’d figured out she was a woman, living in the DC area with her daughter. I went through his desk and found her name—and yours.”
“What are you saying?” My voice sounded distant and muffled like it belonged to someone else and I was eavesdropping on the conversation.
Jared’s tears ran down my hands. “I made a list of all the names. I was gonna show it to my dad. The next day, he was dead. They were all dead. And suddenly we were the Legion.”
It’s his fault my mom is dead.
I knew it was true, but I couldn’t hate him.
Jared’s father hid something from him, and he went looking for answers. How many times had I searched for the note my father wrote, the one I saw perfectly every time I closed my eyes? My mother never let me see it again after the day he left, and it only made me search harder.
I would have looked for them, too.
My body shook as I cried. This time I couldn’t pretend, and I couldn’t stop. Jared let go of my wrists, trying to create space between us, but it was impossible.
There was no space between us—inside or outside these walls.
“I know you’ll never be able to forgive me. My own brother hates my guts,” he said.
It all made sense. The tension between them—the unspoken anger simmering below the surface—it was about so much more than their father choosing Jared to take his place in the Legion… or me.
“I’m sorry. I wish I could take it back,” Jared whispered, his voice hoarse. “All I want to do is be near you, and I don’t deserve to be.”
“What?”
“I’m sorry—”
I shook my head. “No. The other thing.”
Jared stilled and put his hands flat against the boards behind me, with my face between them. I couldn’t see him in the darkness, but I could feel him watching me cry.
Seeing me—the person I tried so hard to hide from the world and replace with someone better.
“All I want to do is be near you.” He spoke the words slowly, his face so close I could feel on his breath on my skin and smell the salt on his. “Kennedy, what do you want?”
The question lingered between us tearing me apart. But I couldn’t make myself say the words, no matter how many times I repeated them in my head. “It doesn’t make a difference.”
“It makes a difference to me.” His voice was raw and deep.
“I want to matter. I want to be the kind of girl someone can’t just walk away from.”
He ran his thumb down the center of my bottom lip. “No one could ever forget you.”
Someone did.
Something inside me gave way, and I started sobbing.
He took my face in his hands and his lips brushed mine. It wasn’t a kiss. It was a breath. A heartbeat.
“You see what I want you to see. It has nothing to do with who I really am,” I said, our lips barely separated.
“Then let me see the rest,” he whispered.
I shook my head, choking on my tears. “I can’t.”
He pressed his forehead against mine. “Why not?”
“Because I’m afraid I won’t be able to go back to the person I was when you walk away.” I said it before I could stop myself, before I calculated all the ways those words could hurt me.
His hands slid behind my neck, tangling in my hair. “I won’t walk away.”
“Everyone does, eventually.”
He gathered me up in his arms and held me tighter than anyone ever had. Tight enough to make me forget about where we were, or how much I wanted to be someone else. In this moment, I wanted to be me. The girl Jared was holding.
I wanted right now.
“I don’t know how anyone could walk away from you,” he murmured. “How anyone could stand to hurt you.”
Easily.
“I want…” He hesitated. “Can I kiss you?”
I pushed up onto my toes and pressed my mouth against his, opening into him. He pulled me closer. His body melted against mine, and my breath hitched as Jared’s finger trailed down my throat. I tugged on his bottom lip and he kissed me harder, like it didn’t matter if we ever got out of here.
I leaned into him, my hands crushed between his back and the boards.
“Kennedy.” His voice was ragged, his fingers slipping under the bottom of my shirt. I felt his chest rising and falling, the pressure of all the things we couldn’t say in every kiss.
CHAPTER 27
Unearthed