I didn’t bother looking. I just nodded and turned the other way, sitting down by the side of the road to wait. I must have been running pretty hard because the two guys were covered in sweat, and there was a dull pain resonating from my legs. My pants were splattered with mud, and my shirt was stuck to my torso. I had left Quillan’s Porsche in a random neighbourhood with no significance to me, my plan or where I was going. Inside, there was a note for the guys. It said simply: I’m sorry. Words were cheap, though, and nothing I could ever offer them would be enough. I had formed the bond and deserted them. I was doing the one thing that they had tried so desperately hard to avoid.
I was leaving them and turning myself over to Weston. Even though I should have been consumed by guilt at that fact, I was only sorry that I hadn’t done it sooner. Now that I had taken the plunge, the path ahead was finally clear.
I had done the right thing.
When Jayden finally arrived, I cast my eyes over the grey Mercedes, recognising it as a replica of the previous Mercedes that I had crashed into a gully in an attempt to run away from him.
“Sorry about your other car,” I said, as he walked across the road toward me.
He looked down at me, his mismatched irises glinting with curiosity as they travelled over my damaged hands, to the evidence of my tears, and then down my mud-splattered legs.
“You should have called sooner,” he said.
“Sure,” I replied, taking his offered hand and allowing him to pull me to my feet. “My self-preservation mechanism got in the way. Useless thing, really. But I’ve taken care of it now… where are we going?”
He laughed, leading me to the car and helping me into the passenger seat, not that I needed help. I was upset, angry, and at the end of my tether—I wasn’t an invalid.
“We’re going to my house. You chose a good location to break down, I don’t live far from here.”
“Hmm,” I hummed beneath my breath, opening up his glovebox as he got into the driver’s seat. I looked under the seat, and then in the centre consol.
“What are you looking for?” he finally asked.
“The candy,” I said. “You lured me to your car, and now we’re going to your house. So… where’s the candy?”
He shook his head, but he was smiling as he pulled back onto the road.
I eventually settled back into the seat, jiggling my legs restlessly. “Just for the record, I don’t like you, and I don’t trust you.”
“But you need me,” he countered.
I grunted in reply and spent the next ten minutes debating whether to use the valcrick to heal my hands or not. Jayden and Weston had both witnessed my inability to heal myself from the bullet in my shoulder, so maybe it was better that I pretended to still be unable… just so that they didn’t use me as collateral again.
“You still can’t use the valcrick?” Jayden asked, catching me staring intently at my own hands.
“No,” I lied easily, shoving the door open before the car had even stopped moving.
I walked toward the front of Jayden’s house, trying to take in everything at once. It was tiny compared to the usual Zev mansions that I was used to. The front yard was small and well-contained, leading up to a white-painted porch. His front door was blue, and I found that mildly amusing. He unlocked the door and motioned me to enter, so I slid past him. The house opened up into a bare-as-bones living room, with a single chaise pushed beneath one of the windows, and a few antique-looking side tables scattered about the room. Some of them held books and some of them held struggling potted plants.
“You should really water those.” I pointed at one of them: a fern with drooping, almost brown leaves.
“Yeah.” Jayden scratched the back of his neck, his cheeks gaining the faintest hint of colour. “I’m not here much.”
He turned right and I followed him down a short hallway, into a simple kitchen with blue stone bench tops. He filled up a glass with water and disappeared—I assumed to go water the fern. I stuck my hands under the tap while he was gone, ignoring the sting as I tried to wash away the mess of dirt and blood. When I was done I turned around to find him right behind me. I jumped, ready to fend off an attack, but he was holding up a hand-towel in one hand and a first aid kit in the other. He frowned at my reaction.
“Thanks,” I muttered, trying to take the towel from him.
He pulled the towel out of reach. “Have a seat.” He motioned to a stool on the other side of the counter. “I’m not going to hurt you, Seraph.”
“It would be nice if I believed you,” I said, moving to the stool and holding my hands out.
“When have I ever given you a reason to not believe me?” He dried my hands with surprising care before rooting around in the first aid kit and extracting an antiseptic cream.