A tense, heavy silence fell over the room. Everyone else glanced back and forth between Takeda and Ian, but I stared at the Viking. For once, his guard was down, and his hurt was written all over his face for everyone to see. For the third time tonight, my heart ached for him. The two of us were far more alike than different. Both of us had been lied to and betrayed by the people we’d loved the most.
“But I trusted you. After everything that happened with Drake, you and Zoe and Mateo were the only ones I trusted. How could you do this to me?” Ian asked, his voice dropping to a ragged whisper. “How could you?”
Takeda winced, guilt creasing his features. He opened his mouth to explain, but Ian snapped up his hand, cutting him off.
“Forget it,” he growled. “I don’t want to hear it right now.”
Ian whirled around, kicked his chair out of the way, and stormed out of the briefing room.
*
Once again, that tense, heavy silence fell over the room.
Takeda reached down, picked up some papers, and started shuffling them from one side of the table to the other. He didn’t look at anyone, but his lips pinched into a tight line, and his fingers curled around the papers like he wanted to rip them all to shreds. It was the most emotion I had seen him show so far.
He hadn’t liked lying to Ian, but he had done it anyway because he’d thought it was the best thing for the Viking. Just like my parents had lied to me about being Reapers. I could understand Takeda’s reasoning—and my parents’ too—but that didn’t lessen the sting of what they’d done. I didn’t know which betrayal was worse, Takeda wanting to protect Ian from his brother or my parents wanting to protect me from their secret lives as Reapers.
“Well,” Zoe drawled. “That went well. Not.”
She started to get to her feet, but I got up instead and waved my hand. “Don’t worry. I’ll go talk to him. Unfortunately, I have experience with this sort of thing.” I looked at Aunt Rachel. “I’ll see you at home later tonight. Okay?”
She nodded.
I left the briefing room and started searching the Bunker for Ian. It didn’t take me long to find him. All I had to do was follow the loud crashing, clanging, and banging of a weapon slamming into a target over and over again.
I found Ian in the training room, whacking at a plastic dummy and hacking it to pieces with his battle ax. I stood in the doorway and watched him. After about two minutes, he got tired of cutting up the poor dummy, dropped his ax on the mat, and stalked over to one of the boxing bags dangling from the ceiling. Ian didn’t bother taping up his hands. Instead, he started punching the bag over and over again, even though his knuckles quickly bruised from the vicious repeated blows.
“You know that’s not going help anything, right?” I called out. “Busting up your hands hurts you a lot more than it hurts the bag. Trust me, I know.”
Ian ignored me and kept right on hitting the heavy bag, his blows even harder than before. I wasn’t lying. I did know what he was going through. Okay, okay, so the brother I thought I’d killed in self-defense hadn’t suddenly come back from the dead. But when I’d learned the truth about my parents, I had felt the same guilt, rage, and disgust that Ian was experiencing right now. I also knew that he didn’t want to talk about it any more than I had wanted to talk about my feelings back then. Or wanted to talk about them right now. But one thing had helped me, and I thought it might help him too.
So I went over and grabbed the bag, stopping its sharp swings. Ian glared at me for interrupting, but I stared right back at him. I had faced down far scarier things than an angry Viking, including Loki and an entire academy full of Reapers. This was nothing compared with that. At least, that’s what I kept telling myself, even as I tried not to notice Ian’s broad shoulders and muscled chest and how his biceps bulged and flexed with every breath he took.
“What are you looking at?” he muttered, and lowered his fists to his sides.
I shook my head and dropped my eyes from his chest. Now was not the time to think about how gorgeous he was. “Instead of busting yourself up and having to get healed again, why don’t you do something a little more productive?”
“Like what?” he growled.
“Like get out of here. Go somewhere calm and quiet and clear your head for a little while. I can help you with that, if you want.”
“And why would you want to help me?” he growled again. “I haven’t exactly been nice to you these past couple of days.”
I shrugged. “We’re part of a team now, and teammates help each other, right?”
Ian looked at me, his anger warring with his curiosity. Finally, though, his curiosity won out. “What do you have in mind?”
I grinned. “You’ll see.”
Chapter Eighteen
“This is a bad idea,” Ian said. “A really, really bad idea.”
“Why, Viking, I had no idea that you were afraid of heights,” I said, a teasing note creeping into my voice.
“I’m not afraid of heights,” he protested. “Just of falling off them.”
I turned away so he wouldn’t see my smile.
Fifteen minutes ago, we’d snuck out of the Bunker and ridden the secret elevator back up to the second floor. Then I had used a paper clip to open the door to the stairs that led all the way up to the library roof, where we were now standing.
The roof was an enormous square, just like the library tower itself. A gray stone walkway wrapped around the area, while a matching stone balcony cordoned off the roof from the open air and a five-story drop below.
Golden light from inside the library streamed up through the stained-glass mosaic in the center of the roof, making it glimmer like a carpet of sparkling jewels. The glass was probably thick and strong enough to hold my weight, but I’d never walked across it. I hadn’t wanted my boots to dirty the colorful patterns. Looking down at the gleaming glass from this angle made me feel like I was standing in one of the wildflower fields at the Eir Ruins, and I didn’t want to do anything to spoil that illusion.
It was almost midnight, and the moon hung big and bright in the sky, surrounded by thousands of silver stars. Down below, lights burned in the other buildings on the quad, as well as in the student dorms in the distance, but no one moved or stirred, and the campus was still and quiet. A cool, crisp breeze gusted over the roof, and I drew in a deep breath, letting the fresh mountain air sweep away all the horrible things that had happened tonight.