Page 69 of Allegiant

My eyes widen. “Me? Nothing right now.”

“You’re…smiling.” He says it like it’s a foreign word. Maybe it is where I’m concerned. Can’t say it’s something I do often. “It’s weird. I don’t like it.”

I stretch my lips wider, just to fuck with him.

Wylder raps the table again. “Focus. What were you trying to tell us, Samson?”

Right. Larry. “I did some digging into his neighbor when I realized the two of them are close.”

“Close how?”

“Like, Rowan takes him food, keeps him company, does his laundry, that kinda shit.”

“Aw.” Harley rests his elbows on the table, chin in his hand. “That’s adorable. Now I feel kinda bad for offering to kill him.”

“As you should,” I growl.

He gives me a lazy smirk. “Is this where I remind you that you were also going to kill him, or…?”

My dagger makes its way to my palm with ease. “That’s not something we ever need to discuss. Ever. You understand?”

Because if Rowan ever discovered why we met, that I’d been stalking him the way Adam had been stalked…

I don’t need to be a genius to see how well that’d go down.

To my surprise, Harley’s face turns serious. “You got it, man. My lips are sealed.”

“All of ours are,” Wylder adds. “We’ve got your back. Obviously we were wrong in the first place. If Rowan is someone special to you, then we’ll treat him like a Buckingham.”

My face heats. “I’m not saying we’re together or anything. It’s not like that.”

Cade nudges me with his shoulder. “But you’d like it to be, right?”

I shrug self-consciously. “I barely know him.”

Cade laughs. “I knew Ansel was mine from the instant he knocked me out with my dagger.”

“Still not over the fact he was able to take you out so easily,” Dalton says.

“I mostly let him.” Cade’s voice takes on a dreamy tone. “I knew it was the start of our happily ever after.”

I trace shapes on the wooden tabletop. Is that how I feel about Rowan?

Yes.

My mind answers that question so quickly that I suck in a breath. Or is it my heart?

I don’t think it matters which it is, so long as I recognize it.

I want Rowan to be mine.

The whole world seems to shift around me at the revelation. When it rights again, there’s a single person at the center.

Rowan Mitchell. The man I was sent to kill.

Who I’ll now protect forever.

Wyatt clears his throat. “We’re off topic again. You were telling us about the neighbor.”