Page 11

Here's what I decided, standing in the dark with my palm flat on a fallen angel's back.

I decided he didn't get to do this alone.

That's it. That was the whole thing. Eleven days of him rotting in a cold room three floors up from me while the wolves tiptoed around the house pretending they couldn't sense it, and my grand contribution to the situation was the emotional equivalent of sitting down on the floor next to him and refusing to leave.

Under my hand, his heartbeat was barely noticeable. Slow. Way too slow. Like it hoped I wouldn’t notice it was there, but it was going, and that was the most important thing at the moment. I could feel it through the tight muscle and smooth skin, thudding away in the dark like somebody knocking politely on a door at a stranger’s house.

"You're not going to say anything?" His voice had gone rough at the edges. It was obvious he was getting uncomfortable.

"I'm still deciding how to phrase it."

"Hazel." The groan sounded more pained than as a warning. Despite everything my lips twitched.

"Shush. You'll ruin it, pigeon."

His wings shifted. Almost like a slight shiver raked his body. Just a settling, the way a bird resettles on a branch, and the movement pushed the air in that room around me. It smelled like nothing at all. That's what got me. River used to smell like cedar and clean laundry and something warm underneath it. I had spent an embarrassing number of hours pretending I hadn't noticed his scent. Like it hadn’t haunted my dreams.

He smelled like nothing now.

"I have things to do and I'm not leaving you up here," I told his back. "That's the decision I made. You can hate it. You can go all growly and pissy about it and stare at curtains all you want. But I'm not letting you sit alone in the dark and turn into whatever you think you're turning into, because I have done that, River. I did that in a house on the good side of Cleveland for most of my life and it did not make me a better company. Nor did it stop whatever was coming."

He was quiet for a moment.

"All right."

"That's it? All right?" I lifted myself on my tiptoes and leaned to the side to look at him over his wing. "I had three more paragraphs prepared and ready to fire."

"I've been alone in a dark room for many days, Hazel." Something almost like his old smirk pulled at one corner of his mouth. "I'm not going to argue with the first person who came up the stairs."

And that, right there, cracked something in my chest that I did not have the emotional strength or capacity to deal with. So, I did what I always do, which is change the subject with all the grace of a bull going through a china shop.

"Great." I stepped back and scooped my shoes off the floorboards, hooking the oxblood boot over two fingers. "Then you're coming downstairs, because there's a bread roll on the counter with your name on it. Well. My name on it. But it's structurally a weapon at this point and I'm not eating it alone. If I end up with a broken tooth you’ll be coming to a dentist appointment with me."

The wings folded away.

I don't know how else to describe it. They didn't retract or fold up like an umbrella. The blackness of them drew in on itself, one long smooth motion like water going down a drain, and then there was just a male in a gray t-shirt standing in front of a window with the last of a sunset behind him. Nothing in the room to suggest anything about him had changed except the cold. I spun on my heel and bolted for the door before I embarrassed myself further and said something that I shouldn’t.

"Hazel." He caught the door before I got it open. "They can't know."

"The pack?"

"Any of them. Not yet." His hand stayed flat on the wood by my head. "Alex has a hundred and six people on that land and a sanction letter in his back pocket. If it gets out that he's housing a fallen, the Council doesn't cut off his suppliers. They cut off his head."

I stood there for a second with my forehead almost touching the door.

"You know that's another secret," I said quietly. “You are actually asking me to lie to a male that is placing his family on a line to protect me.”

"I know."

"You just promised me no more lies, pigeon. Twenty seconds ago. Not even twenty."

"I know." He pulled the door open for me, and the light from the hallway came in and made him look worse, not better. "Ask me anything and I'll tell you the truth. But I'm asking you to let me pick when the rest of them find out about this."

I wanted to fight him on it.

I want that on the record too, because I didn't say a word. I thought about Stella not going back to school, and Amber baking two hundred Danishes for a shop with a padlock on it, and all the people who had voted for me staying in a gravel yard with their eyes on the ground despite the danger to their lives. So, I made my second decision of the evening because I was weak when it came to River Blackman. It should be known that I was a damn fool, too.

“Fine. But you’re still coming downstairs.”