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“Really?” Her elfin face lights up. “Thanks.”
I get up and close the cabinet she was looking in before going to a smaller one off to the side. It’s where I keep all the things that my brothers aren’t allowed to touch, organized and tidy. Malice and Ransom will scoop peanut butter or anything else out of jars with no regard for whether the knife has already touched something else. I’ve even come downstairs a few times to find Ransom eating it right out of the jar on a spoon.
That thought makes me shudder. When I open my personal jar, the top of the peanut butter is as smooth and neat as it was when I bought it.
“I’ll spread it for you,” I tell her.
“Okay.”
I feel more like a freak than I have in a long time, admitting out loud that I need to be the one to do it, but Willow doesn’t seem to judge me. She just brings the bread and a plate over, and I set about making her a sandwich, scraping the knife over the top of the peanut butter just so.
“I feel like a kid again, watching you do that,” she says, resting her elbows on the counter nearby as she watches me. “Having someone else make me a pb&j.” Then she grimaces. “Well, I guess that’s not really true. My mom never made me peanut butter and jelly sandwiches when I was little. She never made me lunch at all. Or even breakfast. If I wanted something, I had to learn how to make it for myself.”
“I’ve seen how you eat,” I tell her flatly. “I guess it makes sense.”
She huffs, rolling her eyes. “I was sick that day you came over, okay? It’s not like I had the energy to make something healthy. I don’talwayseat cup-o-noodles.”
I think about pointing out that I’ve been watching her and taking note of what she eats since the night we met her, through the cameras I put in her apartment, but I keep that thought to myself.
“And it’s not like anyone taught me how to cook anyway,” she adds. “My mom can barely boil water on a good day.”
I’ve done extensive research on Willow, so I know she’s adopted, although I was never able to track down information about her earlier origins. All I know is that she entered the foster care system when she was twenty months old, and that a woman named Misty Hayes adopted her not long after that.
“Get me the jelly,” I tell her. “Top shelf of that cabinet. And another knife.” She does what I ask, and when she comes back and hands them to me, I glance over at her, my curiosity spilling over. “Why do you call your adoptive mother ‘mom’?”
Willow blinks at me, her eyebrows darting up toward her hairline. Then she shrugs. “I ended up in the system when I was really little. My parents died, and the only one willing to take me in was Misty. She’s the only mother I’ve ever known, so that has to count for something, right? If I didn’t have her, I’d just be… alone in the world.”
Her voice sounds wistful and a little sad, and I can’t help but think of my father.
I think of him standing over me, a hammer in his hand and that smug fucking look on his face. I think of the way he kept saying it would make me stronger, make me better, as he brought the hammer down and broke each of my fingers in turn. He always said that. Said that it was for my own good, that he was molding me into someone who would be unbreakable one day. Each break he inflicted back then, each time he put me through something terrible… it was supposed to make it that much harder for anything else to break me in the future.
My hands ache, as if remembering the pain has called it back from so long ago, and I set down the knife carefully, then tap my fingers one by one on the counter.
“Sometimes it’s better to be alone,” I tell her. “When you’re alone, no one can hurt you.”
I can feel her watching me, feel the curiosity in her gaze. Maybe she’s hoping I’ll explain what I mean by that, but I can’t. Talking about what my father did to me feels like re-opening old wounds with a razor blade, so I take a step away from Willow, screwing the lid back on the peanut butter and gesturing to the sandwich.
“There you go. It’s done.”
Turning away from her, I put away the peanut butter and jelly and quickly wash the two knives I used. After returning them to the drawer, I pluck my laptop off the counter and escape back to the sanctuary of my room.
But my thoughts are still on Willow as I go upstairs. She’severythingthat’s on my mind, and I replay our interaction in my head as if I’m going through camera footage—focusing on every expression on her face, wishing I could zoom in to get even more detail.
She makes me want things I’ve never allowed myself to have, never even thought about having before. When I’m around her, I wonder what it would feel like to touch her hair, to feel the softness of it, like spun gold between my fingers. To touch her face, to kiss her. To have her lean into me with careless touches and easy affection the way she does with Ransom.
It seems impossible, unobtainable. Laughable, even. But still, I want it.
Setting my laptop on my bed, I take a seat at my bank of monitors, eager to lose myself in the one thing that always soothes me. I’m about to get back to work running facial recognition scans, but then a soft ping alerts me to an incoming encrypted message.
Dammit. This is bad timing.
It’s from X, and with everything else we’ve got going on, we’ll be stretching ourselves thin trying to complete a job for him too. But telling him we’re too busy isn’t an option, so I get to work decrypting the message to find out what he wants.
It takes several minutes, and by the time I’m done, the unsettled feeling from earlier has vanished—at least until I start to read the message.
My shoulders tense as my gaze tracks over the words on the screen, my brows pinching together.
What the fuck?
