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“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“What do youthinkI’m doing here, Dee?”
The teenaged heart still buried somewhere deep in me said one thing, but my adult, real world logic said something else.
“How the hell am I supposed to know?”
He stared for a moment, completely still, as if he knew he was about to say something that might disappoint me.
“Protection detail.”
Oh.
Not exactly what I wanted to hear, but not remotely surprising.
“So what… you work for my sister now?” I asked, crossing my arms. Then, I moved my hands up to fix my ponytail. Propped my hands on his hips. I couldn’t stay still.
Isaiah—his full name, maybe—smirked. “I prefer to think of myself as a private contractor.”
“Yeah, I’m sure you do.”
“What does that mean?”
“It doesn’t mean anything Zay - I’m just talking, because I don’t know what else to do. I didn’t… I didn’t know what happened to you. How long has it been?”
I knew the answer to that, maybe, but he most likely didn’t. The passage of time in the Garden was always fuzzy. My memories of it were all exacerbated by deeper horrors than some others had to endure.
But I remembered being young and impatient, and wanting more from him than he could give me—because of rules, and maybe unreciprocated feelings.
I wasn’t sure.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Probably… seven or eight years?”
“Beforeeverything… went down.”
Before the Garden fell.
“Yeah,” he nodded, that smile of his taking on a wistful slant that made my chest ache. “All of that was pretty crazy, huh? Worked out for you, though. I know you always wanted a sister.”
“Before I knew how much of a pain in my ass she was going to be,” I replied, trying to keep some levity in a conversation that left no room for it.
Not withthissubject.
Zay shook his head. “You say that, but it’s probably good for you. The position you’re in now… this suits you. You always seemed like a bit of a princess, so it’s no big surprise to find out you damn nearareone.”
He didn’t mean that as an insult, I didn’t think.
But it damn sure felt like one.
Especially considering that until recently, my life hadn’t exactly been what one would considercharmed.
“Should I be thanking you for that statement, or…?”
“It’s not… I didn’t mean it like that. I’m just saying,” he shrugged. “With everything you went through, you deserve to live like you are now.”
Instant moisture sprang to my eyes, immune to my attempts to blink it away as he kept talking.
“I didn’t know what had happened—what was going on. If I did, I would’ve…”
