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“How do you know that?”
I squeezed his hand, a silly response since our hands were bound together already.“Because I know you.”
He let out a long sigh. “You’ve got way too much faith in people, you know that? This whole plan, everyone has such important parts, but me? I just have to get out of the way, and I can’t even manage that.” He went silent for a moment before adding, “Maybe I’m just not capable of it. Maybe I’m so screwed up that I can’t trust anyone even if I know I should.” He turned his gaze toward me, his face surprisingly serious. “And I do know that. You’ve never betrayed me, never given me any reason to not trust you, but maybe I’m so broken that it isn’t possible.”
“That’s not true,”I assured him.“You were brought here as a kid, you lost everything, you’ve had to be suspicious of everyone. If that didn’t leave some scars, then there would be something broken or wrong about you.”
Still, my words didn’t seem to do anything to improve his mood. It was perfectly clear he wasn’t listening to me at all.
So I tried another option.“What will you do when this is all over?”
The corners of his lips tipped down, as if he hadn’t expected my question. Perhaps it was that suddenness that spurred him to answer instead of making a joke in return. “I don’t know.”
“Will you go home? Visit with your family?”
He hesitated for a long moment. “I’d want to visit them, but I wouldn’t want to live there.” I didn’t have to ask before he gave me a strained smile. “Home isn’t there anymore—it’s with you.”
My cheeks warmed and I looked away, hating that I felt like some child who blushed over getting my hopes up.
Wade went on, though. “Other than that, I think I’d like to help kids.”
“That makes sense. You’d be good with kids. You have about the same maturity level.”
He snorted. “I just know what it’s like to turn into a shade early, how it feels to have everything in your life change and not know who or what you really are anymore. I wish I’d had someone who had been through that, who understood it when I was that age. So, when this is all over”—he paused as if he struggled to believe it would end, at least in the way we wanted it to—“I think I’d want to work with young shades, help them grow their confidence and accept what they are. I see Soshi and it makes me realize how important that is.”
His response caught me off guard. Why though, I didn’t know. Thinking about it, it made perfect sense, but somehow I hadn’t expected his answer. Maybe it was because I was so used to Wade taking nothing seriously, because I’d grown accustomed to his teasing and light-hearted attitude that hearing him speak honestly made me go still.
“Pretty stupid, huh?” he asked with a hollow laugh, as if he wanted to lessen the discomfort of telling the truth.
I shook my head and caught his chin with my free hand, drawing his eyes to mine before I brushed my lips against his. The truth was that I could say nothing that would make a difference. The best I could do for him would be to accept him—all of him. So I kissed him to tell him that I supported him, that I believed in him, that what he wanted wasn’t only possible, but I’d do whatever I could to make it happen.
Wade slid his hand to the nape of my neck and pulled me closer, deepening the kiss as if something inside him snapped.
With our hands bound together, it was awkward, and facing each other like this twisted my arm, but I didn’t give a damn. Instead, I let myself picture the future he’d mentioned.
I almost smiled at the memory of Wade and Soshi, at the way he’d protected her, and it made it clear he’d excel at working with kids. I could see him making jokes that the kids would giggle about but the rest of us would glare over. I pictured the trouble they’d get into, but also the way that when one of the kids had a problem, they’d go to Wade, they’d trust in him. Most of all, I thought about how Deacon would get angry at the antics of the kids and how Wade would take the fall for whatever they’d done—especially since I had no doubt he’d be a part of it if not the mastermind.
It was a future worth fighting for, worth making happen.
Having the desire to get out of Larkwood, to escape the pain of our past, that was all well and good, but running away from something never proved as powerful as runningtowardsomething. The future Wade talked about was that something to go toward, something to make us push harder, to strive for.
He ran his tongue across my bottom lip, but that felt distant for some reason. I couldn’t figure it out at first, until I winced at the way the overwhelmingly loud hum of an air conditioner scraped at my nerves.
Which made me freeze.
My powers…
I hadn’t heard that before, which meant my powers had returned, right? I pulled back from Wade, whose expression didn’t seem all that fond of it.
Still, I lifted my free hand along with the one trapped against his, then snapped. I used the sound wave and sent it toward our bound hands and was rewarded with the immediate release of the metal cuffs that had kept us against each other.
“I did it,” Wade muttered, his eyes widened in amazement.
I nodded, then rose from the mattress, Wade following me even if his movements were stiff, as if he couldn’t quite believe he’d managed it.
I went to the door and pressed my ear against it, closing my eyes to block out any stimulus other than the sounds outside. That hum remained, along with conversations from countless people. The conversations came from farther off—probably in offices on adjacent floors. Nothing seemed just outside the door. I also heard no other prisoners nearby, nothing that signaled we were housed in another project cellblock like I had been before.
I turned back toward Wade, glad to be able to sign normally again.“It sounds clear,”I explained.“We’ve been here long enough. I think everyone should be in place.”
