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She smiled at me. “Come on. You can’t tell me you didn’t at least have a little bit of fun getting out of the apartment.”
Fun?I thought about the events of the night. I wasn’t exactly sure I would call a night with Alek’s demon pack fun. Entertaining at the very least, but not fun.
“If I’m being entirely honest, I wasn’t sure I would even make it out of there alive.”
“Too many hot boys?” she teased.
I slapped her arm playfully. “Alek has a few enemies who apparently don’t like me hanging around. A few of them actually tried to drown me.”
Her jaw dropped. “You’re joking.”
“Dead serious. If it weren’t for Alek… I would probably be dead right now.”
She leaned forward and set her iced coffee on the table so she could give me her full attention. “He shouldn’t be letting you near them!” she hissed. A sudden protectiveness washed over her previous joking manner. “Alek should know better than that, Lyra. Demons are dangerous!”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “They are.”
She shook her head. “Maybe it’s not a great idea for you to keep seeing him.”
I shrugged. Like I hadn’t already thought of that. “I don’t think I have much of a choice. Until our deal is over, I’m locked in.”
“That sneaky bastard,” she muttered. I couldn’t help but smile at her squinted eyes.
“He’s just… I don’t know. He’s different than I imagined him to be.”
I thought back to how Alek acted after I finished warming up last night. He could hardly look at me. I had drifted off to sleep on the large bed, and when I opened my eyes a few hours later, he was in the same spot—perched on the end of the bed and facing the locked door.
Any friendship I thought we had built was gone, like it never happened.
I couldn’t help but wonder if he regretted ever getting closer to me. This was all part of a deal; it was all temporary.
Did he regret spending so much time with me? Did he regret even making the deal with me in the first place?
After last night, it was clear that I was a liability to him. I couldn’t protect myself. I didn’t fit in with the demons, even though I was technically part of the pack.
My hand mindlessly drifted to the scars on my shoulder. I could almost remember how it felt when his teeth dug into my flesh.
“You’re not falling for him, are you?” Natalie asked, snapping me out of my trance.
“What? No! He’s a selfish, egotistical demon who thinks he can get away with whatever he wants in this world. No, I’m not falling for him.”
Her expression flooded with relief. “Good. You know that would be impossible. With your mother—”
“I know,” I snapped. “You don’t have to remind me.”
The flash of pain on her face was only visible for a second, but it was enough for me to regret my tone. Natalie knew just as much as I did that my mother would never allow the relationship to continue.
Relationship. What a joke. Any thinking of that manner would be useless. There was no relationship. There was no friendship.
It was only a deal.
She shook her head. “It really sucks sometimes.”
I put my arm around her, around my friend. “Yeah, it does. But we don’t get to be in charge of what happens in our lives.”
Natalie huffed. “No, definitely not us.”
We put a new movie on the TV and sat on the couch all day. Natalie stayed over while I cooked us lunch, gossiped about everything that happened last night, and listened to her ramble about the new boy she’s talking to.
