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Which means I can’t afford to play fair.
“Fine, I promise,” I lie, already plotting how to keep the implant close without him knowing. I can tuck it in my sock or sew it into the lining of my coat or ask Catherine to put it back into my wrist if things get bad enough.
I will do whatever it takes to stay in control of my own destiny, even if it means giving up my shifter form again once the trials are over.
“Good.” Ford brushes my hair to one side and kisses my neck as he pulls his fingers from between my legs and guides my dress down over my thighs. “I’ll walk you to your room and then I need to go. I have to get back to my dorm before someone notices I’m gone.”
“Better hope your roommate is a hard sleeper,” I say, thinking of starving children and all the souls lost to the Circus of the Strange and my garbage, daughter-abandoning mother, anything to banish the pink afterglow from my skin and get my head back in the game.
“I don’t have a roommate,” he says as I put the locket on, instantly making fighting my lust at least ten times easier. “So, if you want a night alone together, I have a place we can go. I’ll sneak you up the tree outside and in through my window and make you come on my cock all night long.”
“Thanks for the offer,” I say as I turn to face him, “but we’re focusing on other things until after the trials, remember?”
He glances down at the locket and back at my face. “I hate that thing.”
“I hate that the trials are rigged against my entire dorm. We have to help them, Ford. Especially Diana and Layla.”
He nods. “We will.”
“You promise?”
“I promise,” he says, taking my hand as he starts toward the stairwell.
Hoping his promises will prove more trustworthy than mine, I let him lead me down the two floors to my hallway and deliver me to the door of my room. But I don’t kiss him goodbye, even though I want to.
That would send the wrong message and add to the hurt Ford’s going to feel when he realizes I’m serious about ruling alone. About being alone. If I can’t have a connection I know is based purely on love, I don’t want one at all.
It’s a vow that comes back to haunt me in my dreams, as my subconscious torments me with a variety of imagined futures, all of them cold and passionless without Ford in my bed.
But that’s just fine. I’m used to bad dreams.
It’s the good ones that scare me.
thirteen
FORD
The next weekand a half rushes past in a haze of barely suppressed rage, near misses, adrenaline rushes, and a serious lack of sleep that convinces me I don’t have what it takes to be a spy.
No double life for me, thank you.
Either one of the lives I have right now—psycho New Lupine Brotherhood member or hardworking Variant sympathizer and man willing to do whatever it takes to make sure his fated mate makes it through the trials even though she’s equally determined not to fall in love with him—would be a full-time job.
As it is, I’m so strung out, most of the time I don’t know whether I’m coming or going.
All I know for sure is that every time Juliet tries, and fails, to reach her shifter form—collapsing into my arms with skin so hot I’m afraid she’s going to burn herself alive—my heart stops. It literally stops beating until her breath shudders out, her skin starts to cool, and I know she’s made it through another “practice session” in one piece.
Though I don’t think what we’re doing can really be called practice, at this point.
It’s more trial and error, with extra error.
Catherine’s scoured the library for advice, and Alexander and I have tried every first-time shifting tip gleaned from the dark web, friends, relatives, and random people in the quad, but all our best efforts have gotten us nowhere.
Well, Alexander has asked his friends and relatives. I still can’t risk reaching out to mine, since Juliet and I are supposed to be dead. The two charred corpses Natalie arranged to be found in that motel room have bought us the time we need to prepare to face my stepfather. But they’ve also isolated us from even the hope of connection with the people we care for in Zion.
Juliet’s literally the only tie I have to my former life.
I tell myself that’s part of the reason I crave her company and her body and the honor of being the only one she trusts to catch her when she falls like an addict craves a fix. I miss my life before the fight pits and the betrayal. I miss my pack and my people and my friends and the smell of the Pacific Northwest in summertime.
