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“Uh…” Setting my wine down and pushing up from the couch, I cross my room, place my knee on the bed, then press my free hand to Christabelle’s temple. “Warm-ish, but not crazy hot.”
“Pupils?”
I grit my teeth and place the pads of my fingers over her eyelids, then dragging them back, I reveal perfect silver orbs, staring and yet, unseeing. “Kinda large, but not uneven.”
“Responding to the light?”
“Yeah.” I release her face and sit on the edge of the bed. “They got smaller when I opened them. What’s wrong with her?”
“I don’t know! Her pupils are okay, she has no official fever. She’s drinking. Did she eat at all today?”
“Only a little bit. Cheese and salami.”
“Then she’s probably going to be okay. Eating and drinking is good. Absence of fever is good. She’s probably sleeping off whatever disease you gave her. Do her a favor and set her free. Who is she, by the way?”
“No! Don’t tell us.” Archer groans. “Please, for the love of god, don’t say her name.”
“Christabelle Cannon,” I answer, purely because he said not to. Defiance is in my blood. He should know better at this point. “Of theCannon Daily Tribute.”
“Fuck!” Archer booms. “Christabelle Cannon? Are you fucking serious, Lix?! Her father has enough money to mobilize the entire national military!”
“No one even knows she’s missing.” I turn to find her lashes fluttering. Her eyes flickering behind her eyelids. Her cheeks are flushed and warm, her lips, pouty and kissable. And since I’m a man of impulse, I simply lie back on my bed and rest my head on the pillow beside hers. “She’s called in sick to work. Her assistant knows she’s out for a few days and to leave her alone. And old man Cannon has been AWOL for months. He’s not gonna do shit until she throws up alarms. Which,” I turn to my side and inhale her sweet breath, “she isn’t gonna do, because she’s here with me, and has no access to the outside world.”
“And what’s your end goal here, Lix?” Archer’s footsteps clap across his tile floor. “What’s the point of all this? Because you’ve just gone and made a whole bunch of fuckin noise I don’t think you intended to make.”
“I dunno.” I slide my tongue along my bottom lip, wetting it, so when Christabelle exhales, I feel it cool. “She was talking shit about us. Sellinghalf a million papers a day, with our faces and names plastered on the front page. She was picking on Cato, and it pissed me off.”
“Cato is a grown-ass man who was raised in a world that few others know. Do you think he gives a shit that someone was saying mean things about him?”
“Ididn’t like it.” I set my phone beneath my ear and take this chance, perhaps the only I’ll ever get, to study the woman who has made herself my enemy.
She fired the first shot, and she kept backing it up day after day, selling her papers and blasting us so Cordoza had to call me out.
Her articles enraged me. Her inclination not to be fearful frustrates me.
But I’ll be long dead and buried before I can tell myself a lie and deny her beauty.
“I just wanted her to stop,” I mumble. “I needed her to let it go.”
“And now she’ll either die,” Archer growls, though at least he doesn’t shout anymore, “or she’ll be released and become a million times noisier. Your plan is flawed, Lix.”
“Maybe there’s a third option,” I ponder. Reaching across, I tuck a tendril of hair behind her ear and try to ignore the fiery touch of her skin beneath my fingers.
She’s warming, and that realization, that hint of a fever, scares me.
“She’s asking questions about our mothers, Arch.”
“She…” He stops and swallows. “What?”
“That’s her motivation, I think. She’s a journalist. She wants a juicy story, and she came at me head-on, thinking I’d have the goods.”
“We don’t know who our mothers are. Susan ain’t it. I’ve even heard the name Anastasia, but that doesn’t help me find a dead woman any easier.”
“Right. But Cannon has sources we don’t have. She has a researcher’s brain and a princess mentality. So why the fuck shouldn’t we let her do the hard work?”
“Youwanther to run the article on our mothers?”
“I want her to do the research for the article,” I amend, a smile slowly growing on my lips. “Instead of fighting her every step of the way, I’ll offer to cooperate. Give her what I know.”
