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Blink. Blink. Blink.
I know I should tell Brooks. When he finds out, he’ll go fuckingferal. But Brooks is the last person on my mind right now.
I move blindly through the hallway, not aware of where I’m going until my feet stop me in front of Lily’s hotel room. I run my fingers through my hair, snarl, and then tug at a dark strand. The brief stab of pain momentarily erases those grotesque images from my brain.
But then I blink, and I see them all over again.
I pound my fist against the door, restless energy skittering directly underneath my skin like currents of electricity.
It only takes a few seconds for the door to swing open and Lily Dean to blink owlishly up at me. Her hair is all messed up, she’s wearing her shirt inside out, and her lips are curled back into a self-satisfied smirk. She looks… Well, she looks like she just had sex.
Want and jealousy gnaw at my gut, warring with the gruesome images flooding my mind.
I hope it wasn’t Brooks. Please don’t let it be Brooks. He doesn’t deserve her. None of us do.
A scowl quickly distorts her perfect features as she recognizes me. She cocks her hip out.
“Brooks isn’t here,” she bites out. “I think he’s walking the floors with his ghost radio—”
“Why didn’t you tell us about your parents?” I blurt, never one for tactfulness or subtlety.
Lily’s face goes carefully blank. One second, she’s hurling daggers at me with her eyes. The next, she’s the shell of the woman I know and love. Still love, even after all this time. Her features are utterly impassive, and her brilliant hazel eyes have dulled to a muddy brown.
She doesn’t answer, so I forge ahead, unable to stop myself, a verbal freight train intent on self-destruction.
“I found the articles. And I read the police report—”
“You read the police report?” Her voice is cold, almost neutral. However, I know her well enough to sense an undercurrent of anger beneath her carefully constructed words. “That’s such an invasion of privacy—”
“Your parents were murdered by demons, weren’t they?” I can’t speak above a whisper. “On prom night?”
God, welefther that same day.
For her own protection.
To save her from this life.
Fromme.
And all along, she needed us more than ever.
A fissure opens up down the center of my chest, and I swear nothing will be able to fill it in. Guilt and pain—both so visceral I can feel them in my bloodstream—swamp me.
“Lily,” I plead desperately when it’s apparent she’s not going to say anything. Either she’s too angry to speak or too numb to compute my words. “Why didn’t you—”
She slams the door in my face.
For a moment, I’m stunned, my gaze glued to the wooden door as if it holds all the answers to the universe’s most evasive questions.
The old Orion might’ve turned around and trudged back to his room with his tail between his legs, but old Orion died the second he got bit by that werewolf. I can’t leave when I can sense Lily’s pain like a physical knife in the chest. It’s so potent that it practically permeates the hallway—melancholic grief woven with rage.
Hesitating only briefly, I quickly open the door, grateful—and maybe even a little concerned—that Lily hasn’t bothered to fix the lock since we destroyed it the night before.
Lily sits crisscross on the bed, her eyes glazed, her hands lying limply in her lap. She doesn’t even look in my direction as she says, “Shut the door.”
And I do.
Tentatively, I venture closer to where she sits, suddenly unsure of how to start this conversation despite knowing I need to.
