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His fingers wrapped around the dip above my hip bone, tugging me against him with a small grunt. “You’re freezing.”
“It’s cold out here.”
“Nice though, isn’t it?”
I couldn’t disagree. It was nice. The fog that’d been clinging to my brain while lying in the stuffy loft had been blown away, replaced by a clarity only gained by inhaling clean, crisp air.
It seemed to have affected Rook in the same way. Though he was still tense, this was the calmest I’d seen him in days. Maybe even a week.
I wondered if the clean air was the only culprit or if something else had contributed.
We didn’t speak for a while, content to sit there, staring at the slowly brightening sky in each other’s warmth and company, but I’d come out here for a reason.
“So, um…”
“Hmm?” Rook said, coming out of whatever thought had taken him. He turned to me, his dark eyes searching my face.
“I’m not going to say it because Corvus sort of told me you don’t like to celebrate.”
His brows drew together.
Maybe this was a huge mistake.
“Everyone always forgot my birthday growing up. I mean, I didn’t care that much because when they did remember all I got was a gas station muffin with a lit match as a candle but…I guess I just thought maybe—”
“What did you do, Ghost?”
I licked my suddenly very dry lips and reached into my Panama pants pocket, a slithering sensation of unease crawling through my gut.
“I found it in your room,” I explained as I tugged his hand close to me beneath the blanket and peeled back his fingers. “It was broken, and I thought it might mean something to you so I…well I sort of gave it to this girl in my English Lit class whose dad owns a jewelry shop in town, and he fixed it.”
I placed the necklace into his palm and felt him jerk at the feel of it, his expression darkening.
Shit.
He didn’t speak for the longest moment, holding the necklace beneath the blanket while he stared off into the shadows of the trees across the drive.
“Fuck, I’m sorry,” I spluttered, heat growing in my cheeks and the tops of my ears. “I don’t even know what I was thinking. I should’ve just left it like Corvus said and—”
His wide hand closed over my mouth, muffling my next word. “Stop talking,” he said, a strain in his voice as he slowly turned his attention back to me and dropped his side of the blanket to look down into his palm.
His warm hand came away from my face, and I stared down at the necklace, too. It looked so small in his large hand. So delicate.
The black diamond caught the pink light of the rising sun, and the brand-new clasp that the jeweler had to have custom made glinted like it was made of pure starlight on the thin white gold chain.
That, too, had been broken. Bent and twisted as though it’d been snatched off the neck of whoever had been wearing it.
I was dying to ask, but it was clear I’d already overstepped my bounds so I just waited instead, hoping he wouldn’t be too pissed that I’d touched it.
“It was my mother’s,” he said finally, just when the silence was starting to get too heavy to withstand.
“What happened to her?” I asked before I could stop myself, then added quickly. “You don’t have to answer that if you don’t want to.”
His lips quirked up slightly, making the tension behind my breastbone ease enough to breathe.
“She died,” he explained in a rough voice. “Childbirth.”
My stomach twisted.
