Blaze (Virtues & Lies 3)

Your duty is to her.

And I’m back to that young girl who found her dead mother.

Your duty is to her.

Curled up on myself, I try to find a prayer, anything that will offer me some relief from the pain lancing through me.

With my head pounding, I open my eyes. It feels like the worst sleep I’ve had in so long. My body is aching, and I can’t get my eyes to focus. Everything is blurry. The headache is so bad that it’s making me nauseous as I look around confused and dazed.

It takes a quick second for everything to dawn on me. And just as I remember crying myself to sleep, a whimper pushes out of me, becoming a long, drawn-out wail that steals all my breath, corrupts my sanity with its horrid, poisonous grief. Another thing I can’t control. Something I can’t fix either.

Biting down on the blanket beneath me, I scream and scream and scream until my lungs are raw and I’m so exhausted from it that sleep starts to lull me again.

“We need to hurry up.” The cold air blusters around me suddenly. “We’re being followed, and until we get to the safe house, I don’t have shit to protect us.”

Ryan pulls me up and out of the cabin, checking me over before he shoulders the large backpack on the deck and jumps out of the boat. Taking my hand over the rail, he helps me over the side, catching me before I land in the water.

It’s excruciatingly cold. There’s a strong bluster sweeping across the coastal flat that makes it hard not to chatter my teeth. I look around me, completely lost and with no bearings when he puts me down on rocky shore.

“Don’t move. There’s something I need to do before we go.” He wades back into the water, tall enough that it only hits halfway up his thigh.

Jumping back onto the boat, he disappears down into the berth. After a few loud bangs that echo around us in the dark, he comes back up and gets off the boat. It bobs t

o and fro for a while until the current starts pulling it out and down.

“It’ll sink out there.” Ryan nods at the open water. “We need to make a move. If we take too long, the coast guard will catch up to us.”

“Where are we?” I cough at him as he takes my hand and guides me up the rocky shore. His skin is rough and chapped from the cold, but his hold is still warmer than I expected.

“France. Heard your French isn’t too bad.” He grins back at me, and the way his lips hitch to the side is devastating. He’s so different to Casper, but some of his mannerisms…

I clear my throat as he searches my face. It’s dark, but there are enough stars that with the light of the moon I can make out the pity in his eyes.

“I don’t welcome your pity.”

Ryan nods, turning back to carry on up the shore. “Not much longer until we’re out of the cold.”

We walk for a lot longer than I have in a long time. The only times I used to walk so far were when Dad used to take away my driver so I wouldn’t go anywhere, and I’d make a point of walking to Cassie’s house.

There was this one time when I’d sneaked out and it decided to rain down torrentially. It was summer and I had nothing but a stupid T-shirt and jeans on. Even with the heat, the rain was freezing. There was no way I was going back home with my tail between my legs, so I kept going. I was soaked through in no time and was waiting at a bus stop when Casper stopped. Everyone was staring at his ostentatious car, probably wondering why he’d stopped to let me in.

“Get in!” Casper yells out of the semi-open window.

I ignore him because he was at the house having some top secret meeting with Dad. He hasn’t been back from service long, only long enough that he’s been around for me to notice him on more than one occasion.

“If I get a ticket, it’s coming out of your allowance, so…”

“I don’t have an allowance.” Idiot.

Allowances are so…old. Old-fashioned.

“Even worse,” he sighs loudly, stepping out of the car to the sound of the cars going past blasting him with their horns. “You’ll have to pay for it out of your own pocket.”

He just couldn’t give a shit. And I like that. I really like that. Almost as much as I like his dark eyes and all the tattoos on all the tanned skin. I don’t remember him having so many tattoos when he was first deployed and used to be a bad smell around the Sinclairs’ house.

Not that he smells…far from it. Even in the rain, he’s all warm earth and mouth-watering whatever-the-fuck it is. He just smells good.

“Get in the car. I’m going to see Christopher anyway…” The heat of his heavy hand on my nape sparks through me, and I can’t help the shiver that wracks my body closer to his.