“But that just leads me back to him being a robot.”
“Robot? No. That’s too mechanical, even for him. He has motivations that are sometimes, good, sometimes bad, but he is always motivated.”
“What motivates him to keep helping the people at St. Andrews?” I made a show of looking around the library. “I don’t see him creating any other loyal friends to help him keep me prisoner around here.”
“That’s a fair point. But look at it without emotion. Or, better yet, look at it as if it’s a deal. What does he get out of helping St. Andrews?”
“Good press maybe?”
He nodded. “Now you’re getting it. Good press and a place that is dedicated to understanding mental illness, including his own.”
“So it’s selfish?”
“Let’s just say it’s in the interests of self-preservation.” He rose and re-buttoned his neat coat.
I got to my feet. “So are you saying you can figure out everything he does just by parsing out the logic of it?”
He smiled, the sadness from his past disappearing back into whatever recess he hid it in. “Everything until you, yes.”
Sebastian arrived home early that afternoon. He spoke with Timothy for several minutes before meeting me in the library. I’d almost finished my drawing of the black bat flower and stared at my color pencil. The tip seemed plenty sharp.
“You better go for the eye if you’re serious.” Sebastian leaned over me and perused my work. “Shove upward hard if you want to impale my brain. Finish me off or I’ll find you. How was your run this afternoon, by the way?”
“You are sick.”
“That’s what all the professionals say.”
“I could, you know.” I turned to look up at him. “I could stab you right this second.”
“You won’t.” His Adam’s apple bobbed as he spoke, the light shadow along his jaw shading him just as sharply as I had the leaves on my drawing.
“What makes you say that?”
“If you were going to make a move, it would have been with the fork two nights ago. At this point, you have grown more used to me.” He leaned down and pressed his lips to my ear. “As I heard earlier today.”
Mortification rained down on me as the memory hit me right in the stomach. How could I have forgotten that? Timothy had thrown me off.
He plucked my drawing from the table. “This is beautiful, by the way. Is it native to the rainforest?”
“No.” I reached for it, but he held it higher. “It’s mine. Give it back.”
“I want it framed.” He smiled down at me. “How about a deal? For each one of these prints you make for me, I’ll give you one orgasm?”
An angry sound lodged in my throat, and I stood so fast I knocked my chair over. “I’m done with your deals.” Turning on my heel, I strode away from him.
“I don’t think that’s true.” He followed me down the hall and into the greenhouse.
The hiss from the sprinkler in the exotics area drew my attention, and I studied the spray from the iffy nozzle. It seemed to be working.
Sebastian edged up behind me, then put his hands on my shoulders.
I shrugged him off and looked around at the small world I’d built over the past week. Disgust rolled through me at how quickly I’d fallen into my own captivity. Here I was, worrying about whether a mister was working correctly in my captor’s glass menagerie. What the hell was wrong with me?
I turned to him. “School starts back in three weeks. People will notice I’m missing. What’s your big plan for that?”
He stared at me, searching my face for some clue about how to respond. It infuriated me even more.
“Surely your robot brain thought of that, right?”
“I have a plan, yes.”
“What is it?”
“I intend to fake your death in the Amazon.”
My mind blanked, and all I could do was stare up at him. I blinked hard, and tried to give his words some meaning other than the obvious one. But there was no alternative. He was going to tell my friends that I was dead.
“I won’t let you.”
“You can’t stop me.”
“I’ll get out of here.”
“Camille.” His warning tone did nothing to stop the torrent that raged inside me.
“I will.”
“You belong here.”
“No. I belong with my students at Trenton. I belong with Veronica. I belong with—”
“Him?” He tightened, his strong body becoming stonier as he peered down at me.
“You mean Link?”
He winced at the name. “Yes, him.”
It was a question I’d been avoiding for months. One I still couldn’t answer. Link was everything I should have wanted, but I hadn’t been able to commit. But Sebastian didn’t need to know that. Given the way he asked, an affirmative answer would hurt him. And, oh, how I wanted to hurt him.
I straightened my spine, refusing to yield to him anymore. “Yes. We’re in love.”