I tipped my head back instead of suffocating myself with the pillow. Peanut became a blur as he drifted toward the curtain, though that had nothing to do with his ghostly form. “Is Zayne up?”
“He is, but he’s not here. He left you a note in the kitchen. I read it while he wrote it.” Peanut sounded rather proud. “It says he went to see someone named Nic. I think that was one of the guys who came with him to the community? Anyway, he left maybe a half hour ago.”
Nic was short for Nicolai, the Washington, DC, clan leader. Zayne probably had unfinished business with him since he’d left whatever meeting they’d been having last night to come find me.
Zayne had felt my emotions through the bond. That strange new connection had led him right to the treehouse. I wasn’t sure if I was amazed by that, annoyed or really weirded out. Probably a mixture of all three.
“Wonder why he didn’t wake me.” Pushing the cover aside, I scooted to the edge of the bed.
“He actually came in here and checked on you.”
I froze, praying I hadn’t been drooling on myself or doing anything weird. “He did?”
“Yep. I thought he was going to wake you. Looked like he was debating it, but all he did was pull the blanket over your shoulders. I thought it was totally bodacious of him.”
I wasn’t sure what bodacious meant, but I thought it was... God, it was sweet of him.
It was so like Zayne.
I might have known him for only a few weeks, but I knew enough to be able to picture him carefully pulling the comforter over me, and doing it so gently that he didn’t wake me.
My chest squeezed as if my heart had fallen into a meat grinder. “I need to shower.” I stood on legs I expected to be shaky but that were surprisingly strong and stable.
“Yeah, you do.”
Ignoring the comment, I checked my phone. I’d missed a call from Jada. My stomach tumbled. I placed the phone down and padded on bare feet to the bathroom, flipped on the light and winced at the sudden brightness. My eyes did not care for bright light of any kind. Or dark or shadowy areas, either. Actually, my eyes pretty much just sucked 95.7 percent of the time.
“Trinnie?”
Fingers lingering on the light switch, I looked over my shoulder at Peanut, who’d moved closer to the bathroom. “Yeah?”
He cocked his head, and when he looked at me, I felt stripped bare. “I know how much Misha meant to you. I know it has to hurt something bad.”
Ending Misha’s life hadn’t hurt me. It quite possibly had killed a part of me, replacing it with a seemingly bottomless pit of sour bitterness and raw anger.
But Peanut didn’t need to know that. No one did.
“Thank you,” I whispered, turning away and closing the door as the burn hit the back of my throat.
I will not cry. I will not cry.
In the shower, with its multiple jets and stall large enough to fit two fully grown Wardens, I used the minutes under the hot, stinging spray to get my head straight.
Or, in other words, compartmentalize.
I’d had my much-needed breakdown last night. I had given myself time to cry it all out, and now was the time to put it away, because I had a job to do. After years of waiting, it had finally happened.
My father had called on me to fulfill my duty.
Find the Harbinger and stop it.
So, there was a lot to sift through and file away in my mental cabinet so that I could do what I was born for. I started with the most critical. Misha. I shoved what he’d done and what I’d had to do all the way to the bottom of the cabinet, tucked under my mother’s death and my failure to stop that. That drawer was labeled EPIC FAIL. The next drawer was where I sent the cause of the blackish-blue bruises covering my left hip and the length of my thigh. Another bruise colored the right side of my ribs, where Misha had delivered a nasty kick. He’d kicked my butt and then some, but I’d still beaten him.
The usual feeling of smugness or pride over having bested someone who was well trained didn’t surge through me.
There was nothing good to feel about any of that.
The bruises, the aches and all the pain went into the drawer I called BUCKET FULL OF NIGHTMARES, because the reason Misha had managed to land so many brutal hits was because he knew I had limited peripheral vision. He’d used it against me. That was my one weakness when fighting, something I needed to improve on, like, yesterday, because if this Harbinger discovered just how poor my vision was, it would exploit it.
Just like I would if the shoes were on other feet.
And yeah, that would be a nightmare, because not only would I die, so would Zayne. A tremor coursed through me as I slowly turned under the spray of water. I couldn’t cave to that fear—couldn’t dwell on it for one second. Fear made you do reckless, stupid things, and I already did enough of those for no good reason.
The top drawer had been empty and unlabeled until now, but I knew what I was filing there. That was where I was putting everything that had happened with Zayne. The kiss I’d stolen when we’d been back in the Potomac Highlands, the growing attraction and all the want, and that night, before we were bonded, when Zayne had kissed me and it had been everything I’d read about in the romance novels my mom had loved. When Zayne kissed me, when we’d gone as far as we could go without going all the way, the world had truly ceased to exist outside us.
I took all of that, along with the raw need for his touch, his attention and his heart—which most likely still belonged to someone else—and closed the file.
Relationships between Protectors and Trueborns were strictly forbidden. Why? I had no idea, and I guessed the reason the explanation was unknown was that I was the only Trueborn left.
I closed that drawer, which I simply labeled ZAYNE, and stepped out of the shower into the steam-filled bathroom. After wrapping a towel around myself, I leaned forward and wiped a palm over the mist-covered mirror.
My reflection came into view. As close as I was, my features were only a little fuzzy. My normally olive skin, courtesy of my mom’s Sicilian roots, was paler than usual, which made my brown eyes seem darker and larger. The skin around them was puffy and shadowed. My nose still tilted to the side, and my mouth still seemed almost too large for my face.
I looked exactly as I had the evening Zayne and I left this apartment to go to Senator Fisher’s house in hopes we’d find Misha or evidence of where he was being held.
I didn’t feel the same.
How could there not be a more noticeable physical manifestation of everything that had changed?
My reflection didn’t have an answer, but as I turned away from it, I said the only thing that mattered.
“I got this,” I whispered, and then repeated louder, “I got this.”
2
Hair damp and most likely looking like a complete mess, I sat at the kitchen island, bare feet tapping, staring at bare walls as I nursed a glass of OJ.
Zayne’s apartment was so incredibly empty, reminding me of a staged home.
Other than my black combat-style boots, which were by the elevator door, there were no personal belongings scattered about. Unless I counted the punching bag hanging in the corner and the blue mats tucked against the wall as personal belongings. I didn’t.
A soft cream-colored blanket was folded neatly, draped over the gray couch, picture ready. Not even a stray glass had been left on the kitchen counter, or a dish in the sink. The only room that remotely appeared as if someone lived here was the bedroom, and that was because my suitcases had thrown up my clothes all over the place.
Maybe it was the industrial design that added to the coldness. The cement floors and large metal fans that churned quietly from the exposed metal beams didn’t add any warmth to the open and airy space. Neither did the floor-to-ceiling windows, which had to be tinted, because the sunlight seeping through them didn’t make me want to poke my eyeballs out.
I would go stir-crazy if I was the only person who lived here.
That was what I was thinking about—real important stuff—when I felt the sudden burst of warmth in my chest.
“What in the world?” I whispered to the empty space. The warmth flared.
Was I having a heart attack? Okay. That was stupid for a multitude of reasons. I rubbed my chest. Maybe it was indigestion or the beginnings of an ulce—
Wait.
I lowered the glass. What I felt was an echo of my own heart, and I suddenly knew what it was. Holy granola bar, it was the bond—it was Zayne, and he was close.
I now had Zayne radar, and that was a little—or a lot—super freaking weird.
I started to bite on my thumbnail, but picked up my OJ instead, finishing it off with two loud, obnoxious gulps. My heart rate kicked up at the ding of the elevator arriving, and my gaze swung toward the steel elevator doors as I filled with nervous energy. I put the glass down before I dropped it. Every time I saw Zayne, it was like seeing him for the first time all over again, but it wasn’t just that.
I’d cried all over Zayne last night—like, all over him.
Heat crept up the back of my neck. I wasn’t a crier, and until the night before, I’d been starting to believe that I had faulty tear ducts. Unfortunately those tear ducts were fully functioning. There’d been a lot of ugly, snotty sobs.
The door slid open, and the anxious energy exploded in my stomach as Zayne walked in.
Damn.
He made a plain white T-shirt and dark denim jeans look like they were tailor-made for him and only him. The material stretched across his wide shoulders and chest yet was fitted to his narrow, tapered waist. All Wardens were large in their human form, but Zayne was one of the largest I’d ever seen, coming in around six and a half feet.
Zayne had beautiful thick blond hair with the kind of natural wave I couldn’t recreate with hours to spare, a YouTube tutorial and a dozen curling irons. Today it was tucked back in a knot at the nape of his neck, and I hoped to God that he never cut his hair.
He saw me immediately, and even though I couldn’t see his eyes from where I sat, I could feel his gaze on me. It was somehow heavy and gentle, and sent a fine shiver of awareness dancing down my arms, making me grateful that I wasn’t holding on to the glass any longer.