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“We can share the bed if you want,” I said, hoping that he would. Two orgasms had flooded me with enough affectionate love chemicals that all I really wanted was to snuggle.
His expression remained weirdly absent. “I’ll just bring a chair in here.”
Disappointment tugged at me, but I wouldn’t let it show. “Okay. Suit yourself.” It didn’t escape me that he hadn’t wanted to kiss me, either. Maybe he was reluctant to make himself vulnerable in that way and I didn’t want to blame him, but it also left me feeling like… the connection I wanted wasn’t the one that he wanted.
Once Everett left, I squirmed up to the pillows and found his phone, which must have slipped off the pillow and into the sheets in the midst of the action. Thinking little of it, I took his phone to put it on the bedside table—then the screen lit up. There was a message from Sebastian Hicks.
‘Did she tell you where Muriel is yet? The transport van is ready at the motel.’
My insides plunged with confusion and dread. She obviously meant me. Sebastian knew that I was here, and it seemed like he and Everett had been scheming to use me to get to Muriel. But Everett wouldn’t so blatantly lie to me like that, would he? Was that the real reason he was being so tolerant of me? Was Everett only keeping me here so he could actually use me to track down Muriel—and was that why he was so insistent on me seeing her, instead of taking me to the hospital?
Unable to resist my curiosity, I tried to unlock his phone, but didn’t know the passcode. I thought for a moment, trying to remember if I’d seen him punch it in before, or if there were any relevant numbers I was aware of. This was my first job. I started when I was fifteen, I remembered him saying. I tried 0015 and the main screen appeared before me. I couldn’t believe that I’d guessed it—but maybe Everett was more predictable than I thought. Gluttonous for information, I opened his texts, found Sebastian, and read all about his and Everett’s plans to steal me and Muriel and deliver Muriel to the Mythguard.
As quickly as my insides plunged, they ignited with indignant fire.
I hadn’t been planning on running away from Everett, assuming he’d been sincere about wanting to cultivate a real relationship out of our fated mate bond. But it seemed the only purpose I served to him was to satisfy the Mythguard’s demands.
Burning with anger, I wrapped up in the blanket and pretended to be asleep by the time Everett returned with the chair. He set it up by the door, shut off the light, and settled in with a blanket. I waited for another couple hours until I knew he was asleep.
This time, when I made my escape, I wouldn’t rouse him. I wasn’t going to give him another chance to use me.
Chapter 16: Everett
T
here was so much running through my mind that night, falling asleep had been a mercy. Even asleep, my thoughts were riddled with glimpses of red hair and flashes of fire.
Being with Aislin afflicted me with feelings I hadn’t expected. It was like all the loneliness I’d felt was suddenly soothed when she let me get close to her, but the immense comfort was too good to be true—I feared leaping headfirst into something that would disappoint me in the end. It was the same distrust that kept me from forming bonds with anyone, expecting that they would ultimately fail to meet my high standards and leave me feeling like the fool. Aislin was… amazing, to be honest. She was attractive and her body moved in all the right ways around me. Her smile and laughter made me feel stronger. My mind and heart ached to fall in love with her, but… was I merely being blinded by the fated mate bond?
I couldn’t bring myself to kiss her, as much as I wanted to, or else I would have fallen more deeply for her than I was ready to. But I replayed our sexual encounter in my mind after I closed my eyes. I imagined her chest bouncing with each thrust, her half-lidded eyes gazing up at me, her pink lips parted just enough to let her moans escape. Her slender hands drifting over her own curves… touching me, too. I wanted to acquaint myself with all the little freckles scattered across her skin, kissing each one.
In the morning, what I wanted most was to crawl into bed with her and savor her warmth. Even if her fire ended up singing me, I’d fight through it. For the sake of our fated bond, I wanted to make it work, smother my uncertainties and let myself love her, and I decided I would try to do just that. But as my eyes adjusted to the dim light in the bedroom, I identified the lump on my bed not as a dozing body, but rumpled bedsheets.
Confused, I tipped out of the chair and staggered to the bed. “Aislin?” I called, glancing at the washroom attached to my bedroom, thinking she was in there. The door was open. Peering inside, I found the washroom empty, and when I returned to the bed, Aislin’s smell was already a few hours old. There was no warmth left in the sheets, just stale evidence of who used to lay there.
“Aislin!” I called, pushing down the hallway. Only silence followed. The spare bedroom where she had kept her duffle bag and other belongings was empty. As my feet crashed down the stairs and into the living room, my mind ran over everything we said to each other last night. Her saying that she wouldn’t run away—except she never explicitly said she wouldn’t, did she? Just that she wanted me to prove that I wanted her. Her terms were that she could pick up items from her apartment, go to work, and that I wouldn’t talk down to her, and I thought I had fulfilled all of that. She was supposed to stay, everything she did and said suggested she would, so why would she so abruptly change her mind and take off? Unless it had never been her intention to give me a chance?
The glass doors leading to my yard were unlocked. As I stepped outside, I noticed imprints in the dirt shaped like paws. They smelled like her.
She left me.
So maybe I had kept my walls up for a good reason. She would have left me even if I did yield to my love and kissed her and became vulnerable with her. Aislin just wanted to see me suffer in ways that our fated bond couldn’t satisfy. It wasn’t enough to give me this tightness in the chest, to break an arm. She wanted to rub it in my face that she fucking hated me.
Rare anger swelled up in my throat. I marched back upstairs, battling with the knife of betrayal she’d sunk into my heart. Bursting back into the bedroom, I was smacked with the smell of our sex, another reminder of my mistake in trying to please Aislin. Her disappearance tainted what had been sweet memories of last night—now all I felt was humility. I was made the fool. Her scent was woven into my bedsheets, impressed in the folds and creases, and I just wanted to rip them off my mattress and set them ablaze.
On the bedside table, my phone screen lit up. I’d completely forgotten about my phone when I fell asleep. A flicker of hope was that it was Aislin, somehow explaining her absence, but I quickly spied the name attached to the text message: Sebastian, sending me nothing more than a ‘?’.
Confused, I unlocked my phone and opened up our text conversation. I hadn’t seen the last texts he sent me, otherwise I would have answered. He’d asked if I’d gotten Muriel’s location from Aislin yet.