Defiance (34 page)

He tightens his arms around me and touches his lips to mine. His kiss is rough, tastes like lake water … and is the best thing I’ve ever felt. I press against him, consuming him like I’ll never get enough, and when we break apart, my pulse pounds against my ear, and his chest rises and falls like he’s been running.

“Done yet?” Willow calls from somewhere behind me. I hear Quinn shush her, but I don’t care.

Because Logan is looking at me like I’m precious to him. And the silence inside me cracks open, just a little. Just enough to let a small piece of hope float to the surface. I grab on to it with desperate fingers.

He keeps one hand on the small of my back and uses the other to trace the Celtic knot on the necklace he gave me the day of the Claiming ceremony.

“I promised to always find you, remember?”

“I remember.”

“I promised I would always protect you. You’ve been wounded badly because I failed to keep that promise.”

I shake my head, and the tears spill over, scalding my cheeks with heat.

“But I won’t fail you in this, Rachel. No matter what has happened. No matter what you’ve done. No matter what you will do. I will always love you. I swear it.”

His hand clenches around the pendant, and he leans down to capture my gaze with his. “I will always love you.”

His arms flex, pulling me against his chest, and his lips hover just above mine, our breath mingling in the dazzling morning air.

“I love you,” he whispers and then he kisses me again, his lips rough against mine, his breathing ragged as he devours my fear and makes me long to feel this way forever.

W
e don’t push ourselves on the return trip to Baalboden. I tell Rachel it’s to let my rib heal, and I think she believes me. But really, I just want time with her. Time to lie next to her at night, holding her against me while I watch the rotation of the stars. Time to walk beside her during the day and try to draw her into conversation so we can get what has hurt her out into the open, where it can start to heal.

I ache to hear her tell me she loves me, but forcing her to put words to how she feels pushes her further into the silence she seems comfortable calling home now. I tell myself to be patient and understanding, but inside there’s a longing only those words will fill, and it hurts to ignore it.

I’m restless. Hungry for something she keeps just out of my reach. It doesn’t help that Quinn and Willow are traveling with us. As grateful as I am for their assistance, having others within earshot cuts down significantly on the things I’d like to share with Rachel. So, at the end of another day’s journey, when Willow announces she wants meat for dinner and is going hunting, I look Quinn straight in the eye and say, “You should go with her.”

“Logan.” Rachel puts her hand on my arm.

“I don’t need help bringing down a rabbit,” Willow says.

“But there might be highwaymen out there. Or more trackers from Rowansmark. It never hurts to be cautious.” I look at Quinn. “You should
go
.”

They all stare at me in silence for a second before Willow says, “Why don’t you just come right out and say, ‘Hey, I want private time with Rachel so I can kiss her senseless like I did at the lake’?”

“Willow!” Quinn frowns at her.

“That’s not what he meant,” Rachel says, refusing to look at me.

Willow laughs. “Yes, it is. He’s itching to get his hands on you without an audience.”

“That’s
not
what he meant,” Rachel says again, pink flushing her cheeks.

“Actually, I meant—” I start to say, but Willow cuts me off.

“What? It’s true. He looks at you like he’d like to dip you in sugar and eat you up.”

“Willow Runningbrook, that’s enough.” Quinn’s eyes flash, and I catch a glimpse of something feral beneath his smooth exterior. It’s gone as soon as I see it, submerged beneath the calm he wears like a second skin.

Willow tosses her hands into the air. “Apparently, honesty is a crime in this group. Look.” She points at Rachel. “You’re all, ‘Revenge is all I want! I’ll figure out my love life later!’ and he”—she points to me—“is afraid revenge will kill you before he has a chance to really touch you—”

“No, he isn’t.”

I step forward. “Willow has a point.”

“Willow needs to learn to share only those observations that others ask her to share.” Quinn steps forward as well.

Willow shrugs and shoulders her bow. “I got tired of tiptoeing around the obvious.” She winks at me. “How much time do you need to kiss her senseless?”

“He’s not going to—”

“At least an hour,” I say, dragging Rachel into my arms and kissing her before she can say another word.

I don’t hear Willow leave or Quinn follow her. I can’t hear anything beyond the wild pounding of my heart and the soft catch of Rachel’s breath as I fist my hands in the back of her tunic and pull her against me like I can’t stand to have a single sliver of air between us.

“Logan.” Her voice is as shaky as the hand she puts on my chest, and I can’t bear it. I can’t bear to hear her tell me to stop. To pull back. I can’t bear to be apart from her when she’s all I have.

“Don’t,” I say, and she tilts her head back to look at me. “Don’t keep me at a distance.”

“Who said anything about keeping you at a distance?” Her smile lingers in her eyes.

But when she leans in to kiss me, I’m the one who pulls back because suddenly just being with her isn’t enough. Not nearly enough.

“Logan?”

I close my eyes and reach for the courage to ask her to give me the words I need.

Her lips brush mine, sweet and hesitant, and I open my eyes. She’s all I can see. All I can taste when I breathe in. Her body molds itself to mine like she was made for me, and I want her to feel it too. To acknowledge it.

To hope for it in the middle of so much hopelessness.

“Rachel, I need …” The words won’t come. I don’t know how to say that I need everything she is without making it sound like more than she can give.

Please don’t let it be more than she can give.

“What do you need?” Her face is luminous beneath the golden fingers of the waning sun.

And suddenly the words are there, falling into place like I always knew the way to reach her. “I need to know what you need. What you want. Not from the device, not from the Commander, but from me.”

She stiffens, shoulders lifting toward her jaw as if to protect herself from a blow she has to know I’ll never deliver.

“Please.” I can barely push the word out. “Please, Rachel. Look past the loss, the grief. Look at
me
.”

She closes her eyes. I feel like I’ve been slashed open inside where no one will ever see me bleed. But then she takes a deep breath, relaxes her shoulders, and looks at me, tears filling her eyes.

“I need
you
, Logan. Just you.”

I tighten my grip on her tunic. “Why?”

“Because I still love you.” Her voice catches. “I never stopped. I thought I had. I wanted to. But somehow … it’s like part of you lives inside the most important part of me, and I don’t know how to separate the two.” Tears spill over, tracing a glistening path down her cheeks. “I love you, Logan.”

Joy surges through me, brilliant and wild. I cup her face in my hands and wipe away her tears. “I love you too, Rachel. Always.” And then I do my best to use the full hour I’ve been given to kiss her senseless.

I
can’t sleep. My lips are still swollen from Logan’s kisses, and the ache I feel for him wants to spill out of my fragile skin, envelop me, and tempt me to forget everything that lies ahead.

But I can’t. Beneath the ache, the silence lives within me, demanding justice for Dad. For Oliver. For all of us. Willow accused me of wanting nothing but revenge. She was wrong.

I want redemption.

I just don’t think I can get it without exacting revenge first.

After tossing and turning on the soft bed of moss I made for us, I give up trying to sleep. I’m careful not to wake Logan as I get up. He looks peaceful beneath the pale light of the stars. I want to trace the lines of his face and memorize the way his skin feels beneath my fingertips, but I don’t. He needs to rest until it’s time for him to take the night watch shift from Quinn.

I walk a few paces away and sit with my back to a thick, silver-trunked oak. A few yards to my left, Willow sleeps in her tree cradle, her bow in hand. I don’t see Quinn, but it doesn’t matter. I didn’t get up for conversation. Besides, his calm stoicism is unnerving, and I never know what to say to him.

I sit in silence, listening to the distant hooting of an owl and the occasional whisper of a breeze as it tangles itself within the leaves above me. It’s the first time in days that I haven’t had someone talking to me, watching me, or expecting something from me. It doesn’t take long for my thoughts to fill the void with violent images. Oliver’s eyes growing distant as his blood spills onto me. Logan’s mother lying at the Commander’s feet, her back flayed raw, slipping away from her little boy until there’s nothing left. Dad, risking everything to keep the Commander from gaining a weapon he could use to obliterate any opposition, and then giving his life to save Quinn and Willow and trusting Logan and me to finish his mission.

“Want company?” Quinn asks quietly. I have no idea how long he’s been standing in front of me.

It’s on the tip of my tongue to say no, but I was wrong. I do want conversation. Even with Quinn. Anything to save me from the overwhelming images in my head.

“Sure,” I say, and he sits against the tree across from me, his long legs folded under him, his eyes scanning the area before coming back to rest on me.

“I hate it when people ask me how I’m doing,” he says as if this conversational opener should make sense to me. And strangely, it does. Because the last thing I want to be asked right now is how I’m doing.

“I wasn’t going to ask you that.”

He smiles, a flash of white teeth against his dark skin. “I’ll return the favor.”

We sit in silence for a moment, then he says, “You’re a lot like your dad, you know.”

The words both hurt and heal, and I don’t know how to respond.

“He always seemed so sure of himself, didn’t he?” he asks.

“Because he always knew what to do.”

Quinn smiles again, yet I swear I see sadness on his face. “No one always knows what to do, Rachel. We all just do the best we can with what we’ve got. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it ruins everything.”

He looks away, and the breeze tugs at his black hair.

I say the words before I really think them through. “What did you do that ruined everything?”

“It’s complicated.”

I know the feeling. I’m about to back out of the conversation with the excuse of needing more sleep when he takes a deep breath and looks at me.

“I killed a man too. I thought I had to. I’m still not sure if I was right, but because of my actions, Willow and I were cast out of our village.” His voice is low and steady, but sadness runs beneath it. He sits in silence for a moment, then says, “What’s been done is done. I’ve had to learn how to live with what was left.”

Shock robs me of speech for a moment. I lean closer to study his face, looking for the lie. For proof he’s saying what he thinks I need to hear so he can gain my trust. The only thing I find in his expression is naked truth. I feel like an intruder. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”

He leans forward and traces patterns into the soil at his feet. “You aren’t prying. You asked because you know how it feels to think you’ve ruined everything. You’re hoping if my story has a happy ending, there’s hope for yours.”

I shift uneasily against the tree trunk. I’m not sure I want to know, but I have to ask, “Does yours have a happy ending?”

His finger pauses, pressing into the dirt as he slowly raises his head to look at me. “I don’t know. I haven’t reached the end.”

“Oh. I guess I thought … you seem so settled. So comfortable with yourself and others. I thought maybe you—”

“Had answers? I might.” He shrugs. “But they’re answers I had to find for myself. I don’t think they’ll work for anyone else.”

I should probably feel awkward, sitting in the dirt across from a boy I barely know talking about the things that haunt us, but instead, I feel a tiny sliver of comfort. Here is someone who understands. Who knows what it feels like to have blood on his hands and not know if the guilt he feels should be his to bear alone. And he isn’t broken. He’s found a measure of peace, with himself and with others.

It gives me hope that someday, after I’m finished with the Commander, I might be able to shatter the silence inside me, grieve for those I’ve lost, and find a way to forgive myself for what I’ve caused. Someday, I might find my own measure of peace.

He leans back, and we sit in companionable silence while the tree branches creak and shiver in the wind and the stars slowly trek across the vast darkness of the sky above us.

“A
bsolutely not.” Quinn’s tone discourages any argument.

“But they might need us.” Willow stands, arms crossed over her chest, staring her brother down across the fire at our final camping spot before reaching Baalboden.

I couldn’t care less about their argument. Whether they come with us or move on. I’m too busy running through tomorrow’s plan of action, looking for weaknesses.

“You don’t want to go into Baalboden with them because they might need you,” Quinn says. “You want to go because you want to see if they can take out their leader.”

“That’s definitely a side benefit.”

“Which is why I’m saying no.”

She rolls her eyes. “You’re no fun anymore, you know that?”

He freezes and something dark flashes through his eyes. That’s the second time I’ve seen hints that what goes on beneath his surface doesn’t always match the calm he wears on the outside. Which won’t matter if he chooses to move on.

But if he stays in Baalboden once the Commander has been defeated, I’m going to have to keep an eye on him.