Lead Heart (Seraph Black Book 3) (4 page)

They nodded silently and I closed the door in Quillan’s face. It was petty, because I really did need a ride home and it was nice of him to think of me, but I wasn’t ready to talk. If I tried, I would only end up screaming. I was trying so hard to keep from thinking about the
specifics
of what had happened at the boat house—all while insisting to everyone that they couldn’t keep me locked-up forever, and that I had to do something
to save Silas. I knew I had to save him. I had to… but I didn’t know
how
to, and I still couldn’t talk about everything that had happened. It had taken me a month to recover physically, but it seemed to be taking much longer for the wounds on my heart to scab over. 

He caught up to me in the hallway, walking beside me silently as I made my way to his car… and then straight past his car.

“Dammit… Seph.” He caught my arm, halting my progress and dragging me back to the relative cover of his Porsche, where people couldn’t stare at us. “I’m sorry, alright? How many times do I have to say it? Do you think I
like
knowing that Weston has Silas? Do you think I can sleep at night any easier than you, knowing what’s being done to him?” He had started speaking in a level enough tone, but now he was almost shouting, his voice close to breaking and a wild desperation lighting in his eyes. “Silas would have handed himself over whether I helped him or not!”

He released me, turning away. His broad shoulders slumped forward and I felt the pain that burned in his chest.

“I’m sorry.” I touched his back, but he made no move to turn around again. “Miro… I… I shouldn’t be blaming you.”

“But I should never have let him,” Quillan continued to speak, as though suddenly unaware of my presence. “I should never have agreed to it.”

“Why did you?”
How could you
? I finally managed to voice the question that had been hanging over me for so long.

“Apart from the fact that Dominic almost killed you on a
whim
, and probably had every intention of experimenting further? If Silas hadn’t dealt with him, I would have done it myself…” His tone was angry, but he reigned it in again, pulling his shoulders back and continuing in a more subdued manner. “Apart from that… there’s something that you don’t know. If you knew, you’d understand.”

“And you’re not going to tell me, right? You’re going to keep it a secret. You’re going to keep it locked up until it comes back around to bite me just like everything else?” I wanted to shake him violently; to shake the sense into him; to shake the smothering caution
out
of him. Instead, I worked to lower my tone. “Not this time, Miro. This time you have to tell me. I need to know when to play dumb and when to fight. This isn’t a battle that I can understand. I have no idea who to trust, and
that
is what’s going to get me killed at the end of the day.”

He turned to face me again, and I paused at the look in his eye. He gripped my shoulders, pushing me back against the car, his body crowding mine. The shock of the sudden movement caused me to pause, and I blinked rapidly, staring at his hands. I was so astounded that Quillan—
careful, controlled,
safe
Quillan
—was using his person to intimidate me, that it took me several moments to catch up to the fact that I wasn’t suffering any adverse effects to his touch. I should have been blacking out, or battling against the uncomfortable itching… but there was nothing.

“You’re bonded to four people,” he said, ducking to speak lowly against the side of my face, his breath stirring my hair onto my temple. I had stood up to him, and it seemed he was going to fight strength with strength. “You’re a strong girl, Seph. But you have no idea what you want—and this is only the tip of the iceberg. Us five, our relationship… it’s nothing compared to what else the Zevghéri world has in store for you. Yet you already spend most of your time pushing three of us away, and the rest of your time trying to ignore your feelings for—”

I growled, cutting off his accusation and fighting against his grip. He stepped forward, one of his legs pushing between mine, effectively pinning me where I stood as his hands dropped from my shoulders to my hands. I stopped fighting him immediately, and I wasn’t sure why. The move was so sudden and aggressive; I was still trying to come to terms with the fact that it was
Quillan
standing in front of me. He grabbed my wrists, pulling my hands up beside my head. He ducked his face, his eyes landing on mine. His stare was weighted, as it usually was, but the emotion behind it was heavier than usual. It dropped right through me, swelling into the pit of my stomach and tickling down my legs. For a moment, I thought that the scratchy feeling was back, but this was a different feeling. I would have described it as fear or uncertainly, except that it felt…

Nice
?

“Go ahead,” he provoked, “push me away.”

“What the hell is this? Blackmail?” I flung my words at him, completely torn apart with confusion. “I prove that I can accept the bond and you’ll tell me all of your secrets?”

For just a moment, he seemed taken aback. He looked at his own tight grip on my wrists, and I thought I saw surprise in his face.
That made two of us
.

“God… I don’t know anymore.” His grip slackened. “Stop tearing me down, Seph. I’m only trying to
protect
you.”

“From who?”

“From Weston. From the messenger. From yourself. From us.”

“Sounds like an impossible task. You should probably give up. Take a load off. Share the burden.”

He chuckled, the sound seemingly extracted from his unwilling lips. “Let me give you a scenario.”

“A scenario?” I asked carefully.

“A hypothetical one.”

“About a hypothetical girl bonded to four people?”

“Yes.”

My heartbeat picked up immediately, and I was sure that he could tell because he turned his head from me, looking to the side as though giving me the privacy of my own fluttering hope. I scrambled for control over the barrier on my emotions and then said as calmly as I could, “I’m listening.”

“This hypothetical girl is at the end of a very taut tether, isn’t she?”

“How would I know?” I struggled to keep the impatience out of my tone. “It’s
your
scenario.”

“Seraph,” he warned quietly.

I huffed out a gentle breath. “Let’s say she’s at the end of her tether.”

“Now what if I told her, hypothetically, that her bonding to those four people in particular had doomed her to a certain, unavoidable fate. A fate that she will never be able to escape, save in death.”

I swallowed, averting my eyes from him. “Knowing is still better than not knowing.”

“
Knowing
is what gets people killed in this world.”

“Weston doesn’t scare me.” The bite in my tone finally emerged again. “He can’t see into my mind as easily as he can other people. He tried. He failed.”

“Oh really?” Quillan seemed to be mocking me, and the sharpness of his taunt was both unfamiliar to me, and perhaps a little gratuitous. “Lord Henry Weston: the most powerful member of our society—and as an extension, arguably the most powerful person in the modern world—doesn’t scare
you
.”

Well… when he put it that way…

He dropped my hands completely, shaking his head. I expected him to back off, but he stayed where he was, pressing me into the car, with our arms hanging uncertainly. I found myself staring at him, drawn to the morning sunlight that slanted over his perfect features, glinting into the dark sweep of his hair and reflecting in the soft black velvet of his eyes. He was taller than Noah and Cabe, so tall that it almost hurt to crane my neck back so that I could peer up at him. I felt that he should have appeared different to me—changed, or evolved. I wanted him to show signs of transformation so that the seemingly absurd shift of my own feelings toward him would make sense. His careful gaze narrowed on mine, reading into my own confusion as a pressure settled into the dip of my waist. He touched me almost experimentally, drawing my attention from his face so that I could instead examine his hands as they moulded naturally to the curve of my body. I had grown accustomed to allowing my body the freedom of its own reactions over the last year—but I would soon have to change that. I wasn’t stiffening and drawing away, or blacking out and stumbling. I was becoming a vessel of sensation, melting closer as Quillan’s fingers slid against the silky material of my top. I hadn’t even noticed him pushing aside the opening of my cardigan, but the single remaining layer between his skin and mine was unmistakable, the gentle slide of whatever silk-blend my top was made of allowing his touch to slide up the natural curve of my hip to my waist, where the material bunched slightly as his grip became firm.

“Why aren’t you pushing me away?” he asked, his voice finally reflecting the turmoil that was dancing violently inside my head.

It was fascinating to see the hesitation in his eyes and feel the complete lack of hesitation in the way he held me. The contradiction was enough to put me on edge about the question. I stopped to consider it seriously, the sounds of nearby people rushing back to me, assaulting me with our own stupidity. Quillan had me pinned me up against the car, and we were
surrounded
by Zevs. But then again… his car was hiding us on one side, with the scattering of pine trees that edged the parking lot shielding our other side. Quillan also had his face lowered, his expression hidden.

“Maybe I’m straining,” I replied carefully. It tasted like a lie, and that confused me even more.

I started to tell myself that I had never felt
that
way about Quillan, but my mind spluttered around the thought and pulled up short, not allowing it any traction. I had idolised Quillan right from the start; I had craved his attention, his approval, his voice and his heavy eyes…
and now I craved his touch
.

No
. No. That wasn’t possible. Things couldn’t just
change
like that.

My breath halted, and I grew very still. I didn’t even dare to blink my eyes or taste any oxygen. The itching feeling and the blackouts had completely disappeared, leaving behind the strange yearning that assaulted me whenever Silas touched me.

I didn’t know how to deal with it.

I couldn’t believe it was happening.

“I don’t think you are,” Quillan countered softly, interrupting my thoughts. “You haven’t strained in months.”

“It’s overdue, then.” I laughed, but it was an uncertain laugh, fraught with nervous indecision.

“I know.” He shifted a little bit, his fingers tightening fractionally in their hold. “But you’re still not straining. You get this vacant, panicked look in your eyes when you are. I’ve been doing some research, trying to figure out why it might have gone away… but there isn’t any information out there about bonding with two different pairs, and I can’t exactly ask the Klovoda…”

I noticed movement in the trees, distracting me from what he was saying. I pushed against Quillan’s chest, remembering my two bodyguards, and he backed away instantly, walking around to the other side of the car as though nothing at all had happened. He got in and started the car, but I stared into the trees a moment longer before pulling the door open. I was about to climb inside when I saw it again: a person was moving between the trees. A man: hood pulled up over his head, his broad back presented as he strode away. My heart lurched in my throat, and a strangled sound escaped… but it was impossible.

Silas couldn’t be here.

“Seph?” Quillan asked. “What is it?”

I slammed the door and ran into the trees, forgetting my bodyguards, forgetting the messenger, forgetting everything but the hope that threatened to strangle me. The hooded man disappeared as quickly as he had appeared and I paused at the spot where I thought I had seen him last, turning in a circle. There was a cell phone taped to a tree, right in front of my face. When I switched my gaze to the side of the tree, I had a perfect view of the side of Quillan’s car—right where we had been. I ripped the phone free just as Quillan reached me. I showed him the phone and explained what I had seen; but our search of the surrounding trees revealed nothing. The man was nowhere to be found.

“Let’s go,” I finally said, trudging back to the car.

I waited until we were on the road before I turned the phone on, which caused Quillan to sigh in an exasperated way beside me.

“I told you to wait until we got back to the house.”

“I’ll start obeying you like a dutiful little Atmá
after
you tell me why you let Silas run rogue, resulting in him as Weston’s hostage—an angry Weston, by the way, because you shot him with a sniper rifle—Dominic Kingsling as a corpse on the ground; and me, with a bullet in the shoulder. Until then…” I trailed off, thumbing through the message threads on the phone. None of them were names that I recognised.
Mother Hen, Trouble #1, Trouble #2, Her, Home, Other Home, Crass, Dom,
and a bunch of others. I clicked on
Mother Hen
, because it was the most recent.

We’re set
, the last message read.

Well, that was informative. I scrolled up, but all of the messages were similarly brief and uninformative. I clicked on
Trouble #1
, and found much the same thing. I bypassed
Trouble #2
, and clicked on
Her
.

The last message read:
I haven’t heard from you. You won’t answer your phone. I’m coming to get you
.

Frowning, I scrolled up and found myself reading a message that I had sent on the night that Dominic Kingsling’s men had kidnapped me.

“Oh my god,” I breathed out. “This is Silas’s phone.”

Quillan pulled the car to the side of the road, snatching the phone out of my hand. He silently examined it as I fell back into my seat, running through the contact names in my head.
Mother Hen
had to be Quillan—Silas had called him that before.
Trouble #1
and
Trouble #2
were Noah and Cabe, and I was…
Her
. I didn’t know about
Home
and
Other Home
, but
Dom
could be Dominic Kingsling and
Crass
could be Jayden—he had called himself Agent Crassus after finding me at the scene of the limousine accident, so I assumed that it was his last name. After a few minutes Quillan pulled back onto the road and handed the phone back to me.