Reborn (Altered) (14 page)

In the hours since I’d seen her last, she’d somehow gotten hotter. Her hair was down, for one, when yesterday it’d been wound up in a ponytail. It was longer than I’d thought, reaching to the middle of her back. It hung around her face in loose waves, and I had the sudden urge to run my hands through it.

Short white shorts gave me a good look at her legs. A tight-fitting tank top showed off her chest. I could see the faint outline of her bra through the shirt and saw a flash of black lace in my head. There was no way I could know what kind of bra she was wearing, but apparently I wanted her in black lace. And that observation made my body do shit I didn’t want it to do. At least not right now at eleven in the fucking morning.

“What happened to you?” she asked, and gestured at the knot on my forehead, her eyes pinched with concern.

Without thinking, I ran a hand over the damage and winced in return. Dumbass.

“It’s nothing. Really.”

“Hmm.” She frowned and tilted her head, causing her bangs to slide forward and hide her eyes. “Do you want some aspirin for it? Does it hurt? I could—”

“No.” I shook my head. “I’m fine.”

“Okay.” She shuffled her feet, shifting her weight, her eyes doing the same noncommittal dance. Finally, she raised an arm to show me the deli bag clutched in her hand. “I brought you breakfast. Muffins. I hope you like muffins.”

I didn’t. I might have been borderline alcoholic, but I rarely ate shitty food. I liked my protein. A lot of it.

But I didn’t tell Elizabeth that. I couldn’t, not when she had that expectant look on her face. So instead I said, “Yeah, sure. I like muffins.”

“Good.” She stayed there at the top of the steps for several long seconds, until I realized she was waiting for an invitation.

“You can come in, you know.” I opened the door wider. Her lips turned up at the corners.

“Thanks.” She stepped over the threshold, her flip-flops slapping the hardwood. She brought with her a scent that was heavy on the flowers, but something clean, too, like rain. Smell was one of the senses I didn’t give much thought to. I had to rely a little more on gut instinct. But something about Elizabeth I’d noticed, something that stuck out, was that she always smelled different, and whatever she smelled like, it was strong, like it’d leached into her skin. Usually people have one specific scent that’s only theirs, sometimes diluted with perfume or cologne. Elizabeth didn’t.

“Did you sleep okay?” she asked.

I shut the door and followed her farther inside. “Not really.”

She glanced at me, mouth parted in an O. “Was it the bed? I keep telling Aggie she needs to replace the mattress in here. It’s super-old. I’m sorry if it was hard as a rock. I could get you some extra blankets for padding or—”

“It wasn’t the bed.” I cracked a knuckle. “It was probably the hangover.”

“Oh.” Her eyes scanned the room, as if searching for the evidence. When she found nothing, she flicked again to me. “You came home late.”

Her lips tightened with regret. She hadn’t meant to admit she’d noticed when I’d returned.

“I ran into an old friend,” I said.

“Who?”

“His name is Trev.”

“Is he still in town? You could invite him over for dinner tonight.”

I crossed my arms over my chest. “I’m not sure. I don’t think so.”

She gestured to the table. “Can I sit?”

“Sure.” I hurried to the table and swiped the recoil spring I’d forgotten to put away. “You want some coffee?”

“I can get it.”

She set the bag of food on the table and went to the cupboard above the drawer with my hidden gun. She knew what I used to do, she knew about the Branch, but how would she feel if she knew I had a gun with me now?

When her cup was full, she took the chair directly across from me,
her hair falling forward on her shoulders. The morning sunlight pouring through the window behind her lit her hair, turning it amber.

I looked down at my own cup.

Elizabeth handed me a napkin and then a blueberry muffin. I rocked back on the chair on two legs and tugged open the silverware drawer to grab a fork. She gave me an odd look.

“You’re going to eat a muffin with a fork?”

“Less mess,” I said, which made her smile. Which almost made me smile.

We ate in silence for a beat.

“Do you have any plans for today?” she asked.

I did. I had a lot of plans. Unfortunately, they all hinged on Trev not being an asshole. “Not yet.”

“I have to work, unfortunately.” She sipped from her coffee, holding the cup with both hands. There were rings on her middle and pointer fingers on one hand, and one on her thumb on the other. I wasn’t close enough to make out the details, but the ring on her pointer finger looked like a feather.

“What’s your shift?” I asked.

“Two to eight.”

I bit my bottom lip, debating. But the question came out before I could squash it. “Do you want to do something tonight? Together?”

She lifted her chin to look me straight on. The move elongated her neck, exposing the soft skin just below her ear. I thought about kissing her there. I thought about doing other things with her.

“Yeah,” she answered, and for a second, I totally forgot what I’d asked her. “Do you have anything in mind?”

I shrugged and tore my gaze away from her neck. “You’re the Trademarr expert. Have any suggestions?”

Hitting on girls was my superpower, but I was having one hell of a time sounding competent at it. It was probably my conscience telling me to back off. Not this girl. And definitely not right now.

“Let me think about it.” The corner of her mouth quirked into a half grin. “I’ll try to come up with something not totally lame. Though I’m not making any promises.”

“I won’t hold you to it.”

The grin widened. She set her cup down. “Can I tell you something?”

“Sure.”

“I…” She spun the feather ring around her finger. Over and over again. “This is going to sound silly, but I feel like you’ve never left. Like you’ve always been here.”

The apartment grew sticky with the silence that followed. I didn’t know how to respond to that without sounding like a total jackass.

“I’m sorry,” she added quickly. “I know that sounds dumb.”

“It doesn’t.”

She pulled the ring up over her knuckle, then shoved it back down again. “Where have you been all this time?”

I debated telling her about the lab, about the Altered program, but decided against it. It was old news, and it didn’t have anything to do with her.

“I was tied up for a long time.” Almost literally.

“Mmm.”

She did that a lot, made a noise that was part hum, part moan. Like a sound was better than a word, like a sound was all she could manage.

“How did you get out?” I asked suddenly. “Wherever they were keeping you. How did you escape?”

I’d been wondering about this for a while, since I read the news article, since I realized she’d escaped before I’d even met her in the forest.

“Someone let me out,” she said, and hung her head, staring at her coffee trapped between her hands. “They opened the cell door and led me to an air vent and told me which way to go to crawl out.”

I leaned forward over the table. “Did you see who it was?”

She shook her head quickly. “I never saw a face. It was a woman, that’s all I know.”

“Did she follow you out?”

“No. She said she would get my mother, but…” The open-ended sentence said enough.

“That kind of thing happens a lot with the Branch,” I said. “People dying. People you care about.”

She bit at her bottom lip and nodded. “Anyway… enough about me. What about you? How did
you
get out? I mean, how are you no longer working for this… Branch?”

“The guy who ran the program I was in is dead.”

Her hands tightened on the coffee cup. “Did you… you know—”

“Kill him? No. But I would have, if I’d been given the chance.”

“You can’t mean that.”

I didn’t say anything.

She drew her shoulders back, and her shirt tightened across her chest. She met my eyes. I knew what my eyes could do to girls—sometimes they were obvious about it, twittering on and on about how blue they were, how unnatural they were—but Elizabeth didn’t seem unnerved by them. If anything, it seemed like she saw right past the color, right into the blackness of my soul beyond them. And she didn’t turn away.

She pursed her lips and the gesture made them plump, made her cheekbones carve severe lines across her face.

My heart shuddered one foot away from my mouth, and both wanted to haul Elizabeth closer and taste the blueberry on her tongue.

Shit.

I got up, whirled around, set my hands on the edge of the counter. All the muscles in my body convulsed, wanting to move, wanting to do something other than this dance that wasn’t getting us anywhere.

What was it about this girl?

I’d only known her a day, and already I couldn’t stop thinking about her.

No, that wasn’t true.

I’d known her a lot longer than a day.

Elizabeth had always been there, haunting me even when the memories were buried.

“Nick?” she said, so quiet I barely heard her over the stomping of my heart.

“Yeah?”

“Did I… I mean… do you want me to leave?”

I inhaled so deep, I felt my lungs press against my ribs. I turned around. “I should probably take a shower.”

A cold one.

“Okay.” She pushed the chair back and stood. “Will you meet me in town later? After my shift?”

“Yeah. Eight, right?”

She nodded.

“I’ll be there,” I said.

She grabbed the trash from our breakfast. “I’ll see you later, then.”

I didn’t relax until the door shut behind her.

22

ELIZABETH

EVAN, CHLOE, AND I TOOK OUR BREAK together since it was dead and Chloe didn’t have any tables. We ordered fried pickles—one of Merv’s most popular appetizers—and a round of sodas.

I got to sit next to Evan thanks to Chloe. She complained that her feet hurt, and that she wanted to stretch out sideways and put them up on the seat beside her.

Evan and I bumped shoulders when he scooted in beside me.

“So what’s the plan for tonight?” Evan asked.

Chloe raised a brow at me and winked. “We get off at the same time, right?”

I dug around in my bag for the cell phone I’d bought earlier to
replace the broken one and checked the messages. Zero new messages. Not surprising. “I get off at eight.”

“Me too,” Evan said.

“Let’s all do something, then,” Chloe suggested.

“I would, but…” I trailed off, torn between wanting to spend time with Nick and wanting to be with the group again. Even though Nick was ungodly good-looking, I still had a major crush on Evan. Evan would always be here, and Evan was safe. Nick would leave again, before too long, and he was most definitely
not
safe.

“But what?” Chloe coaxed.

“I promised Nick I’d hang out with him.”

Evan tensed next to me.

Chloe dipped a pickle spear in her puddle of ranch dressing. “Bring him with.”

“I don’t know about that,” Evan said. “I don’t like the guy.”

Chloe snorted. “You don’t like him because he’s probably better-looking than you.”

Evan grumbled and slid out of the booth. “I should get back to work.”

His break wasn’t even half over.

“Oh, he’s pouting,” Chloe said, and waved a pickle spear in the air at me. “Pouting is good.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t bring Nick.” I took a drink of soda. “After all, the first time I saw him, he had Evan by the collar of his shirt.”

“That’s because Evan can be a dick sometimes.”

“Chloe!”

“Well, it’s true. It’s just male posturing. Don’t worry about it.” She pulled a compact mirror out of her purse and examined herself, picking at her hair. “I need to get my roots dyed again. I look like hell.”

That was so far from the truth. Chloe was gorgeous, and dark roots showing through her sunny blond hair wouldn’t change that.

We finished off the rest of the pickles in record time and grabbed our dishes.

“You want my opinion?” Chloe said as we walked back to the kitchen. “Bring Nick along. If anything, it’ll make Evan jealous. And a jealous man is a motivated man.”

“I don’t know if he’d come anyway. He seems to like to keep to himself.”

“Oh, girlie, if he likes you at all, he’ll come.”

She pushed through the kitchen door, her blond ponytail swinging behind her.

A few minutes after eight, Evan came back to the kitchen, where I was putting in one last order. “Nick is here,” he said. “He’s at the bar.”

“The bar?” I echoed. I’d thought he was eighteen, nineteen at the most. But if he was at the bar, then that made him at least twenty-one.

“The bar,” Evan repeated, hardening his eyes. “I’m not sure about this guy, Lis. How well do you even know him?”

I slipped my pen into my apron. “I don’t. Not really. I mean, I owe him. I trust him, I think.”

“You
think
?”

“Just give him a chance tonight?” I tried. “Please? He’s a friend and I don’t want anyone to be mean to him.”