Текст книги "Tearing Down the Wall"

Автор книги: Tracey Ward

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 14 страниц)

“Vin!” Freedom shouts happily when she sees him.

Then again, what the hell do I know?

“You crazy bitch, who let you out?” Vin shouts back, opening up his arms.

Freedom runs into them, followed by Elise and four other women. They take him to the ground, all of them giggling and laughing, Vin being the loudest.

“I do not understand this at all,” I mutter.

“Really?” Trent asks, sounding genuinely surprised. “You just did this to Ryan.”

“Not like this.”

“No, you’re right. It was way more intimate what you did.”

“Why were you watching?” I groan, turning red.

He grins. “Because it was beautiful.”

***

An hour later I’m back in the central tent with Ryan, Vin, Trent, Ali, Sam, Alvarez, and a few other Vashons that I don’t know or recognize. I ask Sam why Taylor isn’t here and he looks at me like I’m crazy.

“Someone has to stay behind and watch the fort,” he replies.

I notice that Sam sticks close to Ali. He’s always with her and I wonder what that’s all about. I wonder if Taylor put him on guard duty—but if she’s so valuable, why is she here?

“We’ll attack at the gates, but we’ll go in over the walls,” Alvarez tells the room. “Crenshaw and the Hyperion boys will detonate the flash grenades at each gate of both stadiums, causing a distraction and panic. While they run to the gates to defend them, Teams One through Eight will go over the fences. Remember,” he says sternly, catching everyone’s eye, “we are going for containment. Use lethal force only if you absolutely have to.”

“You won’t have to,” Vin says clearly from his corner. He’s standing with his back against a support post, his eyes on the room, but his body language is clearly removed from the group. “It’s easier than you think to overthrow one of these things. Most of the people inside don’t want to be there.”

“Even so, they don’t know why we’re there. They will defend themselves, so be prepared. And capture who you can. We want their Leaders. We need information.”

“We want Westbrook,” Ali says.

Her voice is quiet but it carries through the tent to every corner. I watch each Vashon nod in agreement.

I hate the Colonies as a whole, as an idea and a threat, but the Vashons are obviously working on a whole other level.

The group is disbanded after that. We all have our orders of where we’re supposed to be. It’s hard to believe that this is really happening. We’ve made an attempt on a Colony once already, but it was waiting for us. The work was done. This is different. This will be a true fight.

“Sam,” I call as I see him passing through the room. He hesitates for a second, his eyes going to Ali then back to me. She stops to talk one of the other Vashons and I get the feeling it’s for Sam’s sake to give him time.

“Hey, Joss,” he says easily, stepping toward Ryan, Trent, and I. He does that weird handshake/embrace thing guys do before stepping back. “What’s up?”

“Are you Ali’s bodyguard or something?”

His face goes immediately blank. “Yeah. Why?”

“Why does she need one?”

“For protection.”

“From who? The Colonists?”

“Westbrook?” Ryan guesses.

Sam shakes his head. “Nah, nothing like that. They should be scared of her.” He chuckles. “Them I won’t protect.”

“Then who are you protecting her from?”

“From herself,” he says plainly.

I frown. “You’re protecting her from herself?”

“Kind of all of us. Look, she’s moving so I need to go. Stay safe out there, all right? Watch each other’s backs.”

Sam takes off after Ali, no other words of explanation given. I’m more confused now than I was before I talked to him.

“What is a sixteen-year-old kid protecting a grown woman from?” Ryan muses.

“I don’t know, but your crew is about to leave without you.”

Ryan and Trent follow my eyes to the growing crowd around Crenshaw. They all have backpacks, dark clothing, and the most cautiously excited expressions on their faces I’ve ever seen. This team is purely for distraction. All these guys have to do is follow Crenshaw’s instructions to the letter to light off a series of highly visual, nearly powerless explosions around the gates. They’re giving the illusion of a breach. It’s the truest magic I’ve ever seen Crenshaw wield.

I turn to Ryan, feeling anxiety in every fiber of my body. He’s going to leave me again. He’ll go with Crenshaw, I’m going over the fence, and it’s too much too soon but I’ll never say it.

“How many fingers you got?” I ask him curtly.

He grins as he holds them all up and wiggles them at me. “Ten. Five on each hand.”

“Two hands, two arms, two eyes.”

“Two legs, two feet, ten toes.”

“One liver, two kidneys,” Trent lists off. “One appendix, but you could lose it and be fine. Two lungs, one heart, one gall bladder—”

“Yes, okay,” I snap. “You know organs. Thank you.”

He smiles at my annoyance. “You’re welcome.”

“Two hearts,” Ryan corrects, tapping my chest lightly.

I roll my eyes at the sweetness of the gesture, unable to handle it the way a normal person with real feelings that they can understand would.

“Just bring it all back with you,” I tell him. “Leave no appendage behind.”

“You got it. Be careful in there, Joss.”

I grin. “It’ll be easy.”

He kisses me. It’s quick and firm and right in front of everyone. The most amazing part about it—I like it. Out in the open and everything. I really, really like it.

“Trent.”

Trent nods distractedly, securing his backpack. “Bring him back in one piece. I know.”

“No. Well, yeah, please do that, but I was going to say ‘take care of yourself.’”

He blinks at me, a system error crashing his processor. Finally he blinks again, his eyes clearing. “You too,” he says quietly.

“Thanks.”

And just like that, my Lost Boys are gone again.

***

“Line up,” our commander whispers harshly.

Eight other people and I in Team Three are in position on the outside of the baseball stadium. We line up quickly with our backs against the wall. Then we wait.

I shift the fake gun they gave me around in my hands, unsure how to hold it. It’s carved from wood and stained black, an illusion that will hopefully fool people in the dark chaos we’re about to create inside this Pod. I got a quick rundown on handguns from a Vashon named Todd before we left the forest. Basically I was told I wasn’t trusted to have a real one and I do not blame them one bit. I wouldn’t know what to do with the thing.

As Todd showed me how to use it as a melee weapon, he explained that since their island was founded by a group that was mostly military, the Vashons still have guns and a decent supply of ammo. In fact, he was military once, back before the big collapse and the cure that kicked it off. He was stationed just outside the gates of Ali’s old home, Warm Springs.

Apparently when they helped the farmers of the original Vashon Island clear it of zombies, they mostly used brute force or through ‘strategic strikes,’ whatever that means. I think it boils down to cracking skulls. Bullets, they decided, were better saved for humans. And they were right. With the near extinction of guns these days, the sight of one is pretty horrifying—like seeing a dragon or Bigfoot.

An explosion rips through the night. It flares up, black smoke billowing around it as a sound like thunder cracks through the still air. As quickly as it appeared, it’s gone, leaving my eyes momentarily stunned. Another explosion follows that one, then another. There’s shouting from inside the stadium. I hear cries of terror, some sounding like children. The foreign sound of a baby crying wafts over the walls and blends with the cracks and bangs of Crenshaw’s magic.

Men and women shout muffled commands. We hear them in the momentary return to silence as Crenshaw and his crew wait. They’re drawing the Colonists to them, then they’ll give the sig—

Boom!

There it is. Our commander doesn’t say a word. With the sound of the second round of explosions, he and another member of our team climb like monkeys up the tall fence. We hand up a heavy roll of the thickest fabric I’ve ever seen, which they toss across the layers of razor wire at the top of the fence. The heavy material weighs the metal coils down to make it easier for us to clear them while also keeping us relatively safe from the sharp edges just dying to slice us open.

More explosions are going off in the distance at the other gates, at the other stadium. We’re attacking all at once in a mad rush to confuse and panic them. From the sounds of it, it’s working.

I wait my turn anxiously, then climb over the fence. As I swing my legs over, I get one stuck on a stray piece of metal and take a slice down my leg. I hiss in surprise but quickly pull my leg free and scurry down the other side to the ground. Our commander is waiting there, a man from Vashon Island who I’ve seen only once before in the large tent with Alvarez. He doesn’t ask me if I’m okay. He doesn’t offer me a helping hand because I’m a girl. As I hit the ground he shoves me forward to catch up with the others and get out of the way of the next climber. I was pretty neutral to him before, but I think I’m in love with him now.

I run quickly behind the others as we sprint across the neglected, dusty ground between the outer chain-link fence and the interior concrete walls. According to the plan, these inner walls have doors in them—ones that will lead us into tunnels inside the stadium under the open-air seating. I hope the plan is right, because when I glance up at the dark gray mass beside me, I’m thinking there’s no way of climbing that thing. Without an entrance, we’d have to fly to get in—and I’m all out of fairy dust.

The line I’m following comes to a sudden halt. Our commander goes rushing past me to the front and disappears into the shadows at the base of the wall. I wait anxiously, uncomfortable with the bodies pressed so close at my front and back, not to mention the sound of explosions still going off and shouts echoing from nearby.

Finally the line moves again and we’re racing forward. I follow blindly until I’m passing through a thick doorway into a dark tunnel that makes me cringe. It’s dry in here. There are really low wattage lights spaced out across the ceiling, but it has that boxed-in feeling of the tunnels—the ones where Vin and I fought for our lives and took one in return. The one where I was sure I’d lost Ryan forever.

I take a breath, shake it off, and suck it up. If there’s one thing in this world I can count on, it’s the fact that it’s haunted. Everything has a memory. Everything will remind me of something horrible if I let it.

The tunnel is curving and rising, taking us up and around. We follow them until we see light pouring in from the center of their world: the heart of the Colony.

My first impression when we exit the tunnel and I can see it clearly?

Place is a shit-hole.

I’m stunned by it. It’s nothing like the Pod in the north. Nothing. What used to be a sports field covered in unnaturally green grass is all brown earth farmed to within an inch of its life. There are pens filled nearly to bursting with animals of all different kinds, all mixed in together. Tents and badly constructed, tiny buildings are built into the stairs and seats. Hundreds of them. Small fires burn at regular intervals around the base of the seating, just outside the reach of the overused fields. They have power but it looks like none of it is being used on the inside. All of it is being spent on the huge, barely working spotlights that were meant to light night games but have now been redirected to watch the perimeter. If a large portion of their guard wasn’t up north fighting the cannibals, we never would have made it as far as we have tonight—they would have seen us coming a mile away—but as I look around I wonder what they would have done about it. The Vashons had trebuchets and God knows what else to defend themselves. As far as I can tell, these people have chickens. Mangy ones.

“Fan out!” our commander shouts. “Weapons up! Form a line around the field!”

Other teams have shown up through the tunnel entrances around the field. They start to spread out just like we do until we all link together, forming a circle around the field. Every weapon, even fake ones like mine, are drawn and pointed up at the seating where the Colonists are scurrying to hide inside their shacks. Not a single one is putting up a fight. They’re all too terrified.

Somewhere down in the street, Alvarez and a few other teams will take the Colony guards down. If they’re anything like these people here on the inside, they won’t fight them too hard.

This all feels too easy. Almost unfair. I want to lower my ‘gun’ because I’m starting to feel guilty lying to them with it.

“Hold steady!” Todd, my gun coach, shouts.

So that’s what we do: we point our mix of real and fake weapons at the cowering, hiding Colonists and we wait.

Somewhere from the utter silence behind me, a cow moos mournfully.

Chapter Eighteen

“What do you mean you’re staying here?!”

Vin pretends to wince at my shouting. “Kitten, please. My ears. You’re shrieking.”

“You’re being a coward!”

“I’m being an opportunist.”

“Selfish.”

“A little, yeah.”

I collapse in a chair across from him inside the large tent.

We’re early to our next strategy meeting with the Vashons. I don’t know why we’re meeting again so soon—everyone knows what we’re going to do: move on to the next Colony, the one in the south against the water. The people we’ve taken in so far have been eager to talk. Once Alvarez showed up in the middle of that field and announced what his intentions were, the people began to slowly come out of their hiding places. Turns out not all of them live in the tents and shacks out in the open. A big portion of the Pod lives inside the structure where there are offices turned into dorm rooms, kitchens, showers, bathrooms, even nurseries and play areas. It’s not at as bad down there as it is up top, but they’re so overcrowded they’ve spilled out to live with the animals and crops. Word from the other teams is that the football stadium is just as bad. It’s no wonder the Colonists rushed up north to save the MOHAI from the Hive—they can’t afford to lose all that space.

Now Vin is telling me he isn’t leaving. His flock isn’t leaving, either, and I’m thinking the crowded Colonies are about to get worse before we can make them better.

“Where will you put your people? There’s no room in the stadiums,” I protest.

“We’re not staying in the stadiums.”

“Then where?”

“The MOHAI.”

I sigh in annoyance. “In case you forgot, The Hive has the MOHAI.”

“In case you forgot, the Colonists went up there to take it back. Whoever won that fight has the MOHAI—and no matter who the winner is, they don’t have a leader at the moment. The Colonists have lost their home and The Hive has lost their boss.” He spreads his hands with a smile. “Easy pickings for a man with an army.”

“What army?”

“The small army of Vashons that Alvarez is giving me to squash whoever is in power.”

I narrow my eyes suspiciously. “He’s giving you an army to take over the MOHAI for yourself?”

“He’s giving me what I need to take the MOHAI back.”

“For all of us. For the greater good and all that crap.”

He shrugs. “That was never specified.”

“Don’t do this, Vin,” I tell him seriously. “Don’t double-cross this guy. It’s not smart. He’s too powerful.”

“I’m not double-crossing anyone.”

“It’s shady at best.”

He leans forward, catching my eye. “You afraid for me, Kitten?”

“Always. I’m always afraid you’re going to get yourself killed, and probably me along with you.”

“Have I gotten you killed yet?”

“So close, so many times.”

He sits back. “Take it easy. Alvarez is going to have all the problems he can handle with the two stadiums and all those people on his hands, not to mention whatever you all find down south. Once I show I can be trusted with his people to take over the MOHAI, he’ll gladly hand it back over to me. I’ll even agree to take on more people. Make his life a little easier. He’ll be thrilled.”

“No double-cross?” I ask warily, afraid of the fact that I actually kind of see his point. Either I’ve been around him too long and he’s rubbing off on me, or Vin is turning into a vaguely decent human being—something that seems as likely ice cream.

He draws an X over his heart, grinning. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

“Careful what you wish for,” I mutter.

The tent door flips open. People begin to pour in, one by one taking their seats around the room. I wait patiently.

When Trent and Ryan step in, I smile.

“Ten fingers?” I ask Ryan.

He grins. “And ten toes.”

“Yes!”

I raise my hand for him to give me five of his fingers. Trent goes to step past me to sit down, but I raise my leg to block him.

“You too, buddy,” I tell him. “Ten fingers? Ten toes? Six eyes? Seven brains?”

“I’ll add anatomy to the list of classes you’ll be taking from me.”

I drop my leg with a thud. “Sit down,” I grumble.

He does, but not before he covertly gives me his knuckles to bump. I don’t look at him when I do it, but I know he’s smiling. It’s then that I realize his smile doesn’t creep me out like it used to. I’ve seen it enough to make it normal, and the fact that anything about Trent seems ‘normal’ to me is a very disturbing fact.

“Is everyone here?” Alvarez asks, taking his position behind the central table. He glances around the room, looking annoyed. “Where are Bishop and Haskins?”

“Who’s Haskins?” Ryan whispers.

I shrug.

“Ali is…” a woman begins before faltering.

We all stare at her expectantly. My gut is clenching with nerves. Was she hurt? There wasn’t any real fighting and she didn’t even go to the Colony.

“She’s…” the woman tries again, glancing around at each of us nervously.

Alvarez nods curtly. “Got it. We’ll move forward without them.”

“Is Haskins Sam?” I whisper to Ryan.

He nods, his brow creased. “I think so, yeah.”

“The operation went well. Better than expected,” Alvarez says, but he doesn’t sound happy. “Conditions inside were worse than we thought and a depressed population is an easy one to overtake. They’re passive. Any change in their government seems like a ray of hope. The southern Pod won’t be as easy.”

“Do they live differently?” my commander asks. I think his name is Roberts, and I’m beginning to wonder if I shouldn’t have known his name before following him into a fight. I’m getting complacent. Comfortable.

It makes my skin itch.

“The living situation in the south is vastly different from the one we’ve just seen. I sent scouts to eyeball it before we made camp here. They’ve come back with reports of electricity, lots of it, and more than one building. They’ve taken over a park on a peninsula in Lake Washington as their main hub of operation. They’ve built a small warehouse along with a few other buildings, but most of the people are living in homes farther out on the peninsula, surrounded by the water.”

“Homes as in shacks?”

“Homes as in homes. Mobile homes and manufactured homes.”

Someone chuckles. “They took a page from our book.”

“They’ve taken a lot of things from us,” Alvarez agrees darkly. “There are fields there, but not many. Hardly any farming, very few animals. A lot of it is green open spaces. The standard of living in the south is light years beyond what’s going on in the stadiums, and that’s a problem for us.”

“They’re comfortable,” Trent agrees quietly. “And they’re happy.”

“Dead on. We can’t surround them and take them peacefully like we did here. They’ll fight back because they have somewhere to hide and they have something worth defending. Crenshaw,” he says, catching the old man’s eye, “we’ll need more than just a light show this time around.”

Cren nods slowly. “I shall summon the whole of my powers. They are at your disposal.”

I’m surprised when Alvarez bows slightly. “Thank you.” He stands to face the rest of us as like nothing weird just happened. “They have boats that regularly cross the channel, but we aren’t sure exactly where they’re going yet. My guess is that this Pod is acting as a hub in the supply chain coming from the stadiums and the MOHAI. It’s taking a cut and sending the rest to another location across the water. We haven’t been to see it yet, but we’re assuming it’s on Mercer Island. We think Westbrook has built himself a mini-Vashon.”

“One he’s not sharing,” someone says bitterly.

“No.”

“He really is following in your footsteps, then, isn’t he?”

Everyone turns to the open tent door. What we find there shocks only a few of us, but that’s only because the others don’t know enough yet. They will. And when they do, they will not be happy.

Andy stands next to Elijah, both of them looking completely unhappy. When I glance at Alvarez, he looks the same.

“Uh oh,” I mumble.

“Everyone,” Alvarez says tightly, “this is Elijah and Andy. They’re going to be joining us on our next operation.”

“Twist!” Trent whispers to me.

I scowl at him. “What?”

“This just got interesting. Shhh.”

“Don’t start that again.”

“Shhh.”

“I will cut you.”

Trent reaches for his belt. “Here’s my knife. Shhh.”

“Who are they?” Todd asks.

I’m impressed when Alvarez answers without hesitation. “Cannibals.”

Cue chaos.

People are so angry. It’s ugly. They don’t riot or throw chairs—they have too much respect for their leader for that—but they do shout out protests that leave my ears ringing for a minute.

I’m impressed again when Alvarez calls for silence and they almost immediately give it. It reminds me of Vin and his Colony, and when I look over at him I’m not surprised to see him staring blankly at Andy.

Vin shooting you daggers—that’s a slip in his calm. It’s a rare moment of mistake that he’ll quickly correct.

Vin watching you with silent calm—that’s deadly death danger. That’s a lion biding its time and planning its attack. Get your affairs in order, ‘cause you’re already dead.

“If we go in by boat, they’ll see us coming,” Alvarez says sternly. “If we go in on land, they’ll see us coming. We’ll never break through their narrow gate out onto the peninsula. Elijah and his people have offered to help us with a different strategy.”

“More tunnels,” I groan.

“That peninsula used to be a city park,” Elijah tells the room. “There are water lines. Sewer lines. Drainage lines. There are ways into their compound that they won’t see coming.”

“What’s the price?” Vin asks.

Elijah looks at him with tired eyes. “The price?”

“Yeah. There’s always a price. What do you want in return for this guided tour of the underworld?”

“They want the MOHAI once it’s retaken,” Alvarez says.

Vin’s nostrils flare slightly, but he holds perfectly still. “Is that all?” he asks, his voice low. Deep. Dangerous. “And we’re giving it to them?”

“That’s the plan, yes.”

“I have a better one. Kill them.”

“That doesn’t exactly help us.”

“All right, then just kill this one,” he says, nodding toward Andy. “He’s a traitor. He’s Hive.”

Andy snorts. “As much as you are, brother.”

“Do you have him fooled?” Vin asks coolly, pointing to Elijah. “Does this guy trust you the way Marlow did? Until the bloody end?”

“I would never betray—”

“Let me stop you there because you’re a liar, plain and simple. To be a member of Marlow’s inner circle means you swore an oath, and if you lied to him you’ll lie to these people too.”

“You openly betray everyone who has ever trusted you and you have the nerve to throw stones at me?” Andy growls through clenched teeth.

“I’m open about it. You’re a lying coward.”

“You’re a selfish prick. You’re worse than a traitor because you never had the balls to belong to anyone or anything in the first place. You’re nothing but a cocky little boy playing at being a man when what he really should be doing, what would benefit us all a little more, is if he’d disappear. And that’s what you’ll do someday. You’ll die, you’ll vanish, and no one will care that you’re gone.”

His words sting me, but I’m not sure why. I doubt they’ve even scratched the surface with Vin, but for some reason they hurt in my heart. Maybe because I wonder if they’re true. I sneak a peek at Vin to find him watching Andy with a familiar wry smile on his lips. He watches him for a long time before calmly and clearly telling him:

“Eat me.”

It’s a trigger for Andy. I know firsthand how much he hates judgment on their lifestyle, and somehow Vin must know it too.

The room erupts around me. Andy makes a lunge at Vin. Elijah goes to grab him. Ryan steps between them. Trent easily gets ahold of Andy from behind. Andy slips from his grasp only to be grabbed again, this time by both Elijah and Trent.

Vin never moves. The rest of the room bursts with people shouting for calm, grabbing at angry hands, but he and I both stand perfectly still inside the madness. With the entrance of the cannibals, this was already a powder keg waiting to blow and Vin just lit the match. This was a union that was destined to die violently, but what choice do we have? How many choices do we ever have? None. Or at best we get two and they’re never good. The sum of the life we live is the lesser of two evils. You dance with the Devil you know because he’ll leave you broken and bleeding, but at least you have a chance in hell at making it home to recover. It’s the unknown that will kill you, and even though I know that, even though I’ve lived it every single day for the last nine years, I’m still foolishly hoping that this time it will be different.

Maybe this time it will set me free.

“Are we going to have to separate you two?” I ask, shouting over the noise of aggression and rage, staring straight at Vin. He locks eyes with me, his face impassive. “Or can you play nicely?”

He smiles broad and easy. “I’m sugar-sweet, Kitten. You know that.”

“Can you tone it down a bit?”

“You want me to be less me?”

“I want you to shut your mouth a little more.”

His eyebrows raise in surprise. “You giving me orders now?”

“I’m giving you advice. If you can’t say something nice—”

“Say something painfully honest?”

“Shut your trap.”

He grins again. “That’s not how it goes.”

I gesture to Ryan, Trent, and Elijah forming a barrier between him and a still seething, though quieting, Andy. “Neither is this. If you can’t play nice, you need to get out of the sandbox. I’m getting past the fact that we’re all meals on wheels to them and if I can do it, anyone can. Even you.” I look around to the rest of the room. “All of you can. And you will or we’re boned. We may as well just go home now.”

Vin waves my words away. “I don’t care what they eat. Or who. Live and let live, I always say.”

I shake my head, feeling exhausted. “I really doubt you’ve ever said those words before.”

“Maybe not, but it’s true. The cannibalism thing, that’s never bothered me.”

“Then why are you pushing his buttons like this?” Ryan asks, turning to face Vin. I don’t care for his back being to Andy. The only thing keeping me sane is that Trent is there too.

“Because he’s a liar,” Vin says simply. “He’s betraying The Hive after how many years under their roof? At their table? In their beds?”

“So you don’t trust him. Fine,” I say, letting my exasperation show. “We all know it. Bottom line—can you work with him or not? Can you all get past your issues and work with them to get this thing done?”

Eyes hit the floor or shoot to the sky. People avoid looking at each other and I don’t know if it’s because they’re ashamed for hating someone they don’t know just because they… well, because they eat people and that’s jacked up, or if it’s because they don’t want to face the fact that they can’t get over it. I understand either way.

Vin looks Andy up and down slowly. I know why he’s doing it. He’s dragging the moment out to stress every last person in the room—everyone but him and probably Trent, because Trent doesn’t stress. I don’t like it one bit. I feel like Vin is trying to make Andy slip up so he has a reason. The same reason he had with Breanne.

“Yeah, I can work with him,” he says finally. But then his eyes swing to Alvarez. “But they don’t get the MOHAI. Not a chance.”

“Who would you suggest inherits it, then?” Alvarez asks, but he already knows.

Vin stares at him long and hard without answering.

I see Alvarez’s jaw clench once tightly, but then he nods. “It’s yours if you can get it back. Elijah, the same goes for you and your people. If you get us into the southern Pod like you promised, then it’s yours. Deal?”

Elijah nods, his eyes still on Vin. “Deal.”

“Great,” Alvarez says sarcastically. “Now can you all stop acting like children and get back to business? We still have a lot of work to do.”

***

Three hours later finds me eating my last meal in the forest. We’re having a late breakfast, then it’s off to war. I’m noticing that this overthrowing business is exhausting. I keep accidentally looking off in the direction of my loft, dreaming of my bed and my bathroom. After the tense meeting we just had with the cannibals, I’m even having thoughts about my bottle of vodka.

“It took you long enough to come back,” Lexy tells me bitingly.

The girl is ruining my meal. Ever since the stable girls showed up, she’s been attached like glue to Vin’s side. I recognize it for what it is—infatuation. No way Vin is leading her on. He barely tolerates her, which isn’t to say he isn’t sleeping with her, but he definitely isn’t putting pretty pictures in her head. She’s doing that all on her own.

“That’s what he said,” I grumble around a large bite of bread, gesturing to Vin.

“We were sure you’d left us to die.”

“Sorry to disappoint.”

“Don’t be. We wouldn’t have been sorry to see you go.”

I look up from my plate to eye her carefully. I do it for too long. She twitches under my stare, making me grin.

“‘We,’ huh? You’re a ‘we’ now?”

Vin looks up sharply. “What? No.”

“Vin,” Lexy protests.

“Are you sure?” I ask him.

“Yes,” he tells me angrily. He stares Lexy down. “And, no, we’re not a ‘we.’ We’re nothing.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t mean it, Lex,” I tell her consolingly. “Never give up hope.”

“Kitten,” Vin growls in warning.

Lexy shoots me an icy stare from across the table. It’s cute how hard she tries. “Be sure to watch your back out there, Kitten,” she spits sarcastically. “I’d hate to see you get hurt.”

I put up my finger in her face, getting serious. “Watch yourself. You’re toeing a dangerous line with me right now and I don’t want to have to remind you what happened to the last girl who threatened me. Forget Vin, I’ll put you to bed with Caroline. You get me?”