House of Strife (Poisoned Houses Book 4)

by Lyn Forester

  Felix stares after him. “I really want to punch him again.”

  I pull my arm free of his hold to wrap it around my stomach. “Did that resolve anything last time?”

  “No, but it felt good.” Determined, he bends to grab my hand, his fingers weaving through mine. “Have you ever sparred?”

  I shake my head.

  His bright-green eyes focus on me. “We should go to the gym. It’s a...healthier outlet for when I want to hit people or just work off excess energy. But it sucks to go alone.”

  “Do you usually go with Declan?” I ask, then want to bite my tongue for bringing it up.

  “No, he doesn’t like the gym. Neither does Connor.” Felix shakes his head, his messy black hair falling across his forehead. “I had a personal trainer at my old school, but my parents didn’t think encouraging my violence was a good idea, so they refused to hire me one once we returned home.”

  “That seems shortsighted of them.” My hand tightens around his. “I’ll go, but you’ll have to show me the ropes.”

  “Really?” A grin spreads over his face, then fades with uncertainty. “If you don’t like it, you don’t have to go again.”

  “Don’t write it off before we’ve even gone.” I glance around the circular courtyard, but most of the buildings look the same. “Which one is the fitness building?”

  Felix turns to point at a building directly across from the Library. “There’s a track, too, if you like running. They have a decent outdoor path, too, with simulated trees and small hills.”

  “That sounds nicer than an exercise sphere.” I never could get excited about those. Even with the hologram walls changing the scenery, my head knew I ran inside a bubble.

  “We should go check it out.” His hand tightens on mine, and he turns to lead me onto the grass. “But first, I want to talk to you about something else.”

  My heart trips as I let him lead me past the picnickers and over to the ancient tree at the center of the school. Its gnarled branches sweep the grass, and Felix gently holds one to the side before he gestures for me to go in first.

  Pulse quickening, I duck through. Are we even supposed to be this close to the tree? Everyone else stays on the outskirts, an invisible ring around the ancient relic. Rumor says this is one of the first non-toxic trees grown here after our ancestors crash-landed. It should be in a museum somewhere, with Troehan agriculturalists to take care of it. Not in the middle of a school for the elite, where someone like us might cause damage.

  Despite the ambient outdoor temperature the school maintains, the shade cast by the tree brings on a shiver. Light speckles the ground, revealing brown grass and fallen leaves that crunch under my shoes. Is this where Nikola found all the leaves for the artwork in his dorm room? I’m surprised the landscapers allow the fallen leaves to stay. Outside the branches, the lawn stays immaculate, not a fallen leaf or stray blade of grass in sight.

  As Felix follows me in, dropping the branch to cover the opening, quiet settles around us, the conversations from other nearby students muffled. It makes this place feel secluded, cut off from the rest of the school. No one to monitor us, no one to task us with inappropriate behavior.

  Just me and Felix in a kaleidoscope of shadows and light.

  Felix scuffs his shoes over the dead grass, clearing a spot for us to sit. “I should have grabbed a blanket or something.”

  “This is fine.” I toe off my shoes, settle on the cleared spot, then pull off my socks and tuck them into my shoes for safekeeping.

  Felix eyes my bare feet as I experiment with the texture of dry grass. “What are you doing?”

  “Grounding myself.” I wiggle my toes, not sure how I feel about the prickly blades poking at my sensitive soles.

  He frowns before taking his shoes and socks off and settling across from me, his feet bracketing mine. “What’s grounding?”

  I try to remember what Nikola told me. “It’s a method to release built-up energy back into the ground. Kind of like rebalancing your system.”

  The confusion on his face clears. “Ah, so this is a Trohan thing.”

  I can see why he would make that assumption. The Trohan clan, one of four halion clans, specialize in agriculture. Without their special methods of clearing the toxins from the soil, we wouldn’t be able to grow food. Grounding seems like something they would practice, and since halion sciences have proven superior in almost every way, it adds validity to the process of walking around in grass barefoot.

  I pull my knees up to rest my chin on them. “It’s an old Earth thing. But it wouldn’t surprise me if Trohans also practice something like this.”

  “Old Earth,” Felix scoffs and reaches for his shoes.

  “It helped me when I was feeling agitated.” My quiet words give him pause.

  He looks back at me questioningly, his hand over his shoes.

  “I couldn’t sleep, thoughts bouncing around in my head until they turned into...something pretty negative. I came out here and walked in the grass barefoot and looked up at the stars.” My head tips back, and I stare up at the crisscross of leaves and branches, taking in a deep breath, then letting it out slowly. “It felt like everything just settled, like all those buzzing thoughts just melted away and I could sleep again.”

  Felix’s feet rub against mine. “You did this with Nikola, right?”

  My attention drops from the treetop. “Yeah. It worked at the time.”

  I flex my toes and take another deep breath, imagining the negativity in my thoughts rolling down my spine, down my legs, then out the soles of my feet. On my next exhale, the tension eases from my body.

  Felix takes a deep breath, mimicking me, and frowns. “I don’t think it’s working.”

  I laugh. “Maybe because you don’t think it should work.” I wrap my arms over my knees. “Or maybe because what’s circling around in your head needs to be spoken out loud?”

  “Right.” He mirrors my pose, arms around his knees.

  It makes him look vulnerable, worried, like he fears what he has to say, and I drop the pose instantly. It’s a comfortable position to sit in, but I don’t want him hesitant to speak to me. Instead, I push my legs out to rest next to his hip, trying to exude openness and acceptance.

  He stays silent, his fearful gaze locked on me as he tucks his chin against his arms.

  Okay, this isn’t working. Rising to my knees, I crawl over to him. His head lifts in surprise, and as I move to sit behind him, he twists to stare over his shoulder at me in confusion.

  When we sleep, he likes to be the one being held, it makes him feel safe, so I do that now, settling my legs on either side of his hips and wrapping my arms around his waist. My breasts flatten against his back, my head between his shoulder blades. He smells sweet like my lotion that he’s taken to wearing sometimes, with a masculine undercurrent all his own.

  We sit like that, simply breathing as the tension eases from his body.

  When he finally speaks, it startles me out of the Zen-like trance I fell into. “My relationship with Declan bothers you.”

  I take another calming breath before I answer. “It doesn’t bother me, but I also didn’t understand. I thought what you had with Declan was where we were heading in our relationship. It shocked me to realize you’re with Declan, but not with him in the way I assumed.”

  Uncertainty fills his voice. “What do you mean?”

  My arms tighten around him. “What I want from our relationship, from my relationship with any of you, is trust, openness, dedication, and...love.”

  The last word catches in my throat, but I force it out. Love isn’t part of the Lonette family. I grew up knowing obedience, disappointment, and failure to meet expectation. I’ve had so much of that in my life that speaking of love still brings with it a wash of cold sweat down my sides as I wait for the immediate reprimand that usually follows such soft emotion.

  Instead, Felix hugs my arms closer. “I want that, too.”

  I tip my head back, no
t sure how to go forward from here, but we need to show all our cards or we’re going to keep messing up and hurting each other. “But that’s not what you have with Declan.”

  “I love Declan,” Felix protests instantly. “He’s my best friend. We’ve been together since we were fifteen.”

  “But you don’t kiss him?” The question comes muffled against the back of his shirt.

  “No, I—” He cuts off, new tension filling his body. “I don’t want you to hate me for what I did in the past.”

  “It’s not the you in the past I’m falling for,” I whisper. “What happened before me won’t affect how I feel now.”

  He hangs his head. “You can’t know that.”

  I curl my legs closer around his hips. “Is it worse than the rumors I’ve already heard?”

  He lets out a derisive laugh. “Maybe? Depends on what rumors you’ve heard.”

  “That you slept around a lot, and got into a lot of fights, then you met Declan and he helped stabilize you and you’ve both been exclusive until recently.”

  “That’s pretty tame as far as rumors go.”

  Because I meant for it to be. No reason to get into the name-calling and the way other people view Felix. All that matters is who I know him to be. Which is a broken man still coping with his past trauma in not altogether healthy ways. But he’s doing the best he can instead of giving in to the easy out of letting a mind healer simply remove all the unpleasantness from his past.

  He takes a deep breath. “After Mrs. Porter—” He cuts off again, then tries to peer back at me. “You know about Mrs. Porter, right? I don’t need to get into that?”

  “I know as much as Connor does,” I admit quietly. My knowledge of Felix’s past has largely been ignored while we focused on helping Declan, and I don’t want Connor to get in trouble for telling me something he shouldn’t have. But we’re working on being open right now. “If you want to tell me the details, I’m here to listen.”

  “I’ve never told anyone the details. I don’t like to relive it.” He clears his throat. “After Mrs. Porter, I had trouble dealing with life the same way as before. School felt pointless, relationships with people felt pointless, and there was so much confusion and anger over what happened stuck inside of me. My parents wanted to erase it, to just make it go away, but if they did that, it invalidated everything I went through and set me up to go through the same thing again if another Mrs. Porter came along.”

  I nod against his back to let him know I understand. His parents should have been sending him to someone who could help him work through his trauma, not trying to make it feel like it never happened.

  “I felt—” He scrubs a hand over his face. “I wasn’t pure before Mrs. Porter. I’d watched skin-vids and experimented with my classmates. Normal hormonal teenager stuff, you know?”

  I don’t know. My family kept me away from such experiences growing up, which is why I sought out disc-bike racing as an outlet.

  But Felix doesn’t seem to need my response as he takes a shaky breath and continues. “But after Mrs. Porter, I felt dirty. Used. It made me angry that, because of her, I hated myself. I got into fights at school and on the street; it didn’t matter. Pain helped to dull the other feelings, and the adrenaline rush of winning made me feel good again, even if it didn’t last long.”

  He falls silent, and when it becomes apparent he’s lost in memory, I prod, “And the sleeping around?”

  He shrugs, his shoulder blades shifting beneath my cheek. “If people wanted it, why not? It felt good, and it’s not like I hadn’t already—”

  He breaks off with a gasp, and I hold him tighter. “But that changed with Declan?”

  “Yeah. Not at first, but yeah, Declan changed that.” Relief fills his voice to move on with the story. “It was more fight at first, but the rest followed. He’s my best friend. He helps keep me calm when it gets to be too much.” He peers over his shoulder. “He suggested the disc-bike racing as a way to get that adrenaline rush without needing to fight or fuck.”

  “When did you guys become exclusive?”

  “I’m not sure,” he admits. “Before I turned seventeen. I wasn’t paying attention. I just looked up one day and realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gone out looking for trouble or accepted someone’s offer to go to bed with them. I didn’t need those coping mechanisms anymore with Declan around.”

  I turn my head to rest my other cheek against his back, my attention fixed on the bark of the tree trunk. It looks rough, like it might leave splinters if touched the wrong way. Much like Felix. “Why be exclusive with Declan if it was only sex?”

  Felix takes his time to answer. “We’re best friends. It would hurt Declan if I was bed-hopping.”

  “Because it’s not just sex for him.” I don’t make it a question. I’ve seen how they are together, which is why I assumed it was mutual love between them.

  Felix shifts within my hold, growing restless. “Declan’s just confused. We established ground rules right from the start.”

  “What kind of ground rules?”

  “No kissing, for one.” He shifts again, tension humming through him. “Kissing is for lovers.”

  “And you’re not lovers?” I ask. “Despite all the exclusive sex?”

  “It’s called friends with benefits.” He straightens his legs. “That’s why we don’t kiss. That way, neither of us gets confused about what’s going on.”

  Felix’s insistent tone makes my heart ache for Declan. I know he considers Felix more than a friend he can have sex with, and the distance Felix forces between them acknowledges that without ever saying it out loud. But the way Felix is around Declan isn’t the same as how he interacts with other friends. No matter his protests, his relationship with Declan isn’t as superficial as he wants to portray it.

  “So, when you said you wouldn’t mind sleeping with Nikola, it’s because you consider him a friend, too?”

  He tips his head back. “I did say I’d prefer if it was Declan. But if you want to experiment with a threesome and prefer Nikola, I’m okay with that.”

  Heat floods my face, and I’m glad for the moment he can’t see my expression. “How exactly would that work?”

  “With you, me, and Nikola? Like, the exact position?”

  I nod against his back. “Yeah, we’ll start there.”

  “You’d be in the middle, like a sandwich.” He holds his hands up and presses them together. “And we’d—”

  “Have you done that before?” I interrupt before he gets graphic with the details.

  “Um...”

  “With people you cared about?” I clarify.

  He relaxes with a sigh of relief. “No, Declan never expressed an interest until we met you.”

  “How come I’m in the middle in this scenario?”

  His bare feet rub against the grass. “Who would you prefer to be in the middle?”

  I loosen my hold on his to spread my hands over his hard stomach. “What if it was you?”

  He stiffens. “If it’s with Declan, then I’m okay with that.”

  I trace the buttons up his shirt. “But not if it’s Nikola?”

  His head turns to the side, trying to see my face. “I don’t trust him that much yet.”

  “What if it was me, Declan, and Nikola?” His stomach muscles turn to hard ridges beneath my touch. “Or what if it was just Nikola and Declan?”

  He lets out a strained laugh. “That’s never going to happen. They’d kill each other.”

  “You don’t like the idea of Declan with Nikola. But they could become friends, and that could lead to more, right? Friends with benefits?”

  Uncertainty fills his voice. “Nikola said guys aren’t his preference.”

  “He could change his mind.” Guilt shoots through me as Felix stiffens. “Does it matter, though? I mean, you’re only friends with benefits with Declan, right?”

  In a fluid twist of muscle, Felix turns in my hold until he kneels between my
spread legs to face me. A stormy expression fills his face as he stares down at me. “What are you getting at?”

  I lean back on my hands. “I don’t think Declan’s the one confused about his feelings here. If it was just sex between you two, it shouldn’t matter if he goes somewhere else to relieve himself.”

  Felix frowns. “He has you. Why would he go to Nikola?”

  “But we’re not having sex. When and if that happens doesn’t pertain to the fact you don’t want Declan in bed with Nikola. You’re willing to share if it’s me, and you’re willing to be shared without Declan present if I want it, but Declan is only for you and me.” I tip my chin up in challenge. “Or do I have that wrong? Is Declan only for you?”

  Not Interchangeable

  His brows pinch together. “What are you talking about?”

  “What if there’s no threesome? What if it’s just me and Declan? How do you feel about that?”

  The confusion stays in place. “I’m fine with that. Threesomes are fun, but also complicated. One-on-one is better for everyday activity.”

  I try not to choke at the mention of every day. We’re not even to one-on-one time together.

  Unable to deal with that expectation, I push it to the side for now. “We all agreed to a partnership, but I wondered for a while how much I was needed where you and Declan were concerned. Whether you want to believe it or not, Declan doesn’t look at you as just a friend, and I don’t think that’s the case for you, either. I just think you’ve gotten good at ignoring things that make you uncomfortable.”

  He makes an annoyed tsk. “Declan doesn’t make me uncomfortable. The exact opposite, in fact.”

  “Sex with Declan makes you comfortable. But Declan’s feelings don’t.” I lean up to put our faces close together. “When you kissed me the first time, we weren’t lovers. We were barely friends. You kissed me because Declan kissed me and you didn’t want to be left out. There was no softness, no affection, in our first kiss, so don’t give me that bullshit about kissing being for people in love.”

  He flinches back, pain clear in his eyes. “Are you doubting that I’m in love with you?”