A Portrait of Pain

by Jane Washington

  “Sure you do.” He stretched an arm out behind her chair, crossing his ankle over his knee and turning to face the front of the lecture hall. “Everyone wants to be friends with me. I’m a really cool guy.”

  “Why says that?” Poison growled, her voice quickly turning mocking. “I’m a really cool guy.”

  “He actually is a pretty cool guy,” Cabe interrupted. I could feel the amusement rolling off him. It had my smile widening.

  “It’s true,” Noah added. “I’ve heard people talking about how cool of a guy he is.”

  “See?” Charles tilted his head toward Poison, raising both of his eyebrows.

  “Do you want to have sex?” Poison snapped. “Is that it? Because I’ll have sex with you if you just stop trying to be friends with me.”

  Charles pulled his arm back, shaking his head. “Maybe. I’ll think about it.”

  Poison balked, completely ignoring the professor, who had started her lecture and was throwing them glares.

  “What do you mean maybe?” she seethed beneath her breath.

  I would have been outright laughing by this point, except that the hovering sense of impending doom was beginning to tighten around me. It still astounded me, how much stronger my abilities had grown since completing the bond with both of my pairs, but I didn’t pause to second-guess the feeling. There wasn’t any time for that. I had to trust myself. I pulled out my phone, glancing around the room for any immediate threats that could have been the source of my bad feeling, before opening a blank message and adding in all four of their numbers.

  Today, I typed, before hitting send.

  They all seemed to get the message at the same time: Cabe and Noah turning in their seats to glance at me, while Silas slipped his phone back into his pocket. There was a touch against my hand, and I grabbed at it instinctively. Warm, rough skin. My fingers threaded through Silas’s. Heavy, comforting heat spread through my body. He squeezed my hand. Cabe and Noah both nodded at me before turning back around, and then my phone vibrated in my other hand.

  I glanced at the screen, seeing Miro’s reply. It was just a bunch of numbers. I frowned at the screen, passing it over to Silas.

  “Coordinates,” he told me, apparently unwilling to explain any further. I guessed that Miro was setting a meeting spot for us, just in case something went wrong.

  I somehow expected every phone in the lecture hall to go off. For the professor’s slides to malfunction and switch to an image of me having an orgasm on Cabe’s lap … in a strip club. I expected to run out of the classroom as soon as it happened, and for all the other students on the grounds and in the hallways to be staring at their phones, bearing witness to my deepest and darkest secrets. It was my own personal nightmare, after all, and if it was in Danny’s power to deliver a personalised nightmare right to my feet, then I didn’t see any reason why he wouldn’t do it.

  What I didn’t expect, was to see him again.

  When the overhead projector flickered, sending the professor’s slideshow into a grainy, static nightmare, it was Danny’s face that eventually took over the screen. At least five men and women jumped up around the room, some of them pulling out cell phones. I blinked, distracted by them for a moment, because they were clearly Klovoda agents, but I had mistaken them for students.

  “I have a surprise for you,” Danny’s projected image on the wall announced.

  His eyes almost seemed to be directly focussed on me. The familiar tattoos coiling over his arms visible as he crossed them over his chest. He laughed, his head thrown back, the metal piercing in his mouth flashing, and then it was gone.

  That was the whole message.

  “Time to go,” Silas announced.

  Noah and Cabe were already edging out of their row of seats. Poison and Clarin made to follow them, but Noah muttered something to Clarin, and they both fell back into their seats. We broke out into the hallway, but at least two of the Klovoda agents had separated from the others. They were going to shadow us.

  “This will never work,” Noah muttered, slowing down, forcing the rest of us to slow down with him. “Danny somehow still has people watching you. And he knows you. He knows that if he scares you enough, you’ll run.”

  “You’re right.” Silas looked like he wanted to break something. “But we can’t go back in there and pretend nothing happened.”

  “Too obvious,” Cabe agreed, his voice barely audible.

  We all stopped walking completely, facing the metaphorical barrier before us. We couldn’t run away, but we also couldn’t go back and act like we weren’t concerned.

  My instinctive reaction was to run to Miro’s office, to hide out there while we figured out what to do—but Miro hadn’t worked at the college for months. His office wouldn’t be secure anymore, and Danny knew me well enough to know that it would likely be the first place I would run to.

  And that was when the idea occurred to me.

  “I know where to go,” I announced, meeting each of their eyes, attempting to convey the message that needed conveying—to send them the words I hadn’t said.

  Go with it.

  I wasn’t sure just how thoroughly we were being monitored, so I wanted to rely on the almost-psychic nature of our bond as much as possible. They all stared back at me, their eyes a medley of colour and emotion: smouldering darkness; piercing blue; and rich, golden brown. I thought that they understood, but I wouldn’t be sure until I started walking, so I did.

  I strode off, and they followed without question.

  I sped up until I was almost running as I made my way to Miro’s office. When I reached the doors, Silas finally stopped me, his hand bunching up in the back my shirt. He wanted to go in first. I halted my progress, waiting as he pushed open the door, disappearing inside. Noah followed him, but Cabe stayed behind, his body close enough to mine that I was sure he had been silently tasked to guard me.

  “We’re clear,” Silas’s voice rumbled from inside.

  I followed Cabe into the room, closing the door firmly behind us.

  “We can wait it out here,” I announced to the room. I didn’t bother looking for surveillance equipment. It would be in the room somewhere, and Danny was somewhere out there, listening. “Whatever trick he has planned this time—we’ll just stay in here until it’s over and let the Klovoda deal with it.”

  Silas folded his arms, leaning back up against Miro’s desk. His expression was just a tiny bit amused. Cabe and Noah were staying silent, almost ignoring me. Noah was by the window, staring down into the parking lot, Cabe was trying to be covert about looking for cameras around the room.

  They were the worst actors ever.

  I walked over to Silas, hugging my torso with my own arms, forcing a wobble into my step. He would be the easiest one to force a reaction out of, since he was the most reactive of the guys. The amusement fled his expression as I drew close. He was smart enough to know that we were in the office for a reason, and that we were deliberately showing Danny our reaction to his ‘message.’ The only problem was, I had no way of communicating exactly what kind of a show we were putting on. I could only try and manipulate it into being.

  And that started with Silas.

  “You’re shaking,” he noted, as I stepped up to him, tipping my head forward to lean against his chest.

  Tension laced my spine, and nerves moved through my body. I could feel the eyes of the other two on me, their quiet attention heavy against the back of my head. I never sought Silas out for comfort, but Danny wouldn’t know that. Only we knew that.

  “Because I’m scared,” I lied to Silas, trying to push closer.

  He pushed off the desk, pulling me against his chest. The move was inherently sexual, as I knew that it would be. Silas clearly didn’t have much experience comforting women. One of his hands had wrapped around my back, drawing me up, while the other cupped my skull. His rough fingers in my hair skittered my attention for a moment, but I still forced my arms up and around his neck. He pulled me up
higher, and I heard his rough voice in my ear, his words so low that I almost didn’t catch them.

  “You’re shit at pretending to be weak, angel.”

  I wanted to laugh, but I held it back, lowering my lips to his ear the same way he had, dropping my voice to a barely-audible whisper.

  “Start a fight.”

  He set me down immediately, his hands cupping my face, his eyes narrowing on mine. “You need to tell me everything that Danny has on you. Every single tape he might have that he could use to blackmail you. That dickhead says he has a surprise for you, so what is it? You promised that you told me everything, but clearly you didn’t. He shouldn’t be able to surprise you. We’re supposed to know everything there is to know, and we’re supposed to have a plan in motion to stop him from using any of that information against you.”

  I tried to shrink back from the sudden, flaring anger in his eyes, but he held tight to my face. Holy crap, I needed to take back my thought about them being bad actors.

  “T-there’s a tape,” I managed to force out, legitimately afraid of Silas’s reaction even though he had already seen the tape.

  “What tape?” he snarled, releasing me suddenly.

  He pushed me back a little as he released me, but he must have seen Cabe move behind me, because I fell safely into another set of arms. Cabe righted me before stepping around me, shoving against Silas’s chest.

  “Don’t push her,” he growled, donning an aggressive persona that I’d never seen him wield before.

  Noah jumped in front of me, separating me from their fight.

  “What. Tape.” Silas had already shoved Cabe out of the way, and was now standing in front of Noah, his eyes blazing at me as I peeked out from behind Noah’s back.

  “From the strip club.” I took a few steps back as I said the words, allowing them to rush over my tongue, and then I forced everything else out as well. Everything that needed to be said in order to escalate this scene. “I … I was dancing … for Cabe. I … we …”

  He pushed Noah to the side and was in front of me in an instant. The others clearly realised that I was having a little trouble saying what I needed to say, and so they held back pulling Silas off me.

  I tried forcing the words out.

  I wasn’t actually afraid of Silas, but he was suddenly everywhere, his hands hauling me up against his body again, his eyes trapping me and tugging me into a heated darkness that blanketed most of my senses.

  “What did you do, Seraph?” His words were low, silky and dangerous. It was the tone of voice that I associated with the less-stable version of Silas.

  “I danced on his lap,” I confessed, as his grip tightened, his eyes growing impossibly darker. “Until I—”

  He dropped me, cutting off the word.

  “I don’t share,” he announced, taking one step back, and then another. His expression was cold. “I told you that. You didn’t listen.”

  He spun, striding out into the hallway and slamming the door behind him.

  “Silas!” I called out, allowing him some time to get a head-start before I followed, since we couldn’t all leave the university at the same time, in the same car. That wouldn’t fit with the fake fight we’d all just had.

  I had no idea how Silas was going to get to the meeting point, but I knew that he would. He’d seen the coordinates that Miro had texted me, and I would be sure to copy the coordinates to him from my burner phone as soon as we were out of there, just in case.

  “We should go after him,” Cabe muttered, pulling the door open and looking back at me.

  “We should just go home,” Noah countered. “He’s not going to stick around campus. He’s probably stealing someone’s car right now so that he can drive to the nearest dive and rile someone into a fight. We’re better off waiting for him at home. I’ll call around to a few of the local police stations in a few hours, just to make sure he hasn’t been arrested.”

  “Good. Let’s go,” Cabe replied, stepping out into the hallway.

  I followed, and we made our way to the carpark without any trouble. If Danny had people working with him, stationed about the college, they were allowing us to leave. I felt a small twinge of panic that I hadn’t been able to say goodbye to Poison or Clarin—but this way was better. This way, it would be clear that they hadn’t aided our disappearance in any way.

  We piled into Noah’s car and pulled down the hill, wrapped up in awkward silence without even the sounds of the radio or the wind rushing through an open window to assuage the odd sensation that we had all just had a horrible fight.

  “Everyone okay?” I finally croaked.

  Cabe, who was in the front passenger seat while Noah drove, turned to give me a look that was both astounded and uncomfortable. “That was weirdly convincing. How is Silas going to know where to meet us?”

  “I texted him coordinates.”

  “What coordinates?” Noah asked, his eyes flicking to the rear-view mirror for a moment.

  “I have no idea.” I shrugged, holding up the burner phone. “Miro texted them to me earlier.” I turned on my screen and read them out for Noah, who shared a look with Cabe.

  “Cemetery,” they both said.

  “That was smart,” Noah nodded, turning back to the road.

  “What?” I asked, pushing the phone back into my pocket.

  “Those are the coordinates for the cemetery that we found Aiden buried in last year. Miro must have used them because we would all recognise them—we had to face some questioning about the incident from the Klovoda. That interrogation included each of us marking the coordinates for where we found Aiden’s grave.”

  “How is Silas going to get there?” I asked, a frown drawing my brows together. The cemetery wasn’t close. “He’s not actually going to steal a car, is he?”

  “Borrow,” Cabe corrected me. “He’s going to borrow a car, and he won’t take it far. Just to the bottom of the hill.”

  I shouldn’t have been surprised at how well he had guessed Silas’s actions—though I was surprised to see Silas leaning up against a familiar car when we pulled over to the side of the road at the base of the hill.

  “Of all the cars,” I said, pushing the door open to let him in, “you really had to steal Poison’s?”

  “Revenge,” he said, sliding into the seat and pulling the door closed behind him. “I also cut some words into her passenger seat.”

  “What good does that do?”

  “It stops her and Clarin from saying stupid shit.”

  Noah pulled the car back onto the road, and the tension in the cab seemed to drain away. Silas wasn’t actually angry at us. He had been pretending. I had to keep telling myself that, over and over.

  “What did you cut into the seat?” Cabe asked, twisting around to look at us.

  “Team Silas.”

  We all stared at Silas for just a moment—me with my mouth dropped open, Cabe with a shake of his head, and Noah in the rear-view mirror—before Silas broke the spell by smiling. It was that stunningly rare smile that I lived for, winking a dimple into existence and catching my breath halfway up my throat. He turned to the window, dismissing us all.

  “How is the new version of you even more freaky than the old version?” Cabe grumbled, before turning back around to face the front.

  “He’s here,” Noah announced, pulling the car over to the side of the road. Ahead of us, a plain black town car was similarly parked, the seats empty.

  I assumed that he was Miro.

  We all got out of Noah’s car, locking it up and heading toward the trees that stepped down the mountainside. The path was eerily familiar to me, pulling my feet in the right direction. I was walking so purposefully that the others soon dropped behind me, following my lead. We were all wearing backpacks, and Noah had tucked his car keys above one of the wheels before we left, so I assumed that we weren’t going back.

  “Aren’t you worried that someone is going to steal your car?” I asked over my shoulder, since he was wal
king closest to me.

  “No.” He shrugged. “We comb the vehicles for bugs and trackers all the time, but someone still could have stuck a tracker in there at some point today. The chances of the Klovoda turning up are pretty high. The chances of Danny turning up are even higher.”

  “Didn’t we just lead him right to us?” I gaped at him, almost tripping over a twisted root that blocked my path.

  He caught my arm, stepping up to my side while we continued further down.

  “We might have. That’s why we’re leaving the cars behind. The new phones aren’t hackable or traceable—from here on out, we go dark.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about hacking anymore,” I muttered, watching where I placed my feet this time.

  I could see through the trees now, and the scattered grey tombstones looked different in the daytime than they had at night. I spotted Miro standing by the tall tree directly in the middle of the cemetery, his back turned to us and his eyes focussed on the view of the valley beneath. He surely felt us coming because I could feel his energy getting warmer with each step that I took.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” Cabe spoke up, forcing me to recall what I had said in the first place.

  “I’ll tell you when we get down there,” I answered.

  Miro turned as we broke free of the trees, and we walked over to him. His eyes were on me, measuring me for signs of panic or distress. I was strangely calm, but I shielded my expression anyway.

  “Now tell us,” Silas demanded. “We’re all here, and we have about a minute before we need to leave.”

  Miro blinked, turning an inquisitive look on Silas.

  “I don’t know when,” I started, stuffing my hands into the pockets of my jacket, “but the press is going to find out everything. And I mean everything. They have recordings or pictures of every single … death. Aiden, the man beneath the bridge, the men tied up in Gerald’s living room, Gerald himself, the men in the limousine. Even Weston. Everywhere I go, people die. And now there’s proof, and the whole world is about to find out that I’m responsible.”