How many people had he hurt in the past? She brushed it away, but he continued to stare at her with the eyes of a puppy dog that had been kicked. She turned to look at the fire instead.
“We don’t need to be fighting each other,” she said. “We should focus on our next move.”
“That’s the problem,” Lana said. “There is no ‘our.’”
“Until you kick me out of here, there is,” Alessia said. “So, we need to start thinking what’s best for us in the long term.”
With that, Alessia effectively ended the conversation and crossed her arms. She wasn’t interested in any comebacks from Lana or even any comforting words from Drake. She was sick of the fighting and wanted it to stop. She just wanted rest. Everything for the past few weeks had been uncomfortable and miserable and Erik had the right idea: she just wanted home where things made sense. She got wrapped up in something and was continually at the mercy of others.
She was done with that. So, she made herself comfortable and curled up as best she could on the ground. Her posture didn’t invite any comfort from Drake. Minutes ago, they had been skin to skin and now she didn’t even want to look at him. The only person she trusted right now and could tolerate was herself. So for now, she’d keep her own company and let the others deal with their squabbles. She’d escape to dreams for a few hours.
Chapter 13
Ultimately, Lana’s men didn’t show up again. But Diego did. Everyone had managed to fall asleep at a certain point in the night, which Lana later said wasn’t smart in the slightest and was ready to yell at someone for not staying awake to be the lookout but Diego’s appearance cut her angry rants short. He was haggard. As bad as Drake and Erik looked, he was even worse. Alessia hadn’t seen him physically since the day they were captured and the imprisonment had taken a vast and terrifying toll on him.
“Holy shit,” Erik said, coming forward to catch the stumbling mess that was Diego into his arms and bring him over to lie by the fire.
“We don’t have food or water,” Alessia said, thinking aloud. Diego was skinny. He needed nourishment. He needed medicine and food and water and rest. They could only offer one of those and maybe not even that if Lana’s angry rantings had their way.
“Where are the others?” she demanded, coming forward to grab Diego by the fraying collar of his shirt. The others had been allowed to shower and even change clothes, but he still wore the shirt and pants he’d been in when they first met. The rags had begun to smell and rot. They left him alone to die wherever they’d kept him.
“Give him a minute to breathe,” Alessia said, coming forward and putting a hand on Lana’s shoulder that she quickly shrugged off.
“He’s breathing just fine,” Lana said. “I want to know where my friends are.”
“Don’t know,” Diego grunted out, sounding like a feral animal and Alessia’s heart clenched. She hadn’t spoken with him too much before but now he sounded nothing like a human should, let alone what she remembered him sounding like. He had been broken down and hurt badly. She barely knew him but felt terrible for him.
“You better start knowing,” Lana said, coming forward to grab him more forcibly.
Drake was the one to put his hands on her this time and shove her back. “Calm down. Let the kid have a minute.”
“Oh, please,” Lana said. “You were first in line when it came to fucking with the wolf shifters. Don’t blame Mr. Acceptance now because your girlfriend is watching. I want to know what happened to our people.”
“Your people,” Drake corrected with a snap and sharpness.
“They were your people once too.”
“Maybe I forgot that when you locked me up in a cell.”
“Knock it off,” Erik said, coming forward and pushing Lana back to put himself between her and Diego. “Let the guy sit down and take a fucking breath.”
“He’s a—”
“I don’t care. Shut up and give him a chance to take a minute. He’s a person.”
Erik led Diego over to the place he’d carved out as his own and let him sit gently. He kept his hands on Diego’s back and helped him sit upright. Alessia wondered if he felt a little bit responsible for the whole situation since he was the one who first contacted Diego and asked him to get involved. Alessia was responsible too. She got them both involved. She stepped over to give Diego a reassuring squeeze of his shoulder. She couldn’t offer anything else. They didn’t have food or water or medicine. But she could give him a place to rest.
“Lie back,” Alessia said, whispering quietly and close to his ear. “Just lie back and rest for a bit. The sun won’t be up for a while.”
Diego didn’t need telling twice as he lay back and let out the most satisfying sigh ever heard as he let himself melt into the ground. Alessia wondered how long it had been since he truly slept. She wished she could offer him something better than the forest ground but she knew even that was softer and more comforting than the dark concrete room they’d likely kept him in.
His eyes closed and he seemed to fall asleep right then and there. Alessia turned to look at Erik who met her eyes and something passed between them. It was a pact. They wouldn’t leave Diego alone. He nodded. He’d take the first watch, turning to glare at Lana who watched them both with crossed arms and a huffy glare. Alessia nodded and stood. She had business of her own to take care of as she turned to look at Drake.
He waited for her stare and looked like a deer caught in headlights. She sighed. She was tired—no, she was incredibly exhausted. She was frustrated. She felt useless. And now, she’d been at least somewhat lied to, well, she hadn’t been lied to but Drake liked keeping things, didn’t like talking, kept his past in his past and wanted to keep it hidden from view when it came to Alessia. He wanted her to see the parts of him that he wanted in view. Plenty of people were guilty of that when it came to relationships (if this even was a relationship) but other people also didn’t have such harrowing pasts as him.
She glared at him and nodded to the gathering of trees, beginning to walk there without looking back to see if he was following. He would follow after like a puppy about to be reprimanded. Maybe it wasn’t fair to take out all her frustrations on him. But he was also the person she wanted to trust more than anyone else in the world and here she was, unable to do just that.
They walked into the woods, a place that, only hours ago had been the place where they reacquainted themselves with each other and their bodies. Now it was a place where she planned to ream him a new one, depending on how well the conversation went.
“We need to talk,” she said, turning and crossing her arms, facing him.
He had a small, sheepish smile, and for once, she didn’t find a thing about it that was cute or endearing. He had, quite frankly, pissed her off. She took a breath and held tight to her own crossed arms. His smile faded as his eyes found the ground. The man who had commanded a lecture hall when she first met him was gone now. What had replaced him was a man who was nervous and scared and entirely submissive.
“Are you breaking up with me already?” he asked in jest but she didn’t smile.
“We’d have to be together for that to happen, wouldn’t we?” she said sharply, trying to hurt him. She was seconds away from seeing red. Later, she might regret her words but right now, she just wanted to make him hurt as much as she felt betrayed.
He shut up quickly.
“I like you,” she said, honestly, sounding a little more immature than she meant to but she needed to follow her instincts on this. “But you need to be honest with me.”
“Honest with you?”
“You’re cagey,” she said, shrugging. “You don’t want to talk about anything, you don’t want to let me in. Any time Lana even gets close to revealing something about your past, you shut the whole thing down.”
“Well, would you want someone spilling your darkest secrets in the worst way possible?” he asked.
“No, but it would be a different story if you followed up
with the truth. You shut conversations down and then that’s that. It certainly gives the feel that you’re not being honest.”
He sighed and paced forward a little bit. He put his hands on his hips and stared out into the darkness of the woods around them. She watched as he chewed on the corner of his lip and seemed to be doing mental calculations in his head of just how dangerous it would be to tell her the truth, how damaging it would be to their future. She didn’t care at this point. If it turned out he was a serial killer, she wanted to know now.
“What do you want to know?” he asked.
“Have you ever killed anyone?”
“Yes.”
The danger, of course, with hearing things she wasn’t sure she wanted to know—there was no way to unhear it. There was no way to dig that little bit of info out of her ears and remove it from her brain. It would be there forever. Drake was a murderer. That wasn’t exactly news. She’d suspected it. But hearing it spoken to her in such a blunt way hurt.
There were more questions she wanted to ask. She wanted to know just how many people he killed, how sadistic he was when he took to hurting people. These were more details she wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answers to, but they were questions burning at the back of her brain, nonetheless.
She opened her mouth to ask more, to let Pandora’s Box spill out and ruin whatever could have been with Drake. But someone desperately calling her name cut her off first. Erik yelled for her, and Drake. Without a second thought, they ran back to camp.
Chapter 14
The scene that met Alessia’s eyes was an interesting one. First, she saw Erik pinning Lana to the ground but slowly losing that battle as she twisted and writhed, and managed to land a punch or two on his face. He held tight, however, and pushed down into the ground, trying to use the solidness of the earth to his advantage. Diego was off to the side, nursing some kind of wound on his head and looking more than a little bit disoriented.
Alessia moved to Diego. Drake moved to the scuffle on the ground between Erik and Lana. Alessia got to Diego and put a hand on his back to help steady him. He gave into the help with gusto, leaning into her fully and she had to steady herself to properly hold him up.
“What happened?” she asked.
He groaned and removed his hand. A laceration and blossoming bruise awaited notice at the crown of his head.
“She took a cheap shot,” he said, sitting up under his own power. “I’ll be fine.”
No, he wouldn’t. They needed to get him food and water and rest that didn’t involve ants crawling in his ears or rocks causing kinks in his neck. She looked over to see that the wrestling match on the ground had been contained. Drake and Erik worked together to hold Lana down and she huffed, out of breath, into the dirt, sending a small cloud of dust up into the air each time.
“We need to move,” Alessia said, standing up. “We can’t stay here.”
“Agreed,” Erik said.
“We’re not going anywhere until—”
“Yeah, yeah, we’ve heard that before,” Alessia said. “You can stay if you want but we need to move. Diego will die if we don’t find food and water and the rest of us won’t be far behind. I’m sick of sitting around and waiting for someone else to decide the next step in a plan that I had no say in, so this is what I’m doing. I’m taking off at sunrise with Diego. The rest of you can come if you want or you can stay here, it makes no difference to me. I have no idea where anything is so there’s no guarantee we’ll find anywhere safe for us, but it’s better than waiting around and starving to death. That’s what’s happening at sunrise and you can take it or leave it.”
Alessia walked away, resolved. She felt good about that even if her palms were sweating uncontrollably and her knees were ready to buckle. This was the first step in a direction for her that led to a world where she wasn’t some sidelined person or waiting for someone else to make decisions for her. She felt good about it, even if she was completely terrified.
Drake followed. So did Erik with Diego slumped onto his shoulder in a stupor of a walk. She didn’t hear Lana following behind them, but she also didn’t care. She kept moving. That was part of getting this whole storming out thing done, not worrying about the entire world being willing to follow her. Sometimes just a few loyal friends were enough. Sometimes her own ego and sense of pride was enough. She’d take what she could get. She moved on out.
***
“We need to head south,” Drake said. “We’re up north and the best bet is to head down.”
“You want to walk back to SoCal?” Erik asked. Diego had managed to move more under his own power but he was waning fast.
“There’s a better chance for shelter down there,” Drake said.
“I got an idea,” Erik said, reddening in the face. Alessia knew that look and knew she should step in to try to stop whatever was about to happen. “Why don’t you take that impressive dragon crap and fly us back to L.A.”
Drake rounded on him, turning sharply. He was stalking towards Erik and Alessia moved between them, putting a hand on Drake’s chest. He backed off, just a bit, but she could feel the power building there. She pressed hard into his solid chest, doing everything in her power to push him back, to put space between the two men.
“You’ll want to be careful, kid,” Drake said. “You’re quite literally playing with fire.”
“Oh, spare me the puns,” Erik said, rolling his eyes. “Yeah, I get it. You’re a big scary monster. You’re fire made flesh, you’re all sorts of scary big, monstrous things. I get it. But we need to get moving and you’re a bump on a log with your pity-me crap. You just like playing the brooding lover.”
“I don’t play anything.”
“Yeah. You’re just naturally so brooding and deep and spiritual all the fucking time,” Erik said. “I know your type. Every girl on the planet does. We all read Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff.”
Drake was getting red in the face. Alessia had never seen him blush before, she didn’t know that was something he was capable of—either as a dragon shifter or as Drake himself. She wondered if Erik had truly struck a nerve with his taunting. Alessia tried not to snort too much. She didn’t doubt that Drake did affect some of his brooding to come across like some 90s vampire type, skulking in the shadows, hiding from daylight.
But right now wasn’t the time for them to be measuring their manliness. They needed to get Diego to a hospital, they needed to get him shelter, and they could easily be hunted by something worse once James found out they were gone. And then there was the looming shadow of Damien Orlando and the network of shifters he controlled. They were out in the open and in incredible danger.
“Knock it off, both of you,” Alessia said, standing her ground between them, her head on a swivel between them. “We’ve got to keep moving, not ripping each other a part. You two can duke it out all you want when we find a hospital or at least a motel with a drug store. Diego needs help and I’m not above leaving you two imbeciles here if you’re going to slow us down.”
Maybe all that time in the cell, her pent-up annoyance and rage finally came into use. Or at least bubbling over. She didn’t care. She was willing to give them both black eyes if it meant they knocked it off.
They both turned to look at her but neither said a word, perhaps hoping that the other would be the one to accidently set her off. That was the only way they could really win this whole argument. Whoever pissed Alessia off more was the loser in this situation, so they played a game of chicken, waiting to see who messed things up for themselves first. But as far as she was concerned, they were both equally guilty. If one pissed her off, the other would get just as much anger.
“Good,” Alessia said when enough minutes went by and no one spoke. “Drake, Erik has a point—don’t even open your mouth, let em finish—-you can cover more ground than any of us. See if you can’t find a town nearby. A hospital would be ideal but I’ll take a CVS right about now if that’s all we have. Find it and come back.”
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She’d turned into some military commander. She liked it. Drake looked more than a little taken aback by her, maybe even a little turned on by her. But she ignored that. They’d have a long talk later about all that maybe—if she decided she forgave him for his imbecilic way of showing affection and defending it. She bit back a smile though. It was kind of hot, the idea that he was jealous of her and willing to fight it out. It was frustrating, just like it was in movies, but she wasn’t about to deny that, in retrospect, it was really hot.
“Go,” she said when he was still just standing there, staring at her. “We need to help him before it’s too late.”
He nodded and walked into the wooded area. He didn’t like transforming in front of others, she realized immediately. Maybe it was like getting changed for dinner or for bed; it was intimate, but in a much more spiritual way. She’d seen it once and wasn’t sure she could burn the image out of her mind. A few seconds later, a large mass took off from the trees. Drake was airborne and on his way. She turned back to look at Erik who was glaring in the sky, looked at her with a brief glance, and then turned away.
***
Erik and Alessia didn’t talk while Drake was gone, at least they tried not to speak. They both put their attention towards dealing with Diego and his wounds. But, Diego was one person and they were forced into some close quarters, despite the whole of the California sky around them. It was suffocating.
Alessia tried to think of noncommittal things to say to him, ways she could start a conversation without getting deep into things. But mentioning the weather only got her so far and was an incredibly obvious way of trying to get a conversation started. Erik wasn’t dumb. He was intuitive, though she never would admit that aloud since his ego was already large enough as it was.
They danced around each other as they took turns looking over Diego, asking him if he was okay, if he needed anything.
“If one of you asks one more time,” Diego grumbled out with all the energy he had left. “I’m going to just off myself right here. Even if I did need something, it’s not like you could get more than leaves and some fucking rocks.”
The Artistry of Love Page 53
