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Chapter Eleven

Vanessa

I don’t know if it’s the lingering shock of my fall this morning or the fact that he actually took me to a coffee shop afterward, but I’m feeling like my entire universe was tipped on its side and all the sanity that it once held has fallen out and scattered like marbles under furniture.

He carries me up the stone steps to my front door, and nervousness washes over me. “I can’t believe you’d never been to a coffee shop before,” I say, trying to ignore the feeling of his hand clenched around my thighs and the other around my back, palm pressed between my arm and my side, fingers shifting over the side of my sports bra. I haven’t had a second to worry if I’m stinky or anything like that up until now.

“Nope.”

“What have you been doing this whole ... time if not ... ooph!” I drop my phone, and he somehow ducks, still holding me, and catches it. I look at his face. It’s awfully close to mine. I open my mouth to say something, anything to break the tension, but all words run screaming out of my brain.

He smiles. He’s been doing that a lot. Smiling so, so softly at me. I’m struggling to reconcile the male I first met in the conference room, who later yelled at me in a bar and who fled from me after the press conference, with this stranger. “Waiting.”

My stomach ... I hiccup. And then immediately clap my hand over my mouth. “I’m not going to puke, I promise,” I say quickly, and the Wyvern—the freaking Wyvern—tips his head back and laughs. He laughs riotously as he pulls my key from his pocket, though I have no idea how he stole it from mine—somewhere in the air? Sometime in the doctor’s office?

My antique red door swings inward, and I freeze up as he invades my town house, too many confusing thoughts smashing into me from different directions.

I’ve been working to de-modernize a lot of parts of my 1800s home with Elena’s help, but my brothers think some of it is really stupid. What if Roland agrees?

Also, what did he mean by “waiting”?

Why is he being so nice to me?

And was he serious about moving in? What’s he gonna do when he finds out ...

“I liked it though,” he says, glancing around my entryway and then heading to the right. My door closes behind him, and I jump at the realization that we’re alone. It’s also noon, and I haven’t started working yet at all. “What was the thing you made me order?”

“A vanilla Viennese. It’s my favorite.”

He smirks and sets me down on the sofa before taking a seat on my giant, round ottoman, first pulling it closer. It’s dark-pink velvet. It matches his eyes. He leans forward onto his elbows, and I twist to the side to face him, curling my good leg under me and keeping my swollen ankle outstretched. “It was good,” he says.

“Seriously, though, how have you not been to a coffee shop?” I say, trying to keep any sort of judgment out of my tone.

He tilts his head to the side. “You read my file, right?”

I nod.

“Then you’ll know I was with the SDD for a few years and with a host family from ages they suspect were somewhere around eleven to sixteen. They were nice enough, but the host family they placed me with lived in the middle of nowhere. The SDD thought it best to keep us placed outside of cities. They said it was to give us free rein to exercise our powers, which they encouraged, but I think it’s so that if shit went south while we experimented, we stood less chance of hurting others.”

I nod along as he speaks, my mouth feeling so, so dry. My fingers curl into my palms. I’d really like to be back in the coffee shop. Alone with him, staring at me like this, I’m overwhelmed. I’ve never ... had a guy in my house before ... like this.

And then the tension between us shoots up a thousand degrees as he says, “Didn’t have a coffee shop in unincorporated Sundale backcountry.”

I stiffen, and the subtle ache across my chest burns cold. “You lived out in the boonies?”

He nods and then tips his head to the side, and he says the last thing I want him to. “Yeah. Not too far from you. Different time though. You’d already moved out by the time I arrived.”

Hell freezes over, and I do too. All those warm fuzzy feelings from the day die as quickly as they bloomed. My heart just about stops. I reach up to catch it, as if afraid it’s about to tumble straight out of my throat.

“What?” he says, and I see on his face a genuine confusion that absolutely terrifies me. Because he has no idea why I might be upset by what he’s said. Because he’s not a hero. He has no concept of right and wrong.

“Did you run a background check on me?” I say in a frustratingly high tone when I’d meant to sound strong.

“No.” He sits up and massages the uneven beard on his chin. “I stole your file from Singkham’s office. Not a big deal. Why do you look like you just saw a ghost?”

Because I am seeing ghosts. I can’t meet his gaze, feel my whole body start to retreat and cringe away.

“Nessa, what—”

“You had no right to do that.”

He balks. “I had every right. I needed to know who I was gonna be living with and working with the most ...”

“You had absolutely no right to look at that. Those files—my childhood—” What childhood? “That time in my life is private.”

“You saw my damn files. Stop freaking the fuck out.”

“No, I didn’t. The COE doesn’t share your personal files with us. Only the relevant pieces of information that pertain to the job. This is a job.”

“You’re my girlfriend.”

“Your fake girlfriend.”

Smoke is coming out of his nose now in swooping curls, every bit dragonesque. “You’re a hypocrite.”

“What?” I say, voice barely above a gasp.

“A control freak. Lack of control in your early childhood has led you to want to control the world around you. That’s what your therapist wrote, right?”

I wince like I got slapped. He read my therapist’s notes? Jesus ... “I’d like you to leave, please.” My voice is cold. The pain meds and the shock are gone, giving ground for another monster. I’ve never felt rage like this before. I want to hurt something.

Roland’s expression flattens. His eyes flicker orange momentarily. “No. I live here now.”

I scoff, my eyes getting hot. “And you’re going to sit here and lecture me about control? After you barge into my house and into my life? Make me sign some insane contract? Call me your wife?”

His face turns deep red, a red that makes my heart hammer and hurt. But I’m feeling destructive, bent out of shape, and it’s because of that that I blurt out a question I’d been scared to ask since I saw him touch down in the skate park earlier. “How did you even know where I was today?”

He doesn’t answer. He just gives me a hard look, one I can’t help but wither beneath. His jaw is set, and his eyes are orange and angry. He has a temper. His knee is bouncing, and he’s looking like he’s going to lunge at me.

“Did you follow me?” I say, my voice shaky but no less loud. I don’t know what’s come over me, but for maybe the first time in my life, I don’t feel like backing down.

He jerks, leaning in toward me, knees pressed to the edge of the couch. “I didn’t see anything in that file that made me think any less of you, Nessa.”

“That’s not the point,” I say, running my hands back through my hair, roughly rumpling it. “The point is that you had no right to see it at all. That part of me is over. I don’t go back there ever. That’s why I don’t even tell people I do trust about it. Because they might bring it up in casual conversation and take me places I don’t want to go. Not all of us are so lucky that we get to have our earliest memories scrubbed.”

“How the hell do you get close to anybody if you never open up?” He’s leaning in even closer.

And now I’m leaning in even closer. “Maybe I don’t.”

My face heats. Embarrassment is a little like a shield you don’t want to hold on to. It helps mask the terrors that lurk beneath. Helps make it easier to concentrate on something outward like perception, rather than go to the dark places within where light doesn’t reach.

“Maybe I don’t want to, Mr. Casteel. If what you found in my file is why you’re suddenly being nice to me or following me around or doing whatever it is that you’re doing, then stop. I don’t need a boyfriend, not even a fake one, and definitely not a pity one. I have family. I have friends. This may be a foreign concept to you, but I actually have people who look out for me.”

My gaze flicks to his, and the rumbling of his chest abruptly cuts. I know I’ve gone too far. Fuck. “I ...” I start.

“You’re being a bitch.”

“You’re being an asshole.” I glance at his mouth. It’s so close to mine, I could close the distance between us with a breath.

I lean in. His hand moves to cover the side of my face, his thumb rubbing roughly over my cheek. The hysteria monster has taken on a new shape, this one just as unfamiliar. My mouth moves toward his in an awkward jerk, but he holds me back, licks his lips, and seemingly finds sanity and restraint.

“You don’t get to back outta this.”

I’m breathing hard. So is he. I shake my head, looking down at my lap in humiliation as I realize what I’d been about to do—and moreover, the fact that he was the one to pull back. “I don’t even know what this is, Mr. Casteel.”

“Fuck you, Nessa, and fuck that. You may be my fake girlfriend, but you’re still mine . And I look after what’s mine.” After a few seconds in which the tension hums with its own tune, he stands and pulls some things from his pocket. He sets the pill bottle from the doc on the ottoman, then squeezes the instant ice pack and drops it onto my ankle.

Without another word, he heads to the front door, which I hear creak open even though I keep my hands trained on my lap. “I better not see you at work tomorrow, Ms. Theriot.” He closes the door softly behind him, and I realize, staring blankly into space for the next few minutes, that this is the first time I’ve ever yelled at anybody and the first time I’ve ever had anybody yell at me back as an adult.

I smile and laugh into my hand before catching the sound in my palm. My eyes flare with heat as I think back on our conversation with both wonder and horror, and I’m crying as confusion grips me with an iron fist and shakes me around for good measure.

He didn’t coddle me like most people do. He wasn’t nice. He certainly wasn’t honorable. He called me a bitch because he believed I was strong enough to take it, or maybe because he’s just an asshole.

But I called him an asshole and berated him like that because he wronged me, yes, but also because at no point in our shouting match did I feel unsafe, did I hear my subconscious mind whispering to me in the voice of my mother.

I felt safe enough to shout at somebody, I think, guffawing audibly.

The novelty of the moment is too big, too much, too new ... so I do the only thing that makes sense in that moment. I schedule a therapy appointment and, while I wait, grab my laptop, settle into the couch with an ice pack, lunch, and determination, and bury myself in work.