Page 19 of Captured Immune (Secrets Trilogy #2)

19

ARELLA

I stare over the edge of the tire as the wind blows against my back. “If I ask you some questions, will you answer them honestly?”

“Yes,” Trey says with a firm nod.

“What planet are you from?”

He scrunches his eyebrows together. “Earth. I’m not an alien.”

Pfft. “You could have fooled me.”

“Do you see antennas coming out of my head?”

I run my fingers through the top of his hair to check and my hand gets caught in the dried blood matting up his dark strands. “They could be coming out of your butt or something. I’ve seen a lot of wild stuff recently. Nothing can surprise me now.”

“You’ve seen me naked. Many times. Don’t you think you would have noticed if I had antennas sticking out of my ass?”

You’d think so, but then again, I didn’t know he could make fire come out of his bare hands. How am I supposed to trust my ability to notice things—ever? “If you’re not an alien, then what are you?”

“Human...” He scowls hard and has the audacity to look offended.

“You said you’d be honest, remember?”

“I am human, Arella, just like you. Except I was born with powers—and I guess I have a few bodily differences.”

I pull my long hair to one side and hold it there to keep it from flying into Trey’s face. He hasn’t complained about it, but I can’t imagine he likes being continually whacked by my waves. “I didn’t know there could be humans born with powers.”

“That’s because you’re not supposed to know. The entire world used to know about Zordis. Our kinds used to live cohesively. Eventually, we were forced to go into hiding because Ordinaries began mass-murdering us.”

“How did that happen when you guys can overpower us with your superpowers?”

“First off, superpowers is a term only used when referring to superheroes, like the ones in comics and movies. Our gifts are simply passed down by genetics. Think of it like getting your nose from your dad or your hair from your mom. There’s nothing super about that.”

I wonder who in Trey’s line of genetics had the power to sense emotions like my baby did.

Trey continues, “Secondly, there are more of you than there are of us. Back in the early 1300s, Ordinaries created a poison and distributed it through alcohol. While it did nothing to an Ordinary, it was deadly to Zordis. Two million people dropped dead over the span of a year, and no one knew how it was happening.

“Once the drug was discovered, the zovernment decided we couldn’t live in harmony with Ordinaries anymore, so a bunch of Scrubbers came together to wipe the memories of all Ordinaries and erased any evidence of our existence.”

A secret society of people with powers that the entire world used to know about, who then erased everyone’s memories because they were being murdered by poisoned alcohol? This is getting crazier by the minute. “And the zovernment is?”

“The Zordi government. Also called the Superiors. Casually, we call them the Supes. It’s made up of Keepers and Enforcers. Keepers are the head honchos who make the rules. Enforcers are like the police.”

“And Scrubbers—are those like people who go around with that thing from Men in Black , zapping people’s memories away?”

Trey lets out a light chuckle. “No, they don’t need a zapping thing, just their powers. One of my Zordi schoolteachers said that eighty-nine of the most powerful Scrubbers in the world came together to erase and alter all Ordinaries’ memories at once. Sorta like how you project your immunity onto me, they did the same onto everyone in the world.”

I tilt my head to the side. “Zordi school?”

“Yeah. From the age of one, when our body and elemental powers come in, to eighteen, in addition to Ordinary school, all Zordis go to Zordi school at night. We learn things like our people’s history, our biology, and the way our powers and bodies work. It’s like Ordinary school, except without math since that’s universal.”

“Hmm. It sounds like there’s way more to this Zordi thing than simply having”—I almost call them superpowers again—“gifts.”

“There is. We have our own culture, lifestyles, holidays, and festivals. There are a few islands around the world that are only inhabited by Zordis for those who refuse to acknowledge that Ordinaries exist. Everyone there gets to use their powers freely.”

“Liz is a Zordi, isn’t she?”

At first, he hesitates, then nods and says, “Yes, she is, but how could you tell?”

“Because she looks like one. You all have this impossible beauty about you. Everyone’s so healthy-looking, with perfect skin and straight teeth. Katie said you guys have higher metabolisms too. Liz has the same beauty you and Katie do. Also, I can’t imagine you could be as close to her as you are and be able to keep this big of a secret from her.”

He purses his lips and nods. “You’re right. I wouldn’t. It’s actually against Zordi laws to have close personal relationships with Ordinaries. My relationship with Liz would probably cross that line.”

“Where is the line?”

“Dating, for sure. Kissing and sex are definitely off the table. Basically, we just need to keep as much of a distance as it takes to prevent Ordinaries from noticing that we’re different.”

Trey broke all those rules with me. We dated, we kissed, and we had lots of sex. I noticed he was different the first time we went out for dinner. I should have questioned it more back then. I should have demanded that he tell me how he knew that teenage boy was getting beat up in an alley from all the way at the restaurant. Instead, I ignored it because I was charmed by his beauty, his humor, and the way he made me feel so protected.

“What happens if the zovernment ever finds out that an Ordinary knows about Zordis?”

Trey swallows hard. “It means a scrub for the Ordinary and z-prison for the Zordi who caused the exposure. Depending on intent, it could mean death.”

This is a lot for me to process. It’s as if I’ve recently discovered that math exists and I’m trying to understand all of its elements from simple addition to calculus in one day. It feels impossible, yet I’m curious and I want to know it all. I suppose that’s a little counterproductive when I’m also trying to forget that any of this ever happened.

However, it’s not the existence of Zordis I want to forget. I mean, not all Zordis are bad. I wouldn’t say Trey’s a bad person, and neither is Liz. I never got the feeling that Katie was bad either. It’s not having powers that makes them bad. It’s how they use them, and that’s the part I want to forget.

I want to forget that Victor had Trey spinning in a tornado while he threatened to kill him. I want to forget hearing Trey’s screams while they caused him so much pain, he could barely breathe. I want to forget that Derek threw spiky ice balls at me while Trey fought for his life only a few steps away. Just like those spiders in my apartment, I’ve got a good feeling these moments will haunt me in my sleep.

With a light finger, Trey tucks some of my stray hairs behind an ear. That entire side of my body tingles, betraying me again. “I know you probably have more questions, but I have some I wanna ask you.”

My voice comes out breathy. “Okay...”

“First, you’re still making me immune, right?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Great. Second question: What do you think about when you’re doing it?”

“Water,” I say easily. “A wave surrounding you, protecting you with an impenetrable liquid shield.”

“Wow.” He chuckles under his breath. “That’s ironic.”

“How so?”

“Water is my weakness. It’s ironic that you, my only other weakness, would imagine it drenching me as protection.”

“ I’m your weakness?”

His expression falters like he’s baffled over how I didn’t already know that. “Of course. I’d do anything for you.”

No one’s ever said those words to me before—and with such conviction. A light fluttery tingle fills my belly. I push it away because I can’t let his charm put me under his spell again.

“Where are we?” I ask as an attempt to change the subject. All I’ve seen for the last however long we’ve been airborne is trees. Not a single house or road in sight.

“We’re currently flying over the Sequoia National Forest.”

“Where are we going?”

Trey lifts a hand, making our tire fly higher into the air. “We’re gonna do this until the sun rises. Then we’ll have to find a different mode of transportation.”

“You mean, like, the Ordinary kind?”

“Yeah, that.”

My stomach twists into knots as the question I’ve been wanting to ask him for days slithers into my head. I swallow hard as I gather the courage to make the words leave my mouth. “Was it all a lie?”

Trey’s gaze locks with mine as his lips part. Something in his eyes dies a little as he sucks in a pained breath. “Arella, I?—”

“Was my flat tire an accident?”

The way his face drops makes me wish I wouldn’t have asked. For a while there, through that brokenness in his eyes and the sorrow in his voice, I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. I wanted to pretend like he merely got caught up in this mess too, like he wasn’t part of a grander scheme from the start. Like it was only after we started dating that his uncle saw an opportunity and took it.

Trey hangs his head low. “No, it wasn’t an accident.”

My heart shatters to pieces. How could I be with a man for three whole months and not realize he was pretending the entire time? I’m impressed. His acting skills are top-notch. He should win an award for those amazing performances he put on. Everything from prancing around the grass with that invisible woman to making me think he was in love with me too. He even had Javina fooled, and barely anything gets past that woman.

How long did he know of me before pursuing me to find out the source of my immunity? How did he even know I was immune in the first place? Was he stalking me? If so, for how long? And why did he have to pop my tire? Was he trying to make me feel helpless so he could swoop in and play the hero? I almost laugh. It worked, so I guess it wasn’t that terrible of a plan.

God, I feel so stupid! I allowed him to spin a web of lies right in front of me, and I walked straight into it—willingly. He made me believe he actually wanted me. I should have known that a man as rich and as gorgeous as him wouldn’t pursue me of his own accord. Of course he had an ulterior motive.

Oh, god... and I slept with him! Worse, I was going to have his baby. I saw the rest of my life with this guy. I wanted him there when I opened my first bakery. I wanted to be with him as he toured the world with his band. I can’t believe I thought all those things could happen when, this whole time, he was just using me.

My nose stings as I hold back tears. I want to slap him and curl into him at the same time. I hate that he’s the one who hurt me but is also the only person I want to hold me until the pain goes away. Was any of it real?

Trey scowls at me. “Stop that.”

“Stop what?”

“You look like you’re questioning everything I’ve ever done or said to you. Arella, I need you to know that it may have started off as a way to get information from you, but that’s not how it ended. I realized halfway through that I’d fallen in?—”

“Tell me,” I say, cutting him off because I don’t want to hear him finish the rest of that lie. I fold my arms over my chest. My hand hits the T-shirt tied around my left arm, and it irritates my wound, but I don’t care. The pain that shoots up my shoulder and down my arm is nothing compared to the agony throbbing in my chest. “Tell me everything, and don’t leave anything out.”

“Okay,” he says so calmly, it only pisses me off more. “Where would you like me to start?”

“From the beginning! Where else?”

“Well, there’s the beginning from when I met you and the beginning from when my parents died.”

I squint at him. “What do your parents have to do with you manipulating your way into my life?”

“Okay, okay. It sounds like I’m gonna need to start from when my parents died.”

After a deep breath, he tells me all about the night he witnessed his parents’ murder. Everything from when the Royals burst through the front door and attacked him, to seeing his mother get beat up by a man twice her size, to when his dad threw him on the couch and kinetically tossed him out the window just before the house exploded into a mushroom of fire.

“I didn’t have any other relatives, so I was forced to live with Victor. After he became the CEO of ZIRDA California, he moved to Shadow Ridge, so that’s where I grew up. You already know that Victor was abusive to me. He liked to beat me up and call me things like worthless kid and piece of shit . He hid the fact that my parents left me money until the day I turned eighteen, when he finally told me about my inheritance, then told me to get lost.

“After I left, I didn’t hear from Victor until he called me in early May, out of the blue. He said there was an Ordinary in the LA area who was immune to Zordi powers and if we could find out the source of her immunity, we could work to replicate it and have the upper hand against the Royals. He explained that he needed someone to get her to tell them everything about herself and the best way to do that was to pretend to date her. I’ve wanted the Royals gone since I was seven, so I didn’t hesitate to say yes.”

I think back to all those times Trey asked me about my grandparents and my parents. Yes, I found his questions odd, but not odd enough to come to the conclusion that he was on a secret mission to learn everything about me to relay back to his devil of an uncle.

Trey drags a hand through his matted hair as he sighs. “Tonight, I found out from Katie that Victor’s actually a Royal. His real plan was to get us to fall for each other so he could torture me in front of you until you learned to control your immunity.

“Once you did, his plan was to get rid of me, then who knows what he wanted to do from there. If I had to guess, he probably would have kept you locked up in the Ridge for as long as it took to find a way to replicate your immunity. If not that, he’d probably torture you into projecting onto his Royal buddies while they carried out their missions of destruction.”

The idea of spending my entire life locked up in that underground hideout scares me. What scares me more is knowing that my grandparents and Javina would have spent the rest of their lives wondering what happened to me. I doubt kidnapped by her ex-boyfriend’s uncle would have been at the top of their list.

Trey continues, “Since I thought Victor was operating under ZIRDA, I never thought he’d go as far as kidnapping you. I was under the impression that this was just about getting information. No one was supposed to get hurt, Arella, especially not you.

“ZIRDA is an organization of good people who do good things. They started as a research and development agency that ended up also being the people who fought to protect Ordinaries from the Royals. Because, ya know, the fucking zovernment wasn’t doing anything about the Royals’ bioweapons, nor were they stopping the Royals from going around murdering innocent people for no goddamn reason.

“After Victor told me he planted those spiders and caused your car accident, I should have known he wasn’t with ZIRDA. A real ZIRDA leader would never purposely risk an Ordinary’s life. It doesn’t make any sense why he’d work for the very people who murdered his little brother, so the possibility that he switched sides never even occurred to me. Even now, knowing what I know, it still doesn’t make any sense. What reason does he have to work for the Royals? What did they say to him to get him to turn?”

I gather all my loose hairs to one shoulder again. “You’ve said that Victor used to be like a second father to you, then, like flipping a switch, he treated you like trash. What if he’s under someone’s mind control? Is that a thing in the Zordi world?”

Trey gives me an I dunno shrug. “It’s a gift that’s on the Extinction List, but I just found out today that some people still slip through the cracks, so who knows? Victor being under mind control makes a hell of a lot more sense than him willingly joining the criminals who believe that Zordi humans deserve more than Ordi humans just because we were born with powers.”

He lets out a long sigh. “Fuck, Arella. If I had known about Victor earlier, I woulda kidnapped you myself—in a heartbeat. I wouldn’t have wasted all that time trying to convince you to move to Paris. Within minutes, I woulda had you duct-taped to a seat on a private jet on the way to Europe.”

I was wrong when I thought Trey had done nothing to prevent my abduction. Turns out, he had tried, although his plan was stupid. Move to Paris? Seriously? Couldn’t he have come up with something better? Something with a higher chance of my cooperation? I don’t know what that would be, but anything would have been better than let’s move to another country forever.

I shake my head at him, but mostly, I shake my head at myself. I fell in love with a man from a world of people with powers who live in secret among those without powers. And the only reason we met was because his manipulative uncle sent him on a mission to find out if I had a gene defect or if I had ever been bitten by a radioactive spider. Nothing Trey and I had was real.

Now here we are on a floating tire after I was kidnapped and he was brutally tortured and we almost died trying to get away. And for what? Even after dodging all those fireballs, we still don’t know what makes me immune. What did anyone gain from all that?

“Arella.” Trey says my name like a plea. “Please tell me what’s going through your head because that look on your face is scaring me.”

“What look?” I snap.

“Um, you look sorta mad.”

“Because I am . Wouldn’t you be if the one and only man you decided to let into your heart after being in an abusive relationship turned out to be a fake? What was your plan after you got the information you wanted? Were you just going to break up with me and move on like the moments we shared never happened? Like it didn’t mean anything?”

He lets out a pained breath. “At first, yes. But once I fell in?—”

“You pretended to like me and got me to fall for you knowing what my history was like with Nathan. You knew that I felt like I’d never find someone who could treat me right, yet you kept going on with your deceitful mission anyway.”

He softens his tone as if it’ll calm me. “The goal was to casually date you for a few weeks. Things between us weren’t supposed to go as far as they did. Real feelings were never supposed to get in the way.”

“How do you think I would have felt when you suddenly ended things between us once you finally got the information you wanted?”

He gestures toward the forest below us. “Should I land so we can talk this through?”

“No,” I shout with my hands in fists. “I want answers, and I want them now.”

He lets out a long sigh. “My plan wasn’t to break up with you. It was to get you to break up with me.”

I force back the tears threatening to stream from my eyes. “Right, like that makes it any better? Either way, you would have conned me into falling for you, only to disappear from my life. Do you really think I wouldn’t have been hurt by that? How am I ever supposed to trust another man ever again?”

“You’re right, Arella. You’re one hundred percent right. That’s one of the reasons why I couldn’t leave you. The idea of hurting you hurt me.”

I throw my arms up and let them flop back into my lap. “Well, look at us now, Trey. I’m hurt—emotionally and physically. If you wanted to keep me from getting hurt, you failed. Just like how you failed your mission to find out what makes me immune. I hope it was worth it, because I swear to you, the second this nightmare is over, I never want to see your face again.”

Trey’s breath hitches. He stares at me with his mouth slightly open like he can’t believe what he just heard. I mean what I said though. The second this is over, I never want to see him again. I don’t even want to think about him. I want to move on with my life as if he never existed and none of this ever happened.

With a hard swallow, Trey breaks his gaze from mine and stares down at the trees with a somber look on his face.

Neither of us says anything for a while. I said all I wanted to say, so I just keep my eyes on the forest as I try not to cry.

Occasionally, I steal a glance at Trey. Every time I do, I wish I hadn’t, because with each glance, the light in his eyes is dimmer. They’re glossed over with a pain in him I’ve never seen before. Seeing it makes the large crack running through the middle of my heart break deeper.

After a long time, Trey clears his throat and looks up at me. “Arella?”

My heart skips a beat at the sound of my name on his lips, but I’m still mad, so I huff out a breath. “What?”

His Adam’s apple moves up and down as he swallows hard. His voice comes out low and husky like it’s taking all his energy just to speak. “At your thinking spot, you told me that when you love someone, you put their happiness before your own. If you’re saying that once this is over, you never want to see me again...” He lets out a ragged sigh, looking anywhere but at me. “Then okay. If that’s what makes you happy, then when this is over, I’ll force myself to walk away.”

Hearing him say it out loud makes it more real, and suddenly, it terrifies me. Never see Trey again? Is that really what I want? I think about it for a moment, only to come to the conclusion that I don’t know. What I do know is that being with him is dangerous and it’s detrimental to my life. That should be reason enough to never want to see him again.

“But before I do that,” Trey says, still avoiding my eyes, “I want you to know that I never pretended to like you. I’ve always liked you. From the moment I saw you, I was completely and utterly captivated by you. Then, the more time I spent with you, the more I fell in love with you.”

I try to convince myself he’s feeding me a spoonful of lies, but he sounds so genuine.

“You hooked me in with your kindness and your sense of humor. I fell in love with your laugh and the way you made me feel whole. I fell in love with the way you were fixing me without ever making me feel like I was broken. You made me feel like I had a purpose, and you still do. My purpose is to keep you safe and to make you happy.

“So, once you’re safe, I’ll do whatever it takes to make you happy. And if that means I never get to see you again, then...” He shakes his head at himself, biting his bottom lip. After letting out what sounds like a painful breath, he finally looks up at me, and the light in his eyes completely disappears. “I’ll do it, Arella. I’ll walk away.”

I’m not sure who he’s trying to convince that he can do such a thing—me or himself?