Page 135 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

Sixteen

Riva

I ’m getting a little tired of the guardians’ surprises. Especially the ones where I can’t even tell whether the unexpected event is good or bad, like being ushered into a random room in the facility to find Griffin standing there waiting for me.

I stop in the doorway, my pulse stuttering.

Is this guy my friend or my enemy now?

Does he even know?

“Hey, Moonbeam,” Griffin says, with the vacant smile that makes me want to claw the sound of the childhood nickname out of my ears.

I’m afraid hearing him say it like that will write over my memories of all the times he spoke it with real affection. Of when he was still himself.

I don’t answer, tearing my gaze from him to take in the rest of the room.

It’s a hotchpotch of furnishings: a sofa against one wall, a utilitarian table along another, and a couple of round, ringed targets hanging at the far end. Like whoever set it up couldn’t decide whether it was for lounging in or training.

The table holds a row of gleaming knives. My fingers twitch at my side.

Griffin is watching me. “You always liked practicing with throwing knives. And I thought you might feel more comfortable if you had weapons available while we talk.”

My attention jerks back to him. “Are you planning on saying something that’ll make me want to stab you?”

He lifts his shoulders in a gentle shrug. “I hope not. But I know the last week here has been a lot more stressful for you than any of us would have wanted. You have every reason not to feel totally safe.”

I walk over to the table and skim my fingers along the edge while I eye the blades on offer. “What did you want to talk to me about?”

“Clancy knows he fucked up. I’ve told him how badly he did. He’d like to find a workable solution, but he thought you might prefer to talk things through with me first. Since you know me better.”

I don’t know the guy talking in that unnervingly even voice at all.

But I would rather talk to Griffin than that asshole Clancy. If only because there are questions that’ve been gnawing at me that no one except Griffin can answer.

I select one of the knives—a particularly slim one that looks sharp enough to slice through flesh like butter. “Are you just his puppet, then? You speak for him and not yourself?”

Griffin shakes his head. “I make my own decisions. But I still think what he’s trying to do here could be for the best for all of us. It’s a work in progress.”

A work in progress that traumatized Zian more than he already had been, that forced me and Jacob to murder one gang on behalf of another that might be even worse…

My jaw tightens. I curl my fingers around the hilt of the knife and turn toward Griffin.

“Then you’re on his side. And I’ve got a lot of reasons to be pissed off with him. Aren’t you afraid I’ll stab you no matter what you say?”

I could kill him for real. He knows I could. One slash deep enough through his throat, and he’d be too far gone before the guardians could rush Dominic in here.

With my supernatural speed, I could land the blow before Griffin even has time to try to deflect me.

But he simply gazes calmly back at me, without the slightest sign of being disturbed by my suggestion.

“You’re not that angry,” he says. “You don’t want to hurt me.”

I grit my teeth. I might not be feeling particularly murderous, but the fact that he can read my emotions irritates the hell out of me.

Especially when he doesn’t appear to be remotely affected by them.

What the hell would it take to jolt a little emotion of out him ?

I adjust the knife in my hand, willing myself into a state of calm focus that won’t betray my intentions. Then I lunge at Griffin.

I slam him back into the stone wall he was standing by, hard enough to bruise but not to break any bones, and whip the knife up to brace it at the base of his throat.

Griffin’s expression twitches with the impact, but it settles back into its usual placid state a second later. I can’t say the reaction was anything more than physical.

He gazes down at me with those uncomfortably blank sky-blue eyes.

If anything, he looks curious . Not rattled, not annoyed.

“Maybe I don’t need to be angry to think we’d be better off if you really were dead,” I snap, but I know even as the words come out that they aren’t going to land right. Because just saying them sends a twist of guilt and horror through my gut that no doubt he can pick up on.

He is right that I don’t want to hurt him, no matter what he’s become.

Griffin cocks his head, not seeming to care that the blade nicks his skin with the movement before I tug it back a fraction. “You’re upset with me, but not like that. What are you doing this for?”

I grimace at him. “You’re acting like nothing matters. I’m trying to figure out if anything does matter to you.”

He lifts his hand to set it over mine—the one that’s pressed flat against his chest just beneath his shoulder. The second his fingers brush over my skin, a tingle races through my veins.

All the shadows in my blood wake up and quiver with anticipation. And something flickers in Griffin’s eyes, the closest thing to an emotional response I’ve seen in him so far.

Huh. Does touching me affect him like it does me?

I guess that would make sense. The other guys all feel the same magnetic pull between us, the urge to connect physically and let our shadows meld together.

Whatever the guardians did to Griffin, maybe they couldn’t stamp out that one aspect of his nature.

His gaze stays a little more intense, a little more present , as he tucks his hand around mine.

“You matter to me, Riva. The guys matter to me. All the shadowbloods here do.”

The physical contact and our closeness are distracting me more than I like. I shove away from him, yanking my hand from his and lowering the knife.

“You have a funny way of showing it. We finally got out like we’d always wanted to—we’d have come for you too if we’d known you were alive—and you helped the guardians drag us back into their prison.”

I regret stepping back when I see the vagueness creep back over Griffin’s expression. Like he really was more here with me for a moment and now it’s gone.

“I told you why I helped them,” he says. “You were doing a lot of damage out in the world. Destroying things, killing people.”

“People who were attacking us!”

Griffin is silent for a moment, studying me. When he speaks again, his voice has gone quieter.

“I didn’t help right away, you know. Some of the guardians came to me and told me what had happened, showed me pictures from the place where they said you’d been doing cage fights, said you were the one who murdered all those people. I didn’t believe them.”

My throat closes up. It takes a moment before I can speak. “That wasn’t— I didn’t mean to kill the whole audience. I didn’t even know it was going to happen.”

“But that’s a problem, isn’t it?” Griffin’s tone has turned coaxing, as if I’m a wild animal he’s working at taming. “Most of those people were just there to watch. They weren’t the ones controlling you. Did they all deserve to die?”

My whole body tenses with the surge of anguish. “I had no idea I even had that power then. I’m learning how to control it.”

“It wasn’t just that,” Griffin says. “It isn’t just you.” He pauses. “I didn’t believe it until they showed me video footage from Ursula Engel’s cabin. She had surveillance cameras, you know? So I could see the way you twisted and broke the bodies, just like at the arena.”

“That’s when you started tracking us for them,” I say with a lurch of my gut as the understanding hits me.

After Engel’s house—that was when the guardians started finding us so much faster. We couldn’t stay anywhere for more than a day without them showing up.

Griffin inclines his head. “For a little while. But then, in Miami… Their strategy wasn’t working. They couldn’t take you in, and one of the shadowbloods died while they were trying, and I thought maybe I’d been wrong. That it was safer letting you go.”

I swallow thickly. “But then you changed your mind again?”

“They showed me what Jacob did in Havana. All those people he broke—and then cut off their hands…” Griffin knits his brow as if the thought confuses him.

“He was getting worse, being out in the world. More violent. And then Clancy came to me and told me how he was going to change things, so the Guardianship wouldn’t work like it had before.

So you wouldn’t be trapped the same way.

So you could use your powers to make things better. ”

“And you believed him.”

“He didn’t lie. Here we are.”

I flip the knife in my hand and fling it at one of the targets. It smacks straight into the central ring, but I get no satisfaction out of the sight.

“Here we are,” I say. “Working as hired goons for whatever criminals feel like paying him to take on their dirtiest work. How is murdering people for money better than murdering them to protect ourselves, Griffin?”

Griffin walks over to the table by the knives, but he only looks at them. He never liked weapons practice much even in our old lives.

“I didn’t know about Clancy getting paid. But he does need money to keep things running—to keep supporting us. If he chooses the jobs that do the most good for the world at the same time, it doesn’t have to be a problem.”

I snatch up a smaller knife and whip it after the first. It strikes the target a couple of inches from the center.

“And how can you be sure he is choosing those jobs and not whichever get him the most money?”

“He’s said he’ll be more careful from now on about vetting who hires us.”

I snort. “Funny. Somehow I don’t automatically believe everything he says.”

Griffin replies with the air of patience that annoys the shit out of me. “I’ve known him since before he managed to bring us here. He worked hard to give us this opportunity. And he is better than the guardians who were in charge before.”

“Better doesn’t mean good.”