Page 20 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

I whirl around and laugh at the exhilaration of the movement. Brooke scoots over so we’re facing each other again.

“Are you in any kind of trouble, Rita?” she asks with that serious expression.

I don’t want her to look like that. Brooke is nice—Brooke should be happy. It was her idea for me to come here, and I’m having such a good time.

“No trouble,” I assure her with a broad grin. “I left all the trouble behind.”

“If there’s anything?—”

Fingers close around my elbow from behind. I turn to see Andreas standing over me, his usual warm smile looking a tad tense.

Is he getting serious too? What is up with people tonight? I thought we all came here to have some fun.

“Hey,” he says, and directs his smile at Brooke for just a second before returning his attention to me. “You lost your hoodie.”

“It was too hot,” I inform him.

A little furrow forms in his forehead. “Well, I think you’re going to want it later. Let’s have a look and see if we can rescue it.”

I pump my fist in the air. “It’s a mission!”

Andreas tugs me away from Brooke and her friends, but instead of prowling through the mass of dancers searching for my wayward hoodie, he pulls me right over to the far wall where the whoops and chatter of the other dancers don’t drown out our voices quite so much.

“How much have you had to drink?” he asks me, looking me up and down.

I do a little shimmy, wondering if I can get him to point the same flirty grin at me that he did for the other woman. “Just one. It was good!”

Andreas’s expression only gets more serious, which is absolutely the wrong direction. “Maybe we should head home.”

“What?” I protest. “No. We just got here, like, five seconds ago. I’m having fun.”

He quirks an eyebrow at me, which at least brings back a bit of his normal easygoing vibe. “Are you really?”

I plant my hands on my hips. “Yes. Tons. I haven’t been able to dance since—even when I was alone in my new room, there were the shackles, and I didn’t like thinking about the boss watching—but now I don’t care! I didn’t realize it could be this much fun to dance with other people.”

I don’t know how to describe Andreas’s expression anymore. He looks kind of like he isn’t any more sure what he’s doing with his face than I am.

With a surge of boldness, I tap him right on his toned chest. “Why don’t you dance with me?”

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” he says dryly.

I grimace at him. “Why not? We could have fun together. We used to.”

A sudden melancholy sweeps over me, dragging my spirits down into the toilet. I glance at my arm again, at the scars Brooke noticed and the smaller ones near my armpit.

“I always needed to be sure, you know,” I say, running my fingers over the lines carved by my claws. “Bring out a little puff of the smoky stuff to make sure it still pointed toward the rest of you. That you were still out there somewhere.”

Andreas’s throat bobs with a thick swallow, and I’m abruptly captivated by that motion, my previous thoughts flitting away. I step closer to him and touch his neck.

“Riva,” he says roughly.

“I really am so glad I found you,” I tell him, and tip my head so it rests on his shoulder.

Some distant part of me expects him to shove me away, but the rest of me doesn’t care. And that isn’t what happens anyway.

Andreas’s arms come up to wrap around me. He hugs me to his lean frame so tight that tears I can’t explain spring into my eyes.

He smells just like he should, like sunshine and warm amber. I want to sink right into him.

Then he’s detached himself after all—not shoving but pulling himself away, backing up a step as my head comes up to look at him. He opens his mouth and closes it again, and his gaze veers to someone beyond my shoulder.

I pivot and wobble on my feet with a wave of dizziness. Jacob’s come up behind me—he catches my arm to steady me, his face set in that stupid scowl I’d like to punch right off it.

I yank my arm away. “I don’t want to dance with you . You’ve been so mean to me over things I never even did.”

Jacob blinks at me, startled enough for his stern expression to break, and glances at Andreas. “What the hell happened to her?”

Andreas’s mouth twists. “She says she had a drink. Just one, and with that girl from the residences hovering over her I don’t think anyone could have slipped something in it, but the alcohol could be interacting oddly with the poison.”

“That’s right!” I say triumphantly, as if Andreas has given me a trump card. I jab my index finger at Jacob, who is continuing to be way too gorgeous even when he’s annoying. “You poisoned me too. Definitely no dancing.”

My legs quiver under me again, even though I haven’t moved them this time. I list to the side before catching my balance against the wall. “The floor’s getting tippy.”

Jacob swears under his breath. “We don’t want her collapsing in here, for fuck’s sake.”

“Nope,” I agree. “Then everyone would know just how big a jerk you are.”

He glowers at me, which really isn’t helping his case.

I glance away from him and notice Zian making his way over. One of the corset-top girls is trotting along behind him, pawing at his arm. And just like that, I’m sad again.

“He doesn’t want me touching him, but these girls he doesn’t even know…”

Andreas grips my shoulder. “It’s okay, Riva. But we’d better head home. You’ve gotten kind of… sick.”

I do feel that way now—all topsy turvy, like my stomach is flipping in somersaults.

I pivot, and Brooke is there, her big kind eyes even wider than usual with worry. “Is everything all right?”

My good mood returns in a flash. I snatch at her hand.

“Yes! Let’s dance some more. It’s definitely not time to go home yet.” A whoop careens up my throat, loud enough that several nearby dancers glance our way. “Let’s paaar-ty!”

Andreas keeps his grasp on my shoulder, the spoilsport. “We think she’s been roofied,” he says to Brooke. “She… doesn’t normally act like this, even when she goes out.”

Brooke’s eyebrows draw together. “I can’t believe someone—we’ve never had any problems here before. I can help get her back to the campus. It was my idea.”

“It’s fine,” Jacob says, coolly and smoothly. “We all came together. No need for you to interrupt your night.”

“I want to do something .”

“You could keep an eye out for her hoodie,” Andreas suggests. “We still haven’t figured out where that got to.”

Brooke doesn’t look convinced, but I’m dizzy again, my thoughts too muddled to come up with an argument in my favor.

Zian reaches Jacob’s side, his fawning fan gone off someplace else finally, and studies me with a flex of his arms. “Is something wrong?”

“She’s out of it,” Jacob says. “We need to get her home so she can sleep it off.”

“Not sleepy,” I mumble in an ineffective protest.

In the face of all their concern, Brooke eases back. “All right. If I find her hoodie, I’ll drop it off in your mailbox.”

“Thank you,” Andreas says, flashing a smile, and then they’re ushering me out of the club.

I grumble my displeasure as they stuff me into the back seat again, but relaxing into the pliant leather comes as an unexpected relief. My head lolls to the side when the car takes a corner, and my stomach churns.

I bring my hands up to cover my face. “I want to go to bed,” I say, my voice muffled against my palms.

“That’s what we’re working on,” Andreas says. He’s stayed in the back with me, rubbing my shoulder reassuringly.

At the townhouse, I stagger up to my bedroom between Jacob and Andreas and crash onto my bed. Dominic is there, still in his trench coat costume, his face tight.

Is he angry with me? I don’t know what I did wrong. There’s so much I don’t understand.

A little moan slips out of me, and he rests his hand tentatively on my belly. “You’ll feel better soon, Riva.”

Everyone else is gone. The room is dark. The tingling energy flows out from his hand and melts away my nausea and the shakiness in my limbs, but my mind still feels like it’s floating someplace far above us.

He’s mad at me, but he’s here helping me anyway. That’s what Dominic is like.

I want him even closer. I want him?—

He stands up, and all at once I can’t bear for him to simply walk away. The words tumble out.

“I missed you, you know. All of you. But especially…”

Dominic stops near the door. He watches me, a shadowy figure in the darkened space.

“Especially what?” he asks in a low voice.

I grope for the words to capture the memories trickling through my head. “When you weren’t there, I’d sometimes still imagine the four of you. And you , you always had the right thing to say, like you’d thought it all out and gotten to the best answer like you always did.”

I pause, and one more swell of grief rolls over me. “I wish I knew the right thing to say to you to fix whatever I broke.”

Dominic is quiet for long enough that I almost forget he’s in the room. Exhaustion drags my eyelids down.

Then his voice reaches my ears, steady but a little gruff. “Don’t worry about it. It was already broken a long time before anything you did.”

The comment makes me frown. The door clicks shut behind him, and I sink down into a hazy sleep.