Page 44 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

“You don’t need me. You don’t want my help. I’m finally getting the message loud and clear. You can stop jerking me around, and I’ll go find something else to do with the rest of my life and you can go on with yours.”

“Riva.”

Andreas touches my shoulder, but I jerk away from him. I glare at him before casting my gaze around me at all four of the guys.

The tears well up again anyway. I cracked something open down in the basement with Andreas, and apparently all Dominic’s work didn’t stitch that part of me shut again.

My emotions bubble up to the surface faster than I can catch them. “I thought we were blood, and we’d be there for each other like we always used to be. That you’d see how much you all still meant to me and know I hadn’t changed. But that was obviously stupid of me, so I’m accepting reality.”

I move to get up, but Jacob catches me first. He looms over me, his knees coming to rest against mine, his hands framing my face and holding it so I have to look at him.

Unless I close my eyes.

But even though I refuse his gaze, he speaks anyway, his voice taut and emphatic. “It wasn’t stupid. I have been the biggest fucking asshole and an idiot on top of that. I don’t know what I’d have done if we’d lost you too, if I’d pushed you all the way to— Please don’t go.”

It was his voice that brought me back before I went too far; his nickname, his plea. The memory makes my skin tighten.

Even after everything, his touch and his closeness send a heated tingle over my skin. I don’t want that. No fucking way.

I squirm backward so fast Jacob releases his hold, but I bump into Dominic. With a strangled sound, I finally push myself to my feet.

My legs wobble but hold me. The torn dress clings to my body with drying blood— my blood, from injuries now sealed.

“I don’t know why it suddenly matters to any of you,” I spit out, blinking hard against the tears I refuse to acknowledge. “You couldn’t have known or liked me very much even before if you believed I turned on all of you that easily.”

Zian’s mouth twists. “You don’t understand.”

“No,” I shoot back. “I don’t. But I don’t need to.”

Andreas steps toward me again but doesn’t try to touch me this time. “I can show you.”

My gaze darts to him of its own accord. There’s so much fraught emotion in his eyes that my throat closes up at the sight.

“I can project the memory into your mind,” he goes on. “My memory of what happened that night for the four of us who never made it out of the facility. It doesn’t justify anything, but it might explain a little.”

My body balks, but curiosity gnaws at the back of my mind. What could possibly have happened that would make a difference?

Maybe it won’t. Maybe I’ll feel just as done with them as I do now.

Either way, at least I’ll know.

I glance around to check if any of the other guys is going to object to his offer, but they stay quiet, braced and waiting. I turn back to Andreas.

“Fine. But make it quick.”

He hesitates. “You might want to sit down.”

As much as I hate to admit it, he has a point, given how shaky my muscles still are. I lower myself onto a patch of grass that isn’t soaked with my blood, and Andreas kneels a few feet away from me.

He focuses on me with the ruddy sheen coming over his eyes, and the moonlit fields around me disappear.

I’m dashing out through my cell’s doorway, catching Dominic’s eye as he bursts from his room farther down the hall.

“They did it,” I say with a grin stretching my face, but it’s Andreas’s voice. Because this is Andreas’s memory—I’m seeing everything that went down through his eyes.

We race into the stairwell, flinging ourselves upward to reach the others as quickly as possible, and a troop of guardians barrel into view.

As if they were ready the whole time. As if they knew we’d be coming.

I hear a grunt from below, and then a tranquilizer dart has already struck me in the neck. Another guardian leaps forward with a taser that spews electricity through my body. I stumble on the steps?—

A momentary blackness. Then I’m sitting in one of the smaller training rooms with Dominic, Zian, and Jacob arranged around me. All of our hands are cuffed behind our backs.

A few guardians stand around the room with weapons braced at their sides. Another paces back and forth in front of us.

“What you tried to do tonight was highly irresponsible, ungrateful, and totally misguided. Did you really think there was some wonderful life waiting for you in the world out there, without our help?”

Andreas’s jaw tightens at the suggestion that we need the guardians, that they’re helping us rather than holding us down. We all keep quiet.

The guardian goes on. “At least one of you had the foresight to realize she was better off making her own arrangements with us than spending the rest of her existence on the run.”

Andreas’s head jerks up unbidden. I stare at the guardian through his eyes, the others doing the same.

There are no thoughts or emotions in the memory, only what I can interpret from the sensory details, but I think they all must have noticed that neither I—as Riva—nor Griffin were in the room. They must have been wondering what happened to us.

The guardian swipes a tablet off a desk at the side of the room and stalks back toward us. “We’re all built to look out for ourselves. You’re lucky we take as good care of you here as we do. Remember this the next time you have the urge to start scheming.”

He spins the tablet toward us with a video playing on the screen. Surveillance footage, dark and a little grainy because of that darkness.

It’s a view of the empty front yard outside the facility, lit only by the hazy glow of a few security lamps. A moment later, two figures dash into view.

Me—the actual me—and Griffin. I’m distantly aware of my real heart thumping faster in horrified anticipation of what I know is going to come.

I didn’t realize—I don’t really want to watch him die all over again.

But I can’t close my eyes, because they’re Andreas’s eyes, and he took in every second of this.

The figures on the screen scan the area. The one that’s a younger me pauses and then steps toward Griffin, pulling him into a kiss.

Andreas flinches.

Just as the real me lets Griffin go, the shot comes, blasting into his body. His frame jerks, his legs crumpling.

But that’s not even the most horrifying thing.

The me on the screen doesn’t scream out and struggle against an onslaught of attackers the way I know I did. She looks calmly down at Griffin’s body and then raises her head to nod to someone outside the footage.

A small squad of guardians appears. One of them pats my shoulder in a way that looks almost friendly.

They march me over to a truck and let me hop inside. I smile at them from the window before the truck drives away.

I fucking smile .

Back where Andreas is, Jacob thrashes against his handcuffs, pushing himself toward the guardian. “Where is he? Where’s my brother? What did you do to him?”

The guardian flicks off the tablet and gives Jacob a nonchalant look. “I’m afraid your brother didn’t survive. An important reminder of the potential consequences when you step out of line.”

“You fucking bastard!” Jacob snarls—and the memory falls away.

I’m sitting in my own body again, surrounded by cool fresh air and rustling grass. I gulp in a breath, my eyes burning all over again.

“It wasn’t true,” I burst out. “That isn’t how it happened. I never—they attacked me too. I tried to fight them—I tried to get to Griffin?—”

“I know,” Andreas says softly. “I believe you. They must have doctored the video to splice in footage they faked.”

I stare at him. “But you did believe it. You believed it this whole time.”

Dominic speaks up, quiet and a little ragged. “When they showed us the footage, we were already in shock. And then seeing that Griffin had died… It messed with our heads, made it hard to know what to believe. And you never did come back.”

I thump my hand against the ground. “I did. I did as soon as I fucking could.”

“You did,” Jacob agrees. “And we made a total mess of that too. Me more than anyone.” His jaw works as he lowers his gaze.

And maybe that does make sense, considering he was the one the most messed up. It was his brother who died—his twin.

But just looking at him makes something in me cringe away with the memory of all the harsh words and vicious commands he’s hurled at me since I broke them out.

I don’t know what to do with any of this. I don’t know where to go. Here I am in nothing but a ragged, bloody dress that doesn’t even fit right, not even sure what state I’m in, no money, no food…

With a monster lurking inside me, just waiting until someone makes me angry enough.

I swipe my hand across my mouth and look at the guys again. “What do we do now? The way you’re picturing it, anyway.”

They hesitate, exchanging glances. Jacob speaks first.

“We keep going after Engel. Find out what we can about what we are and how to fix what they’ve done to us—and how we can destroy the assholes who did it to us. They’re the ones who need to pay. For Griffin. For everything.”

Zian hunches his shoulders in apparent discomfort. “I just want to get rid of this shitty ‘talent.’”

“We are close,” Andreas says. “We could reach her in just another couple of days. And after we see what answers we can get… then we could decide where we go from there.”

I draw my knees up to my chest and hug them, my mind whirling with everything that’s happened, everything I’ve learned.

I want answers too. I want to meet the woman who was pushed out of the facility she built—who recorded my first smile like it gave her joy.

It’ll be a hell of a lot easier getting to her if we’re all working together. A hell of a lot easier to make sure the guardians don’t recapture us if we have each other’s backs.

Do I trust the guys to actually have my back now? I guess in a way they always did. Even when they thought I was a traitor, they stepped in every time I faced the slightest threat.

The only people they didn’t protect me from was themselves.

I know what I’d prefer, and I know what makes sense, and they aren’t the same thing. But if I have to choose…

I’ve survived more than a week of them treating me like the enemy. I can make it through a couple more days of their company while they’re not being assholes, right?

As long as they aren’t acting like jerks and pissing me off, they shouldn’t incite the twisted power inside me.

And the poison is gone. If I change my mind, I can leave whenever I want.

I sway to my feet again and square my shoulders. “All right. Then let’s stick to the plan.”