Page 51 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

The Girl We Knew

(A Jacob POV Bonus Scene)

What made Jacob realize he was wrong about Riva and decide to race to her rescue when she ran toward the train tracks? Find out in this alternative POV scene from his prespective…

It takes way too long for Andreas to come upstairs.

The other guys have already crashed on the bed in the second bedroom. I’ve staked myself out next to one of the two windows in the main bedroom, the open door giving me a view of the stairs.

Mostly I’m looking out over the lawn toward the road. With the moonlight gleaming down from the clear sky, the fields outside are cast in shades of gray.

If the guardians track us all the way out here somehow, they’ll most likely come from that direction—from the road. And if they try to swoop in by helicopter or hitch a ride on a train like we did, I’ll hear the engine well before they get here.

Finally, the stairs creak. I don’t glance over until his form appears at the top of the stairs in at the edge of my vision.

I can barely make out Andreas’s face in the darkness. He might as well be a specter haunting the house. But something about his stance as he comes to a stop in the doorway makes my muscles tense up with frustration.

He’s done something he shouldn’t have. I can sense it in everything from his curly hair gone askew to the determined gleam in his eyes to the way the jeans that aren’t his hang on his hips.

My fingers curl toward my palms. I’m not surprised at all when the first words out of his mouth are, “We need to talk about Riva.”

“I told you on the train,” I say without even needing to think about it. “We’ll revisit that subject after we’ve gotten whatever we can from Engel.”

As he walks into the room, Drey shakes his head with a rustle of his curls. “No. All the venom—in every form—needs to stop now. It shouldn’t have gone on for even this long.”

I glower at him. I wasn’t totally convinced his plan was going to get us anything useful instead of coming back to bite us in the ass, and obviously I should have listened to those doubts.

“It isn’t up to you. You don’t get to make the call.”

He folds his arms over his chest, letting his voice rise a little. “You’re not in charge here either. We’re in this together—isn’t that how it’s supposed to go? You’re not always right, Jake, and this one time you’re incredibly wrong.”

My teeth set on edge. “I guess you can make your case once everyone’s awake. In the meantime?—”

“We’re awake.” Zian appears in the doorway, rubbing sleep from his eyes, with a weary Dominic behind him. “What’s going on?”

Of course his sharp hearing picked up on the tense conversation even while dozing. I glare at Andreas to drive home the fact that he’s woken up our friends, who needed their sleep, but he can’t even be bothered to look guilty about it.

“We’ve been wrong about Riva,” Drey says, focusing on the other guys now. “I got the whole story out of her, and she hasn’t lied at all. She didn’t turn on us even a little bit.”

Zee’s forehead furrows. He trudges across the room and sinks down onto the edge of the bed, his head hanging for a moment as he appears to absorb the claim. “But we saw?—”

“I know what we saw,” Andreas snaps with a jerk of his hand through the air. “It’s what made even me treat her like shit when we should have been welcoming her back. But they must have faked it—we should have realized that.”

Dominic frowns where he’s stalled just inside the doorway. “It looked awfully real.”

I let my lips curl with a sneer. “Drey just wants to think it was fake so he can feel better about getting cozy with the traitor.”

Andreas’s eyes flash. “She’s not a traitor. You think you’re so smart, Jake. Do you really figure the people running the facility are skilled enough to genetically engineer us into whatever the hell we are, but they couldn’t handle doctoring a minute of video footage?”

My hackles rise. “I figure there was no reason for them to bother.”

“No reason? How about giving us someone to be angry at other than the guardians—who’re the ones who actually killed Griffin?

How about adding that little sliver of doubt about whether we can trust even each other to try to deflect another escape attempt?

The second part didn’t work, but the first sure as hell did. ”

I tense up despite my best intentions. Even the second part did at first. I remember way too well how for the first few months after I watched Griffin fall, even the three guys around me transformed into strangers to my eyes.

“You don’t know ,” I retort. “You’ve bought into her victim routine and now you want an excuse to make that okay.”

Andreas’s jaw clenches. “Do you even listen to yourself? We did know Riva. She was one of us, right there with us through all the shit they put us through, and she has been since she came back too. Why the fuck we ever trusted what the guardians showed us over what we’d seen our whole lives—that’s the crazy part. ”

“I planned out every part of that escape down to the minute. We didn’t let a hint of it slip. How else could they have known to be waiting for us like that?”

“Oh, so that’s what this is really about,” Andreas says. “You can’t admit that you might have slipped up somewhere, or that maybe you simply weren’t quite as brilliant as you’d like to be.”

I shove myself to my feet. “It’s not about me at all. It’s about Griffin, who’s dead, because she?—”

“She loved Griffin,” Drey cuts in. “Which you wouldn’t doubt at all if you ever bothered to listen to her instead of the angry story you’ve built up in your head.”

My stomach balls into a scalding knot. “And I suppose she told you that she loves you too, huh?”

Andreas’s determined expression doesn’t falter even slightly. “She loves all of us. Or she did, anyway, but it seems like she could still love even you in spite of what an asshole you’ve been to her if you got your head on straight.”

I hadn’t thought there was anything left in me other than resolve and rage. But those words pierce open something way deep down inside me and set loose the tiniest flicker of hope.

My stance goes rigid, a renewed wave of fury rushing up through me. How can I want something even a little bit that Griffin had first, that he can never have now?

All that fury expels itself in Drey’s direction. “What a stupid fucking fairytale. And you believe all this bullshit she’s been spouting, huh?”

“Yes,” Andreas says firmly, “I do. Because I’ve been watching her and listening to her for days, and everything adds up to it being true.

In case you’ve forgotten, the whole reason I started ‘getting cozy’ with her was so she’d open up about things she wouldn’t have told us otherwise.

I held up my end of the deal. Now you’ve got to listen. ”

As the last words tumble from his mouth, a movement just outside the door catches my eyes. Riva has jerked to a stop where she’s slipped up the stairs, her face gone rigid with apparent horror.

A sick sense of satisfaction fills me so completely I don’t even mind that she’s somehow gotten out of the basement.

“Yes,” I say, yanking my gaze back to Andreas with a tight smile. “That was the deal. And now she knows it too.”

Let’s see how long she can keep up her innocent act in the face of this revelation.

Riva walks through the doorway, her eyes glued to Drey, and then halts. Her voice comes out scratchy. “You were acting friendly just to trick me into telling you things?”

For once in his life, Andreas seems to grope for his words. “It wasn’t like that, not exactly. And it isn’t like that now.”

Oh, please. He needs to realize how much bullshit that is too.

“It was exactly like that.” I turn my attention back to Riva, shaping every word to cut through whatever fantasy she thinks she’s caught him up in.

“We had a little conversation right after we arrived at the college, while you were locked up in your room. I wanted to keep you out of our investigations, but Andreas insisted that we should get you involved so we could see if you’d give something away in the moment.

He promised he’d convince you to trust him so you wouldn’t be as guarded. ”

Riva’s mouth twists, her claws slicing through the air at her sides. Already prepared for a fight.

“You argued in front of me about whether I should come along,” she says, as if that means anything.

I smile coolly at her. “Yes, we did. We had to sell the idea in a way you’d believe. And it gave Drey his first chance to play your champion.”

Andreas, the fool, is still trying to pick up the pieces like there was ever anything worth fixing here. “Riva, I swear that has nothing to do with tonight or—or— I believe you. I realized we were wrong. I?—”

I interrupt him before he can babble on any more. “He’s very good, isn’t he? Got you to let your hair down and everything.” I cut my gaze to Drey. “You can stop now. I can’t see how you’ll get anything more out of her than you already have.”

“Will you shut the fuck up, Jake?” Andreas snaps, but Riva is deathly silent. Taking it all in, understanding just how much she threw away four years ago.

She’s never getting us back. None of us. I’m making sure of it, like I should have to begin with. For Griffin.

Her lips part. “Why would you— How could you?—?”

She doesn’t seem to know how to go on. Does she think those puppy-dog eyes are going to work even on Andreas now?

A twinge of uncertainty quivers through me, rankling my nerves. Enough with the charade.

I glare at her. “Do you actually think you deserve better?”

She reaches up to grasp the damned necklace that Griffin gave her, as if she has any right to hold on to a gift of his friendship. She glances at the other guys who’ve remained still and silent by the bed.

“Are both of you okay with all of this? Really?”

Zian looks sick, but he doesn’t deny it. “We needed to know—we needed to be sure…”

“We’ve had to look out for ourselves,” Dominic grits out.