Page 89 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

But he pushes himself swiftly up the stairs with an air of determination that radiates through his body. He walks straight to the room where Jacob is sitting on the floor by the window and stops on the threshold.

“We need to talk about Riva.”

The Jacob of weeks ago answers Drey with the same coolly dispassionate tone he used so often back then. “I told you on the train. We’ll revisit that subject after we’ve gotten whatever we can from Engel.”

As I watch from within, Andreas marches right into the room with a shake of his head. “No. All the venom—in every form—needs to stop now. It shouldn’t have gone on for even this long.”

Jacob’s icy gaze turns into a glower. I can see why he didn’t love the idea of me revisiting this conversation.

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

Andreas crosses his arms in front of him. “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.”

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

Before Jacob can finish his dismissal, Zian and Dominic appear in the doorway.

Zian swipes at his bleary eyes. “We’re awake. What’s going on?”

Andreas turns to them with a sense of urgency winding through his limbs. “We’ve been wrong about Riva. 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.”

I can’t deny how emphatically he says the words, how strongly he clearly feels about making that statement. It’s etched into the memory.

He was sure. He wanted to make things right.

Zian knits his brow and goes to sit on the edge of the bed. “But we saw?—”

Andreas’s tone turns terse with frustration. “I know what we saw. 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 from the doorway. “It looked awfully real.”

Jacob’s sneering voice would make me flinch if I were in my own body. “Drey just wants to think it was fake so he can feel better about getting cozy with the traitor.”

Fresh tension tremors through Andreas’s body.

“She’s not a traitor,” he retorts. “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?”

“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. ”

The part of me I’m still aware of within Andreas’s mind starts to ache with the vehemence in his voice. I missed all this—I had no idea how hard he fought for me.

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

Andreas clenches his jaw. “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. 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.”

Jacob pushes to his feet. “It’s not about me at all. It’s about Griffin, who’s dead, because she?—”

“She loved Griffin,” Andreas interrupts. “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.”

Jacob’s face flushes with fury. “And I suppose she told you that she loves you too, huh?”

Andreas’s voice doesn’t waver in its confidence for an instant. “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.”

Oh, Drey. I want to cry and I want to hug him, and a million other clashing desires.

Jacob practically sputters. “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. ”

The words don’t strike the same chill in me hearing them now. He was using them as a club to smack Jacob into accepting his argument, nothing more.

The last painful shards that were still digging into me melt away.

I’m not happy about what Andreas did or the choices he made when we first reunited. But he wasn’t scheming against me up until the end.

He really had realized his mistake, and he was fighting tooth and claw to correct the whole group’s course the best way he knew how.

In the memory, Andreas’s gaze has jerked toward the doorway where that past me has appeared, sickly pale and braced defensively. Then, with a hitch of my senses, I’m falling back into my own head, faced with Drey’s worried eyes here in the present.

For the first few seconds, I can only stare back at him. My innards feel so jumbled up it’s a wonder I’m still breathing.

Then I reach out my hand and touch his cheek.

Andreas closes his eyes at the tentative caress. A glint of a tear seeps out from beneath one lid.

“You’ve got it, Tink,” he murmurs. “You’ve got all of me.”

The armor I’ve built up must have cracked, because the declaration sinks right into me. And I believe him.

I stroke my thumb across his cheekbone. Then I stand up on wobbly legs, not entirely sure what happens next, but knowing this is my story now.

My soap opera. My melodrama.

I might still be hurting, but I can feel more than that. I want to be more than that.

I tug Andreas up by the collar of his dress shirt. He peers at me, uncertain.

The lilting music is still winding around us. So I say, “Dance with me.”