Page 25 of Defeated

“What is it?” Zoe asks.

“Nothing.”

She keeps chewing her lip as she watches me scramble the eggs between sips of my coffee.

“Guilt,” I say.

Zoe jumps at my response, coffee splashing on a kitchen counter. She may have relaxed her guard a little, but I’m not even close to being on her list of people she can trust. And suddenly, I very much want to be on that list.

“That’s why I run from women. Guilt.”

I don’t know why, out of any woman over the last five years, Zoe is the one I’ve opened up to. But the words just seem to want to come in a way they never have before.

“What do you have to be guilty about?” She edges back, as if I’ve given her the perfect reason to return to wariness.

“I did something a long time ago and someone died because of it.” I stare at the eggs in the pan, but I’m not seeing the bright yellow mixture anymore.

“You killed someone,” she says.

“In a way.” I add the salt and pepper to the mixture I should have added before.

“You either killed someone or you didn’t. Which is it?”

I lift my eyes from the eggs, and for one long moment I hold her gaze.

She’s a stranger. Someone I might likely never see again. Won’t tell Mack or Penny or anyone else who will look at me differently if they know what I did.

“Yes.” I wait for her to turn around and walk out. She was wary before. There’s only one reaction anyone could have to being told they were sharing a kitchen with a killer.

Her chin goes up as she searches my face, and then she puts her mug down on the counter. “Are we having toast as well?”

I’m too struck dumb to answer her, so I just nod and watch her pick up the loaf of bread from the counter and turn to the toaster.

9

ZOE

He’s trying to scare me away.

I feel his attention as I toast the bread, then return to my coffee.

He told me he killed someone, but there was so much anguish in his eyes, I knew if he had, he hadn’t meant to.

“The eggs are burning,” I tell him.

He whips his head back around and saves the scrambled eggs. After dishing the eggs onto the plates, he flicks off the stove and carries both plates to the dining table.

It’s small, it’s round, and I’m almost positive our knees are going to collide under it.

Too close to be sitting to a shifter when my usual reaction is to run from them.

“Zoe?”

I blink myself back into the present.

Chris is hovering beside the table, brow furrowed in concern.

I don’t let myself think too long or too hard about why I’m not running from him after what he admitted to me. Instead, I carry my mug of coffee to the table and take the fork he offers me.

---