Page 68 of Firedrake Betrayal
Meliah offers me a faint smile. “You should go.”
“And this person at the end of the street?”
Her expression hardens. “Should know better than to come looking for trouble. Brennan is safe here.”
I want to know what she was going to tell me, but I’m painfully aware that the longer I stay with my dad, the more danger I put him in.
Atticus wants me, and if he knew I was here?
“You’ll call us if there’s trouble?” I ask.
If trouble finds him here, we can get here fast and help. Atticus wants me, and I can’t be near Dad if Atticus attacks. Dad might not survive it.
Meliah nods. “I will.”
I stop resisting Patten and let him pull me out of the front door.
For now, the best thing I can do for Dad is to stay away. At least, until Atticus is dead or I come into the power I hope will be strong enough to protect him.
19
JADE
There’s no sign of Almeth when we pull up outside the narrow brown house nearly an hour after we left it. The street is quiet, not a single person around.
None of us feels easy about staying here, but we have nowhere else to go, and I refuse to leave Wilkerson while my dad is still so vulnerable.
Being around him isn’t safe. Leaving him behind could prove fatal to himandto Meliah.
Shep shifted to a wolf and spent several minutes sniffing around the house and down the street, returning to say Almeth hadn’t come back.
Patten thinks his dad won’t run straight to Atticus to tell him where we are. He expects his dad will come back and try to convince us that we can trust him, then stab us in the back the first chance he gets.
It’s a worrying thought that chased me up the stairs and into the bathroom.
I decided that I needed a break from the tension building between Dominik and the others. I might be wrong, but I’m almost certain that Dominik was the person watching me and Shep in the kitchen last night. He hasn’t admitted it, but there’sbeen an almost frustrated, angry look in his eyes I’d rather avoid for a bit.
I glance in the mirror before I start the shower. There’s no sign of the gold firedrake I glimpsed in the refrigerator, so I must have just been seeing things. It’s not like I don’t have a million things on my mind.
A long, hot shower doesn’t relax me as much as I’d hoped it would. Mainly because the second I step out, my eyes go to the steamed-up mirror and I think of another change on its way.
Quickly drying myself with a towel hanging on the back of the door, I swipe my palm over the steamed glass and take a step back, dropping my towel.
I examine my body objectively. Or try to.
Nothing has changed.
Yet.
I’m still the same petite Jade I was before. My breasts are small, my waist narrow, and skin pale from all my time in the attic. I’m not a woman who has curves in all the right places. While I’d like to be a little curvier, maybe have bigger breasts, I don’t mind how I look.
“Ordinary,” I murmur.
But I have three men in my life now who seem to think I’m beautiful. I don’t see it, but I’m glad they do.
And then there’s Dominik…
I don’t care what he thinks of me.
