Page 121 of Shadowblood Souls
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 subjectafterwe’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 evenmetreat 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 justwantsto 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 fewmonths after I watched Griffin fall, even the three guys around me transformed into strangers to my eyes.
“You don’tknow,” 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? Wedidknow 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?—”
“ShelovedGriffin,” 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.
