Page 323 of Shadowblood Souls
I grimace at him. “You’re acting like nothing matters. I’m trying to figure out if anythingdoesmatter to you.”
He lifts his hand to set it over mine—the one that’s pressed flat against his chest just beneath his shoulder. The second his fingers brush over my skin, a tingle races through my veins.
All the shadows in my blood wake up and quiver with anticipation. And something flickers in Griffin’s eyes, the closest thing to an emotional response I’ve seen in him so far.
Huh. Does touching me affect him like it does me?
I guess that would make sense. The other guys all feel the same magnetic pull between us, the urge to connect physically and let our shadows meld together.
Whatever the guardians did to Griffin, maybe they couldn’t stamp out that one aspect of his nature.
His gaze stays a little more intense, a little morepresent, as he tucks his hand around mine.
“You matter to me, Riva. The guys matter to me. All the shadowbloods here do.”
The physical contact and our closeness are distracting me more than I like. I shove away from him, yanking my hand from his and lowering the knife.
“You have a funny way of showing it. We finally got out like we’d always wanted to—we’d have come for you too if we’d known you were alive—and you helped the guardians drag us back into their prison.”
I regret stepping back when I see the vagueness creep back over Griffin’s expression. Like he really was more here with me for a moment and now it’s gone.
“I told you why I helped them,” he says. “You were doing a lot of damage out in the world. Destroying things, killing people.”
“People who were attacking us!”
Griffin is silent for a moment, studying me. When he speaks again, his voice has gone quieter.
“I didn’t help right away, you know. Some of the guardians came to me and told me what had happened, showed me pictures from the place where they said you’d been doing cage fights, said you were the one who murdered all those people. I didn’t believe them.”
My throat closes up. It takes a moment before I can speak. “That wasn’t— I didn’tmeanto kill the whole audience. I didn’t even know it was going to happen.”
“But that’s a problem, isn’t it?” Griffin’s tone has turned coaxing, as if I’m a wild animal he’s working at taming. “Most of those people were just there to watch. They weren’t the ones controlling you. Did they all deserve to die?”
My whole body tenses with the surge of anguish. “I had no idea I even had that power then. I’m learning how to control it.”
“It wasn’t just that,” Griffin says. “It isn’t just you.” He pauses. “I didn’t believe it until they showed me video footage from Ursula Engel’s cabin. She had surveillance cameras, you know? So I could see the way you twisted and broke the bodies, just like at the arena.”
“That’s when you started tracking us for them,” I say with a lurch of my gut as the understanding hits me.
After Engel’s house—that was when the guardians started finding us so much faster. We couldn’t stay anywhere for more than a day without them showing up.
Griffin inclines his head. “For a little while. But then, in Miami… Their strategy wasn’t working. They couldn’t take you in, and one of the shadowbloods died while they were trying, and I thought maybe I’d been wrong. That it was safer letting you go.”
I swallow thickly. “But then you changed your mind again?”
“They showed me what Jacob did in Havana. All those peoplehebroke—and then cut off their hands…” Griffin knits his brow as if the thought confuses him. “He was getting worse, being out in the world. More violent. And then Clancy came to me and told me how he was going to change things, so the Guardianship wouldn’t work like it had before. So you wouldn’t be trapped the same way. So you could use your powers to make things better.”
“And you believed him.”
“He didn’t lie. Here we are.”
I flip the knife in my hand and fling it at one of the targets. It smacks straight into the central ring, but I get no satisfaction out of the sight.
“Here we are,” I say. “Working as hired goons for whatever criminals feel like paying him to take on their dirtiest work. How is murdering people for money better than murdering them to protect ourselves, Griffin?”
Griffin walks over to the table by the knives, but he only looks at them. He never liked weapons practice much even in our old lives.
“I didn’t know about Clancy getting paid. But he does need money to keep things running—to keep supporting us. If he chooses the jobs that do the most good for the world at the same time, it doesn’t have to be a problem.”
