Page 106 of Hunted By Fae
“What?” I challenge. “He’s her what? Boyfriend?” I scoff, a bitter grin lazy on my mouth. “No, he’s a fucking decoy. He wears her scent.”
Emily’s twisted face starts to soften, features slackening into something like shock.
“Just like Micheal wears mine,” I say.
She blinks.
Just like Bee has a pair of my gloves wrapped in a plastic bag and crammed into her backpack.
We made sure to have solutions to every potential problem—and that included diversion tactics. You never know if a stray will pick up one of our scents and follow.
But I don’t add that to the info-dump I just unloaded on Emily.
She’s realising enough without it.
The understanding hollows her out.
But I see through her.
Emily is too full of false morals.
I remember a month ago, when she was fucking Jace before he died, and he definitely had a girlfriend in the group at that time when they were sneaking off together—a girlfriend he’d had since the Before, which somehow feels worse.
I remember a month before that, a stampede came crashing down the road of a rural town we were passing through, and Emily was caught in my flashlight—caughtshoving Maddi out of her way so she could steal her shield. Emily literally grabbed Maddi, dragged her out of the truck, and threw her into the path of the stampede, where she was crushed and mangled and killed.
But when the stampede passed, Emily was safe and sound in the truck—acting shocked.
I see you, Emily. And now you’re worried about using people, sacrificing them?
Spare me.
“Bee wants this?” she asks, and now it’s suspicion that hardens her face and drags her narrowed gaze all over me. “Or you do?”
My smile comes with a shoulder-jerking scoff.
There she goes, seeing a difference between me and Bee that doesn’t exist. She thinks I am the cutthroat one, because I don’t dip myself in sugar.
Bee is poison, and I love that about her.
Sweet, sugary poison. She is belladonna.
Me, I’m more of a bitter poison that comes with labels and exclamation points.
I’m cyanide.
“Wake the fuck up, Em.” I scoff and watch the blaze alight the darkness in the distance. “The people who have survived this long aren’t good people. We have survived because we’re willing to do terrible, horrible things. The kind are weak in the dark.” I turn my bitter smile on her. “And so the dark crushes them… like Maddi was crushed, remember?”
Emily’s jaw tightens—and for a long moment, she just stares at me, trying to work out if I know what she did, or I only suspect it.
After a long moment, she tugs the sleeping bag tighter around her shoulders. Her breath mists at her face, words unspoken, lost in the chill.
“If you don’t want to come, I won’t force you,” I tell her. “I’ll leave on my own and find Bee. You can stay and warn the others. That’s up to you.”
The breath she exhales sags her shoulders, and she turns her blotchy cheek to me. “When do we leave?”
All false morals and values.
“Bee said she’ll give me the signal. We wait for that to come through.” I consider her for a moment, the redness of her eyes, the weight of her lashes still lingering. “I’ll stay here with you, keep watch. But you should get some sleep if you can, then finish the rest of that drink. I don’t know how long we’ll be walking in the snow.”
