Page 22 of Make Them Cry
I freeze.
Knight presses. “You’re watching her around the clock. You set up fake accounts just to reroute her search history away from trackers. You gave her the good coffee beans. And now you’re furnishing a safe house like you’re trying to impress her mother.”
“I’m not?—”
Arrow cuts in gently. “You love her.”
I don’t answer.
Because I don’thaveto.
The truth is already in the room, thick as smoke.
Knight raises a brow. “Damn. So it’s like that?”
“Yeah,” I say quietly. “It’s like that.”
They don’t tease me. Not this time.
I sit on the edge of the new bed, staring down at my hands. “I can’t tell her. Not yet. She trusts Mask. But she doesn’t trustme.Not really. Not enough. If I tell her now, I ruin the one thing keeping her sane.”
Arrow nods. “So you wait.”
“Waiting sucks,” I mutter.
“Falling sucks more,” Knight adds.
Arrow chuckles. “Nah. Once you find the right person… falling is the easy part.”
As if on cue, the door creaks open a few minutes later, and Juno, Arrow’s girlfriend, steps in, wrapped in a big puffer jacket and holding a small lavender plant in a blue ceramic pot.
“It’s not much,” she says, placing it on the shelf by the back window, “but it’s alive. Which is more than I can say for most of the vibes in here.”
Arrow grins and pulls her into a kiss. Soft. Familiar. Full of the kind of history I used to think wasn’t real until I watched them survive hell and walk out the other side.
“Now it feels like home,” he murmurs, forehead pressed to hers.
Juno smiles, then glances at me. “So. River?”
“Yeah,” I say. “We’re moving her in tomorrow. She doesn’t know yet.”
“You gonna tell her?”
I pause. “What? About this place?”
Juno gives me a look.
“Oh,” I say. “That.”
“She’s going to figure it out eventually, Gage.” She glances over at Arrow. “I did when Arrow tried to trick me.”
Arrow acts offended. “It wasn’t trickery, Juno. I was keeping you from doing something far more dangerous.”
Juno rests her dark eyes on me. “She’s gonna find out.”
“I know.”
Juno crosses her arms. “She’s smart. Fierce. But she’s tired of running. Don’t let her think she has to run from you, too.”
