Page 17 of Petal

His gaze slides down my body, making my skin tingle, then up to my face. It’s as deliberate as his words. Although I enjoy male admiration, this is too straight-forward.

“I’ll think of something”—his gaze flickers down and up again—“appropriate.”

Dick.

I don’t like this already—he assesses me like a new escort—and kill my smile when he turns around slowly.

“Marlow, please escort the ladies out.”

Marlow looks up from his phone.

“I want to see Abbie!” Callie says loudly and takes several steps after Archer. “Abigail Richardson.”

I step up to her just in case she does something silly.

Archer stalls, turning around to face her. “You can’t.”

This is not going anywhere. Disappointment seeps through my veins, making me restless. I want action. Instead it feels like I got stuck in this Kai-Callie mess.

“I want to see her!” Callie insists, taking another step toward Archer.

Now Marlow seems to get curious as he puts his phone down and stares at Archer. But there is something else in that stare—worry.

“You can’t keep me away from her,” Callie says angrily now. “You can’t even keep me here!”

Her voice is too demanding, considering the circumstances.

Archer stares at her for a moment. “She is dead,” he says calmly, and even I open my mouth to tell him this is not a joke, then close it. His gaze is too serious—no, it’s not a joke. “She had an epilepsy attack and didn’t make it,” he explains with the coldness of a coroner.

The words are like icicles that pierce through my cheerfulness.

Shit.

I glance back and forth between Callie and him.

That’s all she talked about back at the Transfer Center on the mainland, which seems like an eternity ago. She wanted to see her cousin, the only family she had left.

I hate moments like this—when a tragedy hits the person next to you, and you want to feel sad and awful about it, and you do for a minute, but then your mind goes to the mundane while the person will forever be stuck in that trauma. You don’t know what to say, how to comfort. You wish it were over.

Callie frowns, shaking her head in denial. I wonder if she thinks it’s Archer’s sick joke. But there is no point in jokes like this, not on the island, not post-Change.

She realizes it, too, and when her breathing gets heavy, her chest rising and falling dramatically, I know she is hyperventilating.

“Babe, you need to calm down,” I say, knowing that she will either collapse or do something stupid.

Marlow hasn’t taken his eyes off us. He is just like me—trying to watch out for the signs of a storm before it arrives.

Archer watches indifferently, his lips a thin line, his gaze cold as ice.

His phone rings, the sound of it so alien after weeks at the survivalist camp that it jerks me out of my stupor. He looks at the screen. “Ladies, you are dismissed,” he says indifferently.

Callie’s lips curl into a scowl as she murmurs, “You kill people around you—”

“Babe!” I cut her off. “Let’s go,” I say softer. “You need to process this.”

Archer only rolls his eyes and picks up the phone, turning his back to us.

“Yes… Dad, I’ll call you back in five… No, but I’d rather…”

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