Though my body craves sleep like a junkie needs a fix, I walk straight past my bed and into the bathroom and turn on the shower. With all the sweat, puke, blood and tears I’ve been through tonight, it’s all I can do to wait for the water to warm up. I’m desperate to feel clean. To be clean.
And the first order of business is brushing my teeth. I reach for my toothbrush and toothpaste, start to scrub vigorously.
Declan follows me. He begins stripping off before he even hits the bathroom. I glance at him in the mirror—because I’m tired, not dead—then freeze as I get my first good look at him since he tucked me into bed hours ago.
His back has a long scratch down it—from left shoulder to right hip—and his chest and stomach are splattered with . . . blood?
“What happened to you?” I demand, rinsing out my mouth before walking closer so I can get a better look at the damage. I’m tired enough that it’s entirely possible I might be delusional.
But the way he reacts—stiffening and turning away from me like he has something to hide—sets off a whole cacophony of warning bells in my head.
“Declan? Answer me. Whose blood is that? How did you get injured?”
“Don’t make a big deal of it, Xandra.”
“Don’t make a big deal? I get a little bump on my head and you act like it’s the end of the world. You’re scratched up and covered in blood and I’m not supposed to be concerned? That’s bullshit.”
I’m close enough to touch now, and I run my fingers over a particularly wicked-looking portion of the scratch. He flinches away. “You need to take care of that,” I tell him, “Or it will get infected.”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine.” I bend down, look at his pants. And I realize, with horror, that they, too, are splattered with blood. “Whose blood is this?”
He shrugs. “It must be Alride’s. Or those guards’.”
“No way. You already know that Alride’s scene was almost completely bloodless. And you didn’t go near the guards. You certainly weren’t near enough to get this kind of spatter off two dead men.”
He sighs, runs a hand over his eyes. “Look, Xandra, can we not do this now? We’re both exhausted, both have had one hell of a night. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”
Part of me thinks he’s right, that we should just shower and go to bed. Daylight and a good night’s sleep make everything look better. And yet, I can’t just let it go. How can I when the man I love, a man who has made no bones of his dislike for and determination to break up the ACW, is covered in blood—on the same night that one of their most important Councilors is dead?
I think of Alride. Think of the missing blood and the hideous way he died and that more is to come—there has to be more to come. Otherwise, why the blood? Why Shelby? Why any of this?
A sinking feeling starts in the pit of my stomach. Even as I pray it isn’t true, I’m reading the writing on the wall. Putting two and two together and coming up with the most terrifying four imaginable. “Did you do it?” I whisper. It feels like everything we are, everything we have depends on this answer. It isn’t true—at least I don’t think it is—but after our conversation yesterday, I need to hear him say it. Need to hear the word no fall from his lips.
He thrusts an impatient hand through his too-long hair. “Did I do what, Xandra? You’re going to have to be more specific. Did I find you when you were in danger? Did I get you back here before you could be arrested for an unspeakable crime? Did I cover up the fact that we were in that damn room to begin with?”
He stops once he gets a good look at my face. From what I’ve seen these last few weeks, Declan’s typical modus operandi is to go on the attack, to make whoever is opposing him feel and look so foolish that they back down rather than pursue their line of questioning. He isn’t going to do that with me. Not now. Not on this.
“Did you kill Councilor Alride?”
He stares at me for several long, inscrutable seconds. His face is blank, his eyes as guarded as I have ever seen them. And I realize that the old Declan is back, the one I met eight years ago and the one I met again eighteen days ago. Not until his reappearance—not until this moment when distance once more yawns between us—did I realize how much Declan has softened in the last couple of weeks. How much he’s let me in.
With that thought comes regret, real, powerful, overwhelming. “Declan—”
“No. Don’t back down now, Xandra. You can’t accuse me of killing Alride, and then take it all back like a bad case of buyer’s remorse.” Without looking at me, he steps into the shower. Starts to wash.