“We’ve got to stop doing this,” I said, motioning to the towel. “It’s becoming a habit.”
He arched a brow.
I don’t know why I said what I did next. The words just blurted out of me. “I should’ve listened to her. She told me to get up and get dressed, but I took too long. I asked too many questions. Maybe if I hadn’t, we would’ve gotten out of the house before—”
“I don’t think so, Peaches.” The cloth dangled from his fingers. “I think if you hadn’t stalled, they would’ve captured you outside, before we could get to you.”
“Before she…” I took a deep, slow breath to ease the suffocating weight in my chest and throat. “She said she tried, but he was coming for me. She didn’t get to say who it was.”
Luc took my hand, folding the warm cloth over my fingers as he lifted his gaze to mine. “No one is going to take you. No one, Evie.”
I believed him.
I did.
“You said she called you. I think she was talking about you,” I said, and that made sense, that she was trying to assure me. “I can do it myself—clean my hands.”
Several long moments passed as we stared at each other.
“I know you can, but I need to do this.”
Letting out a shaky breath, I nodded. Brief silence fell between us. “Luc?”
Those thick lashes lifted as his hand stilled over mine.
“I told her I didn’t trust her,” I whispered. “When she asked for me to just trust her, I said I didn’t.”
He leaned in, getting eye level with me again. “Don’t do this to yourself.” His voice was just as low as mine.
“I said to her…” My gaze strayed from his face, back to my hands. My hands were clean, spotless except for under my fingernails. I swallowed the knot in my throat, but it got stuck. “I told her she took my life from me.”
His forehead came to rest against mine. “Evie—”
“And she said she was trying to give me back my life. That’s what she said before she was shot.”
The towel disappeared in a flicker of Source and ash, then he was moving and pulling me toward him, and we ended up tangled together on the couch. The strange, curt distance in the SUV was no longer there. He held me, and I held him, because we’d both lost tonight.
We’d lost a lot.
Some time passed before Grayson spoke. “She said things were getting out of hand? At Fort Detrick?”
“She didn’t say that, but I know she’d just come from work,” I said, and Grayson turned from the window. “She said things were going to start happening and that they would happen fast. I don’t know if she was talking about the people who came to the house or something else.”
Rubbing my hands over my thighs, I tried to remember her words more clearly, but the panic and confusion of those moments made it hard. “She’d packed a bag with this fake ID and money—” I realized it was still in the SUV. “She had a lot of money. Thousands, probably.”
“She was prepared,” Luc said, sliding his arm away from my waist. “Unless she normally has thousands lying around, she was prepared.”
“Which means she knew this could happen,” I whispered. “This whole time…”
Luc looked away for a moment, and then his eyes found mine. “I’m sorry, Evie, for what happened to her, for what you had to witness.”
Now I was the one who couldn’t look at him. I dipped my chin, weary. “Thank you,” I whispered, clearing my throat. “Do you know why they killed her? Like, they had to know she was unregistered. She worked for them.”
“Seems to me that she was trying to get you out. She knew they were coming, and she wasn’t going to let them take you.” Sliding his hands over his face, he shook his head. “Which leaves us with a hell of a lot of questions.”
I sucked in a shaky breath. “She knew what happened to me at school—with April and the Cassio Wave—but if she was in on whatever was given to me, then why would she try to stop them from taking me?”
“There’s no way she didn’t know what was given to you,” Luc said, his gaze sweeping over my face. “She’s the one who administered the serum.”
“That doesn’t mean she knew exactly what was in it,” I reasoned desperately.
A muscle flexed in Luc’s jaw as he focused on the scratches along the surface of the coffee table.
“Either way, she was trying to get you out of there before they got there,” Grayson said. “They must have known that.”
“And the Daedalus would see that as a betrayal,” Luc added. “It wouldn’t matter what she did for them in the past or the present; they would see her as a traitor, and they do not tolerate those they see as an enemy.”