Unless I close my eyes.
But even though I refuse his gaze, he speaks anyway, his voice taut and emphatic. “It wasn’t stupid. I have been the biggest fucking asshole and an idiot on top of that. I don’t know what I’d have done if we’d lost you too, if I’d pushed you all the way to— Please don’t go.”
It was his voice that brought me back before I went too far; his nickname, his plea. The memory makes my skin tighten.
Even after everything, his touch and his closeness send a heated tingle over my skin. I don’twantthat. No fucking way.
I squirm backward so fast Jacob releases his hold, but I bump into Dominic. With a strangled sound, I finally push myself to my feet.
My legs wobble but hold me. The torn dress clings to my body with drying blood—myblood, from injuries now sealed.
“I don’t know why it suddenly matters to any of you,” I spit out, blinking hard against the tears I refuse to acknowledge. “You couldn’t have known or liked me very much even before if you believed I turned on all of you that easily.”
Zian’s mouth twists. “You don’t understand.”
“No,” I shoot back. “I don’t. But I don’t need to.”
Andreas steps toward me again but doesn’t try to touch me this time. “I can show you.”
My gaze darts to him of its own accord. There’s so much fraught emotion in his eyes that my throat closes up at the sight.
“I can project the memory into your mind,” he goes on. “My memory of what happened that night for the four of us who never made it out of the facility. It doesn’t justify anything, but it might explain a little.”
My body balks, but curiosity gnaws at the back of my mind. What could possibly have happened that would make a difference?
Maybe it won’t. Maybe I’ll feel just as done with them as I do now.
Either way, at least I’ll know.
I glance around to check if any of the other guys is going to object to his offer, but they stay quiet, braced and waiting. I turn back to Andreas.
“Fine. But make it quick.”
He hesitates. “You might want to sit down.”
As much as I hate to admit it, he has a point, given how shaky my muscles still are. I lower myself onto a patch of grass that isn’t soaked with my blood, and Andreas kneels a few feet away from me.
He focuses on me with the ruddy sheen coming over his eyes, and the moonlit fields around me disappear.
I’m dashing out through my cell’s doorway, catching Dominic’s eye as he bursts from his room farther down the hall.
“They did it,” I say with a grin stretching my face, but it’s Andreas’s voice. Because this is Andreas’s memory—I’m seeing everything that went down through his eyes.
We race into the stairwell, flinging ourselves upward to reach the others as quickly as possible, and a troop of guardians barrel into view.
As if they were ready the whole time. As if they knew we’d be coming.
I hear a grunt from below, and then a tranquilizer dart has already struck me in the neck. Another guardian leaps forward with a taser that spews electricity through my body. I stumble on the steps—
A momentary blackness. Then I’m sitting in one of the smaller training rooms with Dominic, Zian, and Jacob arranged around me. All of our hands are cuffed behind our backs.
A few guardians stand around the room with weapons braced at their sides. Another paces back and forth in front of us.
“What you tried to do tonight was highly irresponsible, ungrateful, and totally misguided. Did you really think there was some wonderful life waiting for you in the world out there, without our help?”
Andreas’s jaw tightens at the suggestion that weneedthe guardians, that they’re helping us rather than holding us down. We all keep quiet.
The guardian goes on. “At least one of you had the foresight to realize she was better off making her own arrangements with us than spending the rest of her existence on the run.”