Riva
The second the wordsperfect solutionleave Jacob’s mouth, I can tell that I’m not going to like his proposal. Even so, I’m not prepared for his next move.
He extends his muscular arm, almost impressive enough to rival Zian’s brawn, and squeezes his fingers into a fist. And a row of purple spikes shoot from his skin from the side of his wrist to just before his elbow.
My pulse stutters, my body tensing with the instinctive sense that whatever those are, they’re a threat. They look like the spines on some exotic reptile.
Jacob never showed anything like that in the time I knew him before.
He stares at me with his ice-hard eyes as if daring me to comment.
Andreas clears his throat. “Jake, man, I’m not sure—”
“It’s simple,” Jacob interrupts. “I give her a mild dose of the poison. Then she’ll have to stick with us so Dom can heal the damage regularly enough to keep her alive.”
His lips curve into a tight smile, his gaze boring into mine. “I developed some new abilities while you were enjoying the high life. If I don’t jab you much, it’ll take a while before the toxin builds up enough to be fatal. But there isn’t any regular cure—the guardians testedthatvery thoroughly. You take off on us, you’re dead.”
Zian’s dark eyebrows have drawn together. I think he might protest this torturous suggestion, but instead he glances at Dominic. “But if Dom has to keep healing her…”
Jacob looks over his shoulder at Dominic, his face softening just slightly for the first time since we’ve reunited. Because he still cares about the other guys, just not about me.
“Only if you’re okay with it,” he says. “It shouldn’t taketoomuch, just once or twice a day, to keep her functioning. And hopefully we won’t need her for too many days.”
Like the boy I remember, Dominic takes a moment to think. I don’t totally get why they’re especially worried about him—will it really take that much energy to offset the effects of the poison?
He didn’t seem all that fazed by healing our gums after we extracted our treacherous teeth. My tongue flicks over the new gap at the back of my mouth automatically, the tissue there still tender.
Dominic’s stance looks a bit stiff, but before too long, he answers in his low, measured voice. “It’s all right. I can do it.”
Nausea unfurls up through my chest as I remember Jacob’s phrasing.Keep her functioning.
“I might notdie, but your poison is going to mess with my body, isn’t it?” I say to him. “If the guardians catch up with us, I won’t be able to help you fight them off very well if I’m physically sick.”
Jacob turns to face me again, nothing but disdain in his expression now. How can he look so gorgeous and so cold at the same time?
“That’s asking us to believe you’d be fighting against the guardians instead of with them.”
I can’t suppress the edge that creeps into my voice. “Yes, thatiswhat you should believe, because that’s what’s fucking true.”
At least the layer of frustration helps tamp down the anguish that’s roiling through me underneath. Every quiver of that fraught emotion rippling through my chest makes me feel as weak as if I’ve already been poisoned.
It doesn’t matter what the guys think right now. I have to prove to them that I’m the same Riva I always was, that I’ll put all my strength toward defending them and keeping us together.
I can’t do that if I’m falling apart.
“And yet somehow I’m still not seeing it,” Jacob snarks back, and rolls his shoulders. “Of course, I still see just offing you as a viable solution too, if you’re so upset about this option.”
My mouth tightens into a flat line. None of the other guys speak up against his very explicit threat.
Memories flood the back of my mind: my dizziness last night, the shakiness of my muscles. He’s asking to do the same thing to me that the boss did—the way the boss tried to murder me.
He wants to put me in a different kind of cage, with my own body trapping me.
A prickle creeps into my lungs—a tiny oscillation like something sharp-edged starting to vibrate within my ribcage.
Like a vicious, angry sound that wants to break free?
I stiffen up, clamping down on the impression and taking a deep breath to clear my lungs. That—that wasn’t me. I won’t let it be me.