I grumble my displeasure as they stuff me into the back seat again, but relaxing into the pliant leather comes as an unexpected relief. My head lolls to the side when the car takes a corner, and my stomach churns.
I bring my hands up to cover my face. “I want to go to bed,” I say, my voice muffled against my palms.
“That’s what we’re working on,” Andreas says. He’s stayed in the back with me, rubbing my shoulder reassuringly.
At the townhouse, I stagger up to my bedroom between Jacob and Andreas and crash onto my bed. Dominic is there, still in his trench coat costume, his face tight.
Is he angry with me? I don’t know what I did wrong. There’s so much I don’t understand.
A little moan slips out of me, and he rests his hand tentatively on my belly. “You’ll feel better soon, Riva.”
Everyone else is gone. The room is dark. The tingling energy flows out from his hand and melts away my nausea and the shakiness in my limbs, but my mind still feels like it’s floating someplace far above us.
He’s mad at me, but he’s here helping me anyway. That’s what Dominic is like.
I want him even closer. I want him—
He stands up, and all at once I can’t bear for him to simply walk away. The words tumble out.
“I missed you, you know. All of you. But especially…”
Dominic stops near the door. He watches me, a shadowy figure in the darkened space.
“Especially what?” he asks in a low voice.
I grope for the words to capture the memories trickling through my head. “When you weren’t there, I’d sometimes still imagine the four of you. Andyou, you always had the right thing to say, like you’d thought it all out and gotten to the best answer like you always did.”
I pause, and one more swell of grief rolls over me. “I wish I knew the right thing to say to you to fix whatever I broke.”
Dominic is quiet for long enough that I almost forget he’s in the room. Exhaustion drags my eyelids down.
Then his voice reaches my ears, steady but a little gruff. “Don’t worry about it. It was already broken a long time before anything you did.”
The comment makes me frown. The door clicks shut behind him, and I sink down into a hazy sleep.
Fourteen
Dominic
The marigolds give off a pungent scent, as bright and bold as their orange petals. I pour the last of the liquid from the small watering can over the raised garden bed and then sit down on the back step next to it.
Something that’s balled tight and hard in my chest relaxes just a little as I take in the vibrant colors and the life the flowers exude. I don’t know whether past student residents planted them or if the garden is something the campus staff normally maintain, but I’ll take the little fragment of peace I get out of looking after them.
The only plants I ever got to handle in the facility were the ones the guardians expected me to kill. And then when that wasn’t enough—
I shut those memories out of my mind and lean against the steps as well as I can without provoking a jab of discomfort at my back.
There are a lot of things going on in the house behind me that I can’t really take care of, but then, it’s been clear for a while that my talents are a lot more superficial than any of us would like to think. The damage we’re dealing with has roots that run far deeper than our physical bodies.
And Riva…
Before my mind can stray very far in that direction, the sound of ragged panting has my head jerking up. As I get to my feet, Jacob jogs into view from the alley that runs behind the townhouses.
Well, kind of jogging. He’s limping as much as he’s running, his face gone waxy sallow.
I catch my lips before they can pull into a full grimace. The worst damage might be way down deep, but Jake does like pushing it as close to the surface as he can get.
“I’m okay, I’m okay,” he mutters in a rasp as he makes it to the back steps, as if he doesn’t look like he’s just risen from the grave. He staggers on his way up the stairs, and I catch his arm.