It’s better this way, I tell myself as I slump back to the floor. We’re safer this way.
Both of us.
Twenty-Three
Riva
It’s on my fifth pass through the halls that my gaze slides along the wall outside the crib rooms at just the right angle, and I notice the tiniest of seams in the otherwise smooth surface.
I stop and back up a couple of steps to confirm what it took my mind a second or two to process. Thereisa nearly indecipherable line of shadow down the wall, like the edge of a partition.
“Guys!” I call out, moving toward it and pressing my hand against the surface right by the seam. “I found something else.”
My prodding doesn’t shift the partition at all. Jacob and Andreas come jogging over first—Jacob frowning, naturally.
“You found the wall?” he asks with an edge of sarcasm.
I roll my eyes. “I think there’s a hidden doorway here like there was in the lab where Engel used to work. If you look at the right angle from the right spot, you canjustsee the edge.”
Andreas has already stepped closer, cocking his head. He lets out an awed chuckle.
“There it is. Zian must have missed that.”
“Too busy trying to play engineer,” Jacob mutters, but there’s a note of fondness alongside the exasperation that I’ve never heard when he mutters about me. “He was mostly looking in the actual rooms, not the halls.”
He lifts his voice so it’ll carry farther. “Zee, get your ass over here. We need those X-ray eyes of yours.”
His call brings not just Zian but Dominic, who wanders over from the rooms he was searching.
As Jacob motions to the area of the wall, I step farther to the side, giving Zian as much space as I can. His tirade from earlier rings in my ears.
You don’t know anything. Stay the fuck away from me.
Even the memory brings a burn into the back of my eyes. I inhale slowly and deeply in an effort to even out my emotions.
Zee has always had a volatile temper, one he has trouble keeping on a leash. He probably didn’t mean all of what he said as harshly as it sounded.
But he’s never spoken to me like that before, not even in the past week while Jacob’s been laying into me. Is hemoreupset with me now than he was before?
How the hell did that happen? How am I still screwing this up?
I don’t have the answers to those questions, so I do my best to focus on the conversation about the wall.
Zian must have spotted the internal mechanism to open the partition, because he’s motioning to a specific spot farther over from the seam, around chest height. Jacob positions himself there and rests his hands against the wall to help guide his talent through.
He closes his eyes. The chiseled planes of his face tighten with concentration, turning him even more starkly gorgeous than usual.
We all wait, breaths held. There’s a stretch of silence, and then a mechanical rasp within the wall.
The seam widens, pulling back to reveal not an opening but an actual door: solid, natural wood unlike the painted steel ones that fill the rest of this place. It even has a bronze doorknob.
We stare at the thing for a second as if afraid it’s going to launch some kind of killer door attack. Then Andreas shakes his head with a self-deprecating guffaw and reaches for the knob.
It turns in his grasp, this part of the entrance unlocked. As he pushes it inward, lights flicker on automatically with the movement.
We slink into the hidden room one by one. Andreas lets out a low whistle. The rest of us just gape.
Like every other room we’ve entered in the old facility, a layer of pale dust coats every surface, dulling the colors with a grayish sheen. But even so, it’s immediately obvious that this space isn’t at all like the others.