Page 117 of The Midnight Order
He crouches in front of me as my breathing finally steadies. Brushing my hair back over my ear, he searches my face before sighing. “You’re the most dangerous thing to me.”
“Why?”
“Because you promise to be the best thing that ever happened to me. To break my curse, to become the one thing I’ll crave over all else, even freedom. But what if you aren’t? What if you’re chaos, destruction, or worse?”
“What’s worse than destruction?” I ask, scared to know what he’ll say next.
“Distraction.”
I quirk a brow. He’s got a grim outlook on things, and I don’t quite know how to respond to him. He’s seen so much, played out so many scenarios over lifetimes, and it’s made him paranoid, manic even.
“There are many who’d love to see us burn, little lamb. What if you’re a distraction sent to lead us to the fire?”
I swallow thickly. How can I deny any of this to him when I don’t know who I am?
I can’t.
So, I remain silent.
My chest is burning, as are my eyes. I won’t show fear or weakness, though. I don’t know why, but I know Lowell won’t respond well to it.
He stands, reaching a hand down for me to take. The same hand that choked me to the brink of existence moments ago. “Come, little lamb. Let’s get home.”
Home.
It’s a confusing concept for me right now.
Even so, I take his hand and lift off the ground.
Lowell takes a moment to brush the leaves and dirt off my body, and I try to ignore the ache building the more his handsrun over it, and then he leads me toward Thorngray, the manor that’s quickly becoming my prison alongside theirs.
I’m sippingcoffee on the back porch that overlooks the forest beyond the sprawling lawns of Thorngray when Asher walks out, his hands in his pockets and a grin on his face.
“There’s the bandit now. In all her glory,” he jokes, and I think it’s the most lax I’ve witnessed his face so far.
It’s like they’re getting used to me being here—some of them.
“Yeah, dragged back to prison and on lockdown once more.”
He sits beside me, turning on his chair to face me. “Tell me that’s not how you truly feel.”
“Why? What will you do, reinforce the bars so I can’t escape again? I don’t think any of you considered how I felt when you snatched me off the street.”
“No, we didn’t. But we consider how you feel now. Well, at least Corvin and I do.”
“Why? What’s it matter now?”
He swallows, and it looks like it takes tremendous effort. The words he swallows over are thick, and it appears they’re hard to get his throat to slip past. “Because we’re already growing fond of you.”
I snort, and he eyes me narrowly. “Sorry, it’s just how you speak. Sometimes, it is like you’re straight out of another time.”
“Well, that assumption isn’t too far off.”
“Have you not lived in the modern world around us?”
He shakes his head. “The world surrounding us, while modernized in some ways, differs from your world, I suspect.”
“You suspect right. What year were you cursed again?”
