Page 49 of My Revenant
“Now, Jonah.”
I decided right then, even if I’d never admit it to him or anyone else, that I didn’t like it when he called me by my real name. I liked the nicknames better, the ones onlyhecalled me. I knew I should have fought him more, and I blamed my lack of mental faculties on coming too hard as I gave him my number.
Dex sent off a text and I stared at him for a few moments before my phone pinged with a message from an unknown number. I opened it to see… a test sheet?
“Why did you send me a test paper?”
“I didn’t. Bryce did.” He grabbed my phone out of my hands. For some reason, I let him.
“You gave my number to Bryce?”
Dex didn’t answer, just zoomed in on the image before he started typing.
He typed for a long time, and I just stood there waiting for him like an idiot, taking drag after drag of the cigarette until it was all burned out and my head spun from the rush of nicotine.
When he finally finished and handed my phone back over to me, the text thread was still open on the screen. He’d texted Bryce the answers on the test. Unable to help myself, I looked at the test paper myself and then at the answers he’d typed out.
“Number four is wrong,” I told him, a slight curve to my lips in the knowledge that I knew something he didn’t.
“I know,” Dex answered simply, and that triumphant spark extinguished.
“Then why did you send it?”
“You think Bryce’s professor is going to believe he got one hundred percent on a test?” Dex scoffed. “He’ll get busted for cheating. He’ll pass with that.”
I looked again and yeah, a few more of the answers were wrong but like, believably wrong. He’d even included the equations so Bryce could copy it down exactly and it would seem like he’d worked it out himself.
That spark of pride that came with knowing things others didn’t returned, only this time instead of knowing something Dex didn’t know, I felt like I knew something about him that most others didn’t. Not that I’d thought he was stupid, but that seemed to be the general impression people held of him, grouping him with idiots like Toby and Bryce.
While I continued to stare at my phone screen, a new notification popped up.
Unknown Number
You look so pretty when you come.
Heat rushed to my cheeks, and I glared up at the man snickering in front of me.
“I’m going to block you.”
“No you won’t,” he said, sounding so confident about that.
I hated that he was right.
twenty
Dex - Past
THE FIRST BODY.
I’d buried a lot of bodies for someone who’d never killed anyone.
I wasn’tgood. Nothing about me ever had been. Those rumors? The things I got up to, the people I’d hurt… were more true than not. I’d done things for Archer, things for the Strays, things for my mother. Those things had secured my place in hell long before I reached adulthood. I’d accepted it. Long given up on trying to be anything else.
I was past the point of it bothering me, or at least, I had thought I was.
The closer I got to Jonah, the more I realized that if I wanted to keep him, I’d have to let him in. I’d have to let him see what his devil was capable of.
If I were a better man, I’d acknowledge that Jonah was too good for me, maybe keep away from him and let us live on our set paths. But I wasn’t a better man. I didn’t care what path he was supposed to be on. He was coming with me.
