Page 27 of Thrall
Reluctantly, Lucy uncoiled. She didn’t want to make Natalie worry. She was probably in good hands now—at least she hoped she was.
“I’m okay,” she said. “You should go back. It’s not safe for you out here, either.”
“He may not be after you,” Mila said as Natalie stood. “But you invited him into your suite at the party. You should barricade your door, if you can.”
“Trust me,” Natalie said tightly. “I’ll be spending the night whittling something wooden and sharp. Once I figure out how to whittle.”
“And, Lucy?” Pallas said. “The number I called from earlier was the station landline. This is my cell.”
She tapped a few buttons on her phone, and within a few seconds, an incoming AirDrop popped up on Lucy’s phone. It was a contact.Athena Barnes.
“Oh…” Lucy’s fingers moved carefully over Pallas—Athena’s name as she saved it to her phone. It felt oddly fragile in her hands. “I think you might have—”
“Don’t worry. It wasn’t an accident.” Pallas’s smile thinned, as if self-conscious. “I hear him calling my name, some nights. He doesn’t try to get into the radio station anymore, not for a long time now. But he still calls me anyway. Like he thinks one day I’ll get desperate enough to come out, just to make him stop.”
She took a slow breath that eased the tremor out of her voice. “I came here intending for you to keep calling me Pallas. If this goes badly…I didn’t want to hear you calling my name, too. But we’re asking you to trust us. It’s not fair if I don’t give you some of my trust in return.”
Athena smiled, and nodded, as if to wordlessly take her leave. Natalie exchanged brief, wide eye contact with Lucy as she passed. But she followed Athena just as silently.
“Be careful,”Mila called out after them.
Athena turned just long enough for Lucy to see her smile twitch, then fade. With every step, her rabbit heartbeat grew just a little quieter. “You know me.”
It was an excruciatingly quiet walk back to Quincey Hall.
Lucy scrambled in the wake of Mila’s long strides. She knew she should probably say something. Technically speaking, they hadn’t finished their argument yet. But her earlier anger was crystallizing into a brittle, embarrassing hurt that she didn’t want to put on display.
She had nothing to be upset about. She and Natalie finally had help, from people who ostensibly knew what they were doing. And—well, it wasn’t like Mila had truly betrayed her trust. They’d had two conversations. A conversation and a half, really. Lucy was acting like a child.
But still. During that conversation and a half, beneath Mila’s easy confidence, there had been real warmth. Calm, unobtrusive reassurance, a steadiness that had kept Lucy on her feet. Sure, it had been nice to get a smile and a cardigan from a ridiculously beautiful girl at a moment when she’d never felt less pulled-together. But it went beyond that, too. Mila had looked at all her fear and uncertainty and hadn’t flinched. Maybe it should have meant more that she hadn’t flinched, knowing now that Mila had clocked what was happening to her from the very beginning.
Except that when Mila looked at her now, that warmth was gone. No understanding, pity, cruelty, anything. Just business.
And unfortunately, that hurt.
“You can say what you’re thinking, you know,” Mila finally said as they approached the Quincey front doors. “Might make you feel better.”
Lucy’s lips gave a bare, unamused twitch as she unlocked the door. “I don’t think it’ll make either of us feel better.”
“True. But you could say it anyway.”
When Lucy filed into the building and kept her mouth shut, Mila let out a breath. “Okay. We can save that for later, then. For now—you know you can’t stay in that room, don’t you? Your roommate—”
“I get it,” Lucy said shortly. Mila didn’t need to elaborate. She realized it the moment they started walking away from the Interfaith Triangle: that as much as she wanted to curl up in her own creaky, extra-long twin bed, away from Mila’s assessing stare, that was impossible. If the vampire managed to get an invite into Quincey, Lucy wouldn’t be the only one to get hurt. Whitney would be there, too.
So, reluctantly, she acknowledged that out loud. “I don’t want to get anyone else involved, either. Just—give me a second to go get some stuff, and I’ll meet you at your room.”
“Oh.” Judging by the look on Mila’s face, she’d expected a bit more of a fight than that. “Um—you want me to come with you? I can help you carry stuff.”
Lucy flinched. Mila probably meant it innocently, but—God, it brought her right back to that stupid line about arm day. On top of everything else, Mila was probably well aware that Lucy found her attractive. Lucy wasn’t in the habit of hiding that kind of thing.
“I shouldn’t have much to bring.” She said it with her back turned, already halfway to the stairs. The last thing she wanted Mila to see was her face already starting to crumple. “This’ll be over soon either way.”
Lucy was around the corner and halfway up the stairs before she had to reach up to wipe her eyes. It was ridiculous. But apparentlythiswas going to be the straw that broke her back.
When Lucy was younger, she used to spend a lot of time watching the faces people made when they looked at her. At the pharmacy, trying to work out prescriptions. Confirming instructions with doctors, haggling with insurance companies, picking out the caskets when Jillian decided it was more than she could bear. Even earlier than that, walking out of her first-grade classroom the day they’d told her that her father was dead, though that was less of a memory and more of a faint impression in her mind.
She used to be so sure of what they were thinking in those moments.Look at her. Glad that isn’t me. She knew now they probably weren’t thinking that at all. She understood, most days, that people weren’t looking ather, even if they were looking in her direction. Most of the time, they were too wrapped up in their own problems to really see hers.
