Page 52 of Thirst
I looked past his shoulder. You’re nothing to me.
Not a lover. Certainly not my savior.
An enemy. A lying, two-faced enemy.
He rinsed the salt away with the second bottle. “That should be better,” he said, helping me to sit back against the seat.
I let out a long exhale. The throbbing hurt eased, although I wouldn’t have admitted that to Cain even if he’d held a knife to my throat.
He touched my bleeding lower lip without saying anything. I just looked at him until, with a distorted little smile, he released me and closed the door.
We continued east through the falling snow, the only sound the swish-swish of the wipers. Shortly after, we entered a thick forest.
We could’ve been driving into one of my paintings.
Headlights carve a path through the snow-choked night, their glow swallowed by the dark. A single set of tire tracks disappears into the trees. Ahead, a wall of thorns—razor-sharp, tangled, draped in roses so red they seem to burn against the cold.
Somewhere beyond the thicket, she stands, eyes wide. Watching and waiting. This is no Sleeping Beauty. She won’t be claimed by just any man who cuts his way through the thorns. He’ll have to prove himself—earn the right to her. And even then, she might refuse him.
Yeah, my paintings were repositories for all my bottled-up longing.
Cain glanced at me. “We’ll be at the coast in another thirty minutes or so.”
I nodded without speaking. To talk felt like too much of an effort. I felt feverish and lightheaded, as if my head had morphed into a balloon and was floating somewhere above my body, while the rest of me sagged in the seat, heavy with pain.
I stared dazedly out the dark window at the thick white flakes. Picturing the prince who’d come to my rescue. Funny thing was, he looked like Cain.
I snorted, and Cain exhaled. “Something amusing about this?”
That made me laugh out loud, a cracked, unhinged sound I barely recognized. “You h—have no idea.”
I felt rather than saw the look he shot me. “Just go to sleep already.”
“Noway,” I muttered, the words slurring together. “To sssleep, I’d have to feel ssssafe.”
But the next thing I knew, my eyes were closed, my head lolling against the seat. I jerked upright, heart pounding. My fever had worsened, my body burning, my head still floating around somewhere in the stratosphere.
We’d left the forest and entered another town, this one larger. We must be nearing the coast.
I forced myself to focus. “What happens when we get to Lilith Island?” I asked because if I didn’t say something, I might pass out again, and the vulnerability in that terrified me.
“You’re going to tell Brien everything you know.”
My smile was a bitter sliver. “Like Hades I am.”
I’d helped this man, and Brien, too.
And it still wasn’t enough. I was never enough.
“Then we’ll lock you up,” he said.
“I guess you’ll have to because I’m done helping you.”
“Up to you,” he said and turned on the radio.
I focused on the dark scenery again, the silver burning its way through me like a slow-moving fire. The snow stopped.
When my eyes drifted shut, I forced them open and asked another question, trying to keep myself from slipping into unconsciousness. “Why did your uncle hate you so much anyway?”
