Page 59 of The Diamond in the Rough

I looked up at him, seeing concern in his features. Then I looked at Raj, crouched beside me, elbows on his thighs. He hadn’t touched me, but he was close enough that I could feel a slight warmth from his body. Shifters ran warm, I remembered someone saying once.

“I—I don’t know,” I admitted.

“You want a drink?” Hart asked.

“Jesus, Hart,” Ward snapped.

“What?Iwant a goddamn drink, and I wasn’t even a patient there.”

“Not helpful, Keebler,” Raj put in.

“You got a better idea?” Hart retorted.

“We have hot chocolate,” Mason suggested.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, not everything is made better by hot chocolate,” Hart grumbled, throwing his hands up.

“There is nothing that can’t beimprovedby hot chocolate,” Ward replied. “So we’re all going to have some before things get seriously ugly.” He gripped the wheels of his chair to head to the kitchen.

“I’ll do it,” Mason said quickly, standing and walking out of the room. Ward looked annoyed.

“Jesus fucking Christ on a cracker,” Hart grumbled.

I swallowed, wishing I could somehow sink into my chair and disappear.

“Rayn?” I sucked in a sharp breath when Raj put a hand on my knee, staring at his long, strong fingers spread across the khaki of my slacks. “Sorry,” he said softly, pulling his hand back.

“No, it’s okay—I—” I swallowed. I wanted him to put his hand back, but asking that seemed extremely inappropriate.

“Do you need something?” he asked.

I shook my head. It was a lie. I needed for this whole thing to stop. For Tranquil Brook to not still be doing… anything. For the world around me to not have been shifted and thrown off-kilter, as though someone had put a filter over the world that muted the colors and sounds so that I felt as though everything were blanketed in fog.

Raj shifted his weight slightly, then pulled out a small tin from one pocket, then opened it. “Anise mint?”

I stared down into the tin, the mints tiny little eggs in the brass oval. I pulled off one glove—because picking up one of the tiny pastilles would be difficult with gloved fingers—and carefully took one of the candies, tucking it in my mouth. The mint flavor was soft and sweet—although the candy itself was hard, like a tic tac—rather than strong. It was soothing.

“Thanks,” I managed.

He closed the tin and returned it to his pocket. “Want to tell me what you’re thinking?” he asked softly, his voice pitched low, for me, not for the rest of the room.

It made tears push at the backs of my eyes. I blinked them away. If I cried, I knew Ward would get upset, and then Mason. And Hart would get flustered, and I didn’t have the bandwidth to deal with any of that. I swallowed a few times before I felt as though I could keep my voice under control. “I’m confused,” I murmured, knowing his shifter hearing was far better than anyone else’s in the room. Except maybeSylvia, since she wasn’t actually hearing with her ears. “I’m scared. I don’t want to go back. I don’t want it to still exist at all.” I swallowed again. “My sister came and found me,” I half-whispered. “She thought I was there and didn’t know how to find me—didn’t know how to findit.” I swallowed. “But her lawyers contactedsomeonewho was at least pretending to be running it.” I looked up at him. “I thought—but Sylvia says there’s no one there.”

“You thought?” he asked.

Another swallow. A deep breath that tasted slightly of mint. That calmed me a little. “Maybe they’d started it up again.”

“And Sylvia went there?”

I nodded, glancing up to find her empty eyes focused on me.

You know we’d never let them touch you again, right, sunshine?

I know you’d try,I told her.

Never, she promised.

I believed she meant it. But I’ve been around Beyond the Veil long enough to know that things aren’t always in our control. People get hurt when we don’t mean them to. People die.