Page 79 of Rejected Hollow

Something passed over his face before I could understand it. Then the grin returned, and I could hear it in his voice.

"Nobody. I'm just very, very good."

He helped me into his bed and pulled the blanket around me, then added another one over the top. He put a glass of water on the floor beside the mattress where I could reach it easily.

Then he glanced at the clock on the wall.

Something in him shifted.

His shoulders tightened, and the warmth that had been in his expression disappeared.

"I have to go somewhere," he said. "Tonight. I'm sorry. It's... a thing. I can't get out of it."

"Where?"

"Just a thing." He pulled a dark sweater over his head and reached for his jacket. "Stay here and sleep. Nobody comes into this room except me, and nobody's stupid enough to try. I can send Reed to get your glasses tonight. She doesn't need to know anything else."

The thought of anyone coming into the room, even Tamsin, made my throat tighten.

"No. Not tonight."

"You sure? She can leave them outside the door. You won't have to explain anything."

"I'm sure."

His jaw tightened.

"Then I'll get them first thing tomorrow." He placed the spare room key beside the glass of water where I could reach it. "Lock the door after me. Keep that one in case you need to leave. I've got the other."

He stopped in the doorway, his body dark against the light from the corridor.

"Wren," he said. "You have no reason to feel insecure. I’m not lying to you. You are absolutely stunning. Anyone who told you different was just fucking stupid."

Then he left.

I stayed in his bed wearing his shirt, surrounded by the lingering smell of him, while the silver lines across my stomach still felt warm where his mouth had touched them.

For once, I didn't cry.

10

Chapter 10

Jax

Ileft her asleep in my bed, which, for the record, was not how I had imagined the first night Wren Hale spent there. In my version, there had been considerably less crying and considerably more of me being devastatingly charming. Still, she was in my bed, so I supposed reality had managed to get at least one thing right.

I stood in the corridor with one hand flat against the door and listened to her breathing on the other side. It had finally gone slow and heavy with exhaustion. For a moment, I seriously considered going back inside, lying down on the rug beside the bed, and refusing to move again until Christmas.

Then the alarm on my phone buzzed in my pocket.

There was no signal on Ironmoor and never had been, but alarms worked perfectly well. I had set this one five years ago because I was afraid that one day I might forget, even though I never had. When I pulled out my phone, the screen lit up with the photograph I kept as my background: my little brother at seventeen, skinny enough that his hospital gown hung from his shoulders, grinning at the camera and giving me the finger from his bed.

It was the first Friday of the month.

So I went down the cliff.

There was a path around the back of the Baths stair that nobody else seemed to use. It wound behind the old stonework and dropped through a narrow split in the rock before opening onto a shingle cove on the eastern side of the island, hidden from both the harbor and the walls. I had found it during my first week at Ironmoor and had never told anyone it existed.