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but hear me when I say this: if you’re hurting, we’re hurting. If you won’t let us help you, we need to know you are taking care of yourself. Okay?” They weren’t the right words, but it was close enough to your failure is our failure that Jean hesitated. “Yes.”
The rest of the short ride to Laila’s house was silent. Rhemann pulled up behind Jeremy’s car and put his hazards on. He turned in his chair to consider the three packed into his backseat and said to Jean, “Lean on them as much as you need
The self-censure was regrettable, but then Jean said, “Pop. How easily these monsters die in the end.”
“You do not have to trust him,” Jean said. “I do.”
“He was not my partner. It was not his job to protect me, and I didn’t want him to. I just wanted him to die.” Jeremy’s heart skipped a beat. “You don’t mean that.” Jean dug cruel fingers into his bandages. “I was glad when he lost his hand. Exy is all he has and all he loves; I knew it would destroy him to lose it. A month in the Nest without it, maybe two, and he would have no recourse but to kill himself. I was only alive because he made me promise to survive. If he died, who could hold me to that? I would have slashed the tires on his car before I let him escape us, and he knows it.”
“There you are,” Jean said. It was jarring enough to shake the warmth out of him. Where Leo had said it with hungry satisfaction, Jean only sounded thoughtful. “Jean?” he asked. Jean turned a considering look on him. “You go away when you go home.”
That malfunctioning cretin existed to cause trouble for everyone in a thousand-mile radius,
If I have to be a Raven or a robot to take first place, then what is the point?”
When’s your birthday?” “November.” Cat waited, but nothing else was forthcoming. “Like all thirty days of it, or do you want to narrow it down some for me?”
“You are his better in every way. You should have slammed him into the wall.” He had, later that night at the hotel room, but Jeremy didn’t think Kevin needed to hear that.
“Does that really matter?” Jeremy asked, studying Jean with a stare that felt prying. “I’m not learning French for anyone but you.”
Stained glass.” He flicked his fingers, trying to erase it from his memory, but said, “That is what the Ravens are: sharp-edged and shattered, and fused together into a new whole. You cannot take them apart again.” “You and Kevin left,” Derek said. Kevin was forcibly broken off and Jean was stolen, but there was no point getting into that with these people.
Once upon a time, Jean would have taken Zane’s disappointment personally, but Zane had burned every bridge between them. He was not Jean’s teammate or his partner anymore; his disapproval was worth less than a fly’s tiny shit.
“Fuck what I deserve. What about what I want?”
“I am not sorry. Perhaps I should be. But I will choose you every time. You, and Cat, and Laila, every time. I will lose them all if I must.”
Brown like the soil in Rhemann’s garden, or the sand where the tide washed ashore, or the dirt roads Cat had led him down time and again. Brown like the gaze that sought Jean out in every room, but that last thought wasn’t one he could linger on.
“It was the first place she could truly call home, and they took that from her,” she finished, so soft Jean might have imagined it. “They destroyed something she doesn’t know how to lose.”
He was so deliriously happy that Jean swallowed the rest of his complaints for later. It took
