shot his way for being naïve, mine included.
“Which she wouldn’t have had to do if you’d listen for once,” Paulo sneered. Kai’s actions weren’t the ones on trial here, but it didn’t surprise me that things circled right back to him.
“Here we go again,” Kai grumbled.
“And we’ll keep going there until you listen. You can’t … fix … everyone,” I asserted, feeling like those words always fell on deaf ears.
Tonight, it had been a child, a ten-year-old girl claiming to have followed a disembodied voice that lured her across the border. This was the first we heard of anyone claiming to have heard the Darkness speak, but the ordeal ended with her returning home contaminated, attacking her mother before her father could restrain her. When we arrived, she was chained in the cellar, eyes black as night, just like when we found Isaac. While I understood Kai wanting to save such a young life, the rest of us were more concerned with saving his. After what we’d seen today, there was no denying that taking on the Darkness was starting to wear on him.
“Noelle isn’t your typical girl, I’ll give you that,” Kai declared,
“But you can’t tell me it’s okay to write someone off based on a hunch. It’s entirely possible she’ll age up and nothing will happen.”
The room was quiet, but far from calm. There was an energy building in the space, and there was a chance someone could explode if we weren’t careful.
“You’re right,” Paulo replied with sarcasm heavy in his tone. “She could blow out the candles and we’ll all go to bed that night happy we didn’t ship her home for her own people to deal with. Or,” he countered, “she could hulk out on us first, then make it into the village where kids are playing, where the elderly are resting beside the water, and feast on our people like she’s at some kind of buffet. Now, I don’t know about you, but I think it’s probably a good idea to over-prepare.”
Kai’s shoulders tensed when he stood from his seat beside the window. Paulo pushed off from the wall he stood against, and you could feel the air thicken as they stared one another down. The flame within a flame—the mark of the Firekeepers—glowed brighter at the nape of Paulo’s neck. The intensity was an indicator of extreme emotional output, such as anger.
“That’s enough,” Rayen stepped in, literally acting as a wall between the two. “Agree to disagree, cry and hug it out, something,” he reasoned. “Because we don’t have time to be at each other’s throats.”
A stifling silence filled the common quarters of the bungalow. Rayen’s gaze volleyed back and forth between our brothers, and it was Kai who finally backed down, clearly pissed it came to that. Using his foot, he shoved the chair he’d been seated in against the wall, splintering its back with the force. Before disappearing inside his room, he passed a dark gaze over his shoulder, aimed straight for Paulo.
The door slammed with enough force to make the walls shudder.
It made our job ten times harder when there was a disconnect between us, which seemed to be happening more often lately.
Paulo let out a breath while stretching his neck, dispelling some of his frustration. “Guy’s wound tighter than a spool of thread.”
“Needs to get laid,” Rayen grumbled as he dropped down onto the couch.
“Don’t we all.” When Paulo laughed, it lightened the mood a bit. “Not gonna lie. Trailing the resident princess in that uniform from sunup to sundown probably ain’t helping.”
The comment made me envision Noelle, how her already short skirt rose just slightly higher in the back, leaving the backs of her thighs visible. So much of my brothers’ conversation had become about her looks lately, seemed I found myself losing focus on occasion too. It wasn’t like we hadn’t seen pretty faces before, but it’d be a lie if I didn’t admit hers was exceptional.
Actually, her everything was exceptional.
When I first spotted her in the atrium over a month ago, I mistook her for an islander, one of our own. That is, until I realized she was the mainlander’s princess. Her tan skin was only a shade or two lighter than my own, and her dark, wavy hair had thrown me off as well. However, considering her background—namely, the diversity of her family—the ambiguity made sense. Still, by any nation’s standards, she was beautiful.
Unfortunately for us—four guys who had yet to successfully connect with a potential