Hush - Anne Malcom Page 0,83

a quickness Orion had never seen. No one had been able talk April down before.

“Orion, I’ll call you when you get home. We’ll go out tomorrow night,” she said with a smirk.

“No, you fucking won’t,” Maddox growled.

April flipped him the bird but let Eric guide her toward her car. She blew Orion a kiss over his shoulder.

Both Orion and Maddox watched them get into the car.

Orion wished she was April then, much like she had when she was younger, bitter about her situation and desperate for a new family. A new life. She fantasized often about what would’ve happened if she were born a Novak.

The feeling of jealousy was familiar, but she had deeper needs now. Deeper trauma.

“Orion.” Maddox’s voice was gentle but edged with residual anger.

She wondered if he was angry with her. She sure hoped so. Orion was fucking sick of him being so goddamn nice to her.

Her gaze flickered toward him. No scowl illuminated in the street lights. It disappointed her.

“You want to get in the car?” He nodded toward the vehicle.

Orion stared at it. On autopilot, she walked over to it. He opened the door for her, because that was Maddox.

He got in and didn’t start the car until she buckled up.

Then they left the bar behind.

The ride was silent at first, mostly because Orion was trying to get her bearings. She’d never really been drunk before, drinking that vodka beside Jaclyn’s dead body didn’t count. She hadn’t felt drunk, at least. Not like this, with things blurring in her memory as they were happening. Life in slow motion. Her stomach roiling.

It was too much like the feeling from the drugs they injected her with. Orion hated it. Sitting in the car in the silence made it all the more prominent. Unavoidable. Maddox was the only reason she wasn’t freaking out right now.

There was no chain on her ankle. No emptiness in her stomach, no agony between her legs—she wasn’t there. She was safe with Maddox.

“I passed my driver’s test,” Orion said lamely.

At least she wasn’t slurring now.

Maddox kept his eyes on the road. “I figured.” The words were short, brisk, but there was also a kind of dry humor attached to them. None of the clipped fury he had spoken to April with.

Of course not. He couldn’t talk harshly to the poor little victim.

An uncomfortable silence fell between them again. Even though it was dark, she could make out Maddox’s profile. The strong jaw, the nose that was ever so slightly crooked. It hadn’t been like that before. Had he broken it in football? Fighting over a girl? Trying to arrest a drunk?

She wanted to ask him about why his nose was crooked now. What his life had been like. High school. College. Vacations.

Questions that shouldn’t be so damned hard to ask. But the mundane was hard for Orion. She was an expert at handling the horrible, but the everyday was somehow impossible.

“She recognized me,” Orion said after a few more minutes.

Maddox glanced over at her but didn’t speak.

“She recognized me from the news,” Orion continued. “It was a shitty thing to do, but she didn’t mean any real malice. She was young. Drunk. Stupid.” Orion paused. With hindsight, albeit blurry, she could see just how harmless the girl was. The world was different now. People did shit like that, took photos on their phones of “celebrities,” lived their lives online. Everything was fair game.

She was used to bracing herself for attention she didn’t want. She just had to repurpose the shields she’d used in The Cell to make them work for this social media world.

“She was old enough to be in a bar,” Maddox said after a beat. “She’s old enough to know fuckin’ better.”

“Maybe,” she said.

“Definitely,” he replied. He glanced over at her, stopping at a red light. He reached toward her, hand featherlight on her chin, brushing against the bruise on her cheek.

Orion had given the girl much, much worse, and she probably deserved to be in handcuffs right now.

She wanted to capture this moment, this memory, of Maddox touching her where it already felt painful.

“I fucking hate that you got hurt,” he said, pulling his arm back as the light turned green.

Orion gritted her teeth, swallowing all the cruel retorts on the tip of her tongue. The need to hurl something about the fact she’d been plenty hurt in this decade was almost overpowering. “It’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing.”

“Maddox, it’s nothing,” she repeated.

He didn’t fight her this time. “I don’t like the