had to kill him.” Each word felt like a kick to the chest. I kept seeing Misha. Not the Misha in the clearing outside the senator’s house, but the one who’d waited for me while I talked to ghosts. Who’d napped in his Warden form while I sat beside him. The Misha who had been my best friend. “I did it. I killed him.”
Peanut shook his head, his dark brown hair fading in and out as he became more corporeal for a moment and then lost his hold. “I don’t know what to say. I really don’t.”
“There’s nothing to be said. It is what it is.” Exhaling, I stretched out my legs. “Zayne is now my Protector, and I’m going to be staying here. We need to find the Harbinger.”
“Well, that part is good, right?” Peanut rose from the bed, still in a sitting position. “Zayne being your Protector?”
It was.
And it wasn’t.
Becoming my Protector had saved Zayne’s life, so that was a good thing—a great thing. Zayne hadn’t hesitated to take the bond, and that was before he’d found out it was always supposed to have been him. But it also meant Zayne and I... Well, we could never be more than what we were now, and it didn’t matter how badly I wanted to be more or how much I liked him. It didn’t matter that he was the first guy I was ever seriously into.
I tipped my head back instead of suffocating myself with the pillow. Peanut became a blur as he drifted toward the curtain, though that had nothing to do with his ghostly form. “Is Zayne up?”
“He is, but he’s not here. He left you a note in the kitchen. I read it while he wrote it.” Peanut sounded rather proud. “It says he went to see someone named Nic. I think that was one of the guys who came with him to the community? Anyway, he left maybe a half hour ago.”
Nic was short for Nicolai, the Washington, DC, clan leader. Zayne probably had unfinished business with him since he’d left whatever meeting they’d been having last night to come find me.
Zayne had felt my emotions through the bond. That strange new connection had led him right to the treehouse. I wasn’t sure if I was amazed by that, annoyed or really weirded out. Probably a mixture of all three.
“Wonder why he didn’t wake me.” Pushing the cover aside, I scooted to the edge of the bed.
“He actually came in here and checked on you.”
I froze, praying I hadn’t been drooling on myself or doing anything weird. “He did?”
“Yep. I thought he was going to wake you. Looked like he was debating it, but all he did was pull the blanket over your shoulders. I thought it was totally bodacious of him.”
I wasn’t sure what bodacious meant, but I thought it was... God, it was sweet of him.
It was so like Zayne.
I might have known him for only a few weeks, but I knew enough to be able to picture him carefully pulling the comforter over me, and doing it so gently that he didn’t wake me.
My chest squeezed as if my heart had fallen into a meat grinder. “I need to shower.” I stood on legs I expected to be shaky but that were surprisingly strong and stable.
“Yeah, you do.”
Ignoring the comment, I checked my phone. I’d missed a call from Jada. My stomach tumbled. I placed the phone down and padded on bare feet to the bathroom, flipped on the light and winced at the sudden brightness. My eyes did not care for bright light of any kind. Or dark or shadowy areas, either. Actually, my eyes pretty much just sucked 95.7 percent of the time.
“Trinnie?”
Fingers lingering on the light switch, I looked over my shoulder at Peanut, who’d moved closer to the bathroom. “Yeah?”
He cocked his head, and when he looked at me, I felt stripped bare. “I know how much Misha meant to you. I know it has to hurt something bad.”
Ending Misha’s life hadn’t hurt me. It quite possibly had killed a part of me, replacing it with a seemingly bottomless pit of sour bitterness and raw anger.
But Peanut didn’t need to know that. No one did.
“Thank you,” I whispered, turning away and closing the door as the burn hit the back of my throat.
I will not cry. I will not cry.
In the shower, with its multiple jets and stall large enough to fit two fully grown Wardens, I used