Secret Beast - Amelia Wilde Page 0,52

I’m ready to protest. Ready to insist that I’m not tired. Ready to provoke him, even. Anything to get more of this closeness. But the moment he pulls the covers up to my shoulders, my eyelids droop and I’m out. Sleep claims me.

I don’t know if he ever comes to bed. I sleep all night. It’s the sleep of a narrow miss. Of a near thing. My body dives in deep. Heat comes in waves over my cheeks any time I get close to resurfacing, but I can’t pinpoint why.

In the morning I wake up alone.

There’s a different kind of silence in Leo’s bedroom. A more expansive one. The room itself is bigger than the guest room, but more importantly, Leo is gone. I know he’s not here the instant I’m conscious. He always seems larger than life. Like he takes up so much space. Now I know that it’s not him, or not only him. The pain he carries with him is a stack of barbed, humming energy. That takes up space, too.

I could sleep for longer. All day. All night.

But I get out of bed and go drowsily down the long, long hallway to the guest room. I notice two things right away. One, the bed is made. I didn't sleep here last night. I slept in Leo’s bed. I slept in his bed.

Which could be related to the second thing that’s different.

The phone on the bedside table.

My phone.

I tiptoe over to it until I catch myself being ridiculous and loom over the phone. It’s...charging. Not plugged in, but charging. I pick it up and it stops. Put it back on the bedside table, and the screen lights up. The table of Leo’s guest room has a built-in charger.

Wow.

I swipe my thumb over the screen, and the phone unlocks. This is really my phone, then. He gave it back. I feel like the human embodiment of a warm, sparkling glow, which is crazy. People don’t glow for Leo Morelli. They run from him, or hurt for him, or—

Or touch him like they want to.

No more thoughts. Only phone calls.

Cash answers on the first ring. “Jesus, Hales.” His voice is pinched. My heart sinks right through Leo’s plush carpeting. “Did they tell you?”

“Tell me what?” I pace around the bed and back. “Cash, did something happen?”

A door shuts in the background of his call. “Aunt Caroline happened. She’s trying to have Dad committed.”

I sit down heavily on the side of the mattress. “What do you mean, committed?”

I know what he means, but only in the vague, horrified sense that it can’t be right. It cannot be right. My dad is too trusting, and he spends too much time working, but that doesn’t mean Caroline can have him put away.

“There’s a hospital upstate.” Despite the obvious strain, Cash keeps his tone level. That’s how I know it’s bad. “An old-fashioned asylum type of place, where they keep people.”

I’m half off the bed. Maybe it’s to throw up. Maybe it’s to run. I’ll run all the way home if I have to. “Tell me he’s not there already. Tell me she didn’t take him.”

“She didn’t take him yet.”

That’s the thing about Caroline Constantine. She could come to my house and take my father. Would she do it personally, with her own two hands? No. She would not. That’s not the Constantine way. The Constantine way is to hire out the dirtiest work so your hands always stay clean. The memory of Leo’s shadowed form pinning that man to the alley wall drills through me. Leo killed those men with his own two hands. With his own knife. He’s a Morelli. He’s not supposed to have more integrity than even the worst Constantines.

And yet.

I push myself off the bed and go to the window. With my forehead pressed against the glass, I do deep breathing and focus on the snowflakes swirling down over Leo’s beautiful backyard. No—grounds. He has grounds. Caroline has her claws in my dad. I have a shirt that belongs to Leo, and a pair of too-big pajama pants more luxurious than anything in my closet back home.

“He’s in the house, Cash? Dad’s home?”

“He’s home for now. I don’t want him to hear—” Cash clears his throat and lowers his voice. “Caroline’s bulldog came to visit. That guy, Ronan. He threatened him. Pushed him around in his workshop. Broke some shit.” A pause that sounds like a struggle.

A guilty ache closes in around my neck, holding on so tight