Shatter Me - Tahereh Mafi Page 0,54
but as much as I’d love to break his face, he’s no good to us unconscious.
“You could love me, you know.” He’s smiling a strange sort of smile. “We would be unstoppable. We would change the world. I could make you happy,” he says to me.
Adam looks like he might snap Warner’s neck. His face is so taut, so tense, so angry. I’ve never seen him like this before. “You have nothing to offer her, you sick bastard.”
Warner presses his eyes shut for one second. “Juliette. Don’t be hasty. Don’t make a rash decision. Stay with me. I’ll be patient with you. I’ll give you time to adjust. I’ll take care of you—”
“You’re insane.” My hands are shaking but I hold the gun up to his face again. I need to get him out of my head. I need to remember what he’s done to me. “You want me to be a monster for you—”
“I want you to live up to your potential!”
“Let me go,” I say quietly. “I don’t want to be your creature. I don’t want to hurt people.”
“The world has already hurt you,” he counters. “The world put you here. You’re here because of them! You think if you leave they’re going to accept you? You think you can run away and live a normal life? No one will care for you. No one will come near you—you’ll be an outcast like you’ve always been! Nothing has changed! You belong with me!”
“She belongs with me.” Adam’s voice could cut through steel.
Warner flinches. For the first time he seems to be understanding what I thought was obvious. His eyes are wide, horrified, unbelieving, staring at me with a new kind of anguish. “No.” A short, crazed laugh. “Juliette. Please. Please. Don’t tell me he’s filled your head with romantic notions. Please don’t tell me you fell for his false proclamations—”
Adam slams his knee into Warner’s spine. Warner falls to the floor with a muffled crack and a sharp intake of breath. Adam has thoroughly overpowered him. I feel like I should be cheering.
But I’m too anxious. I’m too suspended in disbelief. I’m too insecure to be confident in my own decisions. I need to pull myself together.
“Adam—”
“I love you,” he says to me, his eyes just as earnest as I remember them, his words just as urgent as they should be. “Don’t let him confuse you—”
“You love her?” Warner practically spits. “You don’t even—”
“Adam.” The room shifts in and out of focus. I’m staring at the window. I glance back at him.
His eyes touch his eyebrows. “You want to jump out?”
I nod.
“But we’re fifteen stories up—”
“What choice do we have if he won’t cooperate?” I look at Warner. Cock my head. “There is no Code Seven, is there?”
Warner’s lips twitch. He says nothing.
“Why would you do that?” I ask him. “Why would you pull a false alarm?”
“Why don’t you ask the soldier you’re so suddenly fond of?” Warner snaps, disgusted. “Why don’t you ask yourself why you’re trusting your life to someone who can’t even differentiate between a real and an imaginary threat?”
Adam swears under his breath.
I lock eyes with him and he tosses me his gun.
He shakes his head. Swears again. Clenches and unclenches his fist. “It was just a drill.”
Warner actually laughs.
Adam glances at the door, the clock, my face. “We don’t have much time.”
I’m holding Warner’s gun in my left hand and Adam’s gun in my right and pointing them both at Warner’s forehead, doing my best to ignore the eyes he’s drilling in my direction. Adam uses his free hand to dig in his pockets for something. He pulls out a pair of plastic zip ties and kicks Warner onto his back just before binding his limbs together. Warner’s boots and gloves have been discarded on the floor. Adam keeps one boot pressed on his stomach.
“A million alarms are going to go off the minute we jump through that window,” he tells me. “We’ll have to run, so we can’t risk breaking our legs. We can’t jump.”
“So what do we do?”
He runs a hand through his hair and bites down on his bottom lip and for one delirious moment all I want to do is taste him. I force myself back into focus.
“I have rope,” he says. “We’ll have to climb down. And fast.”
He sets to work pulling out a coil of cord attached to a small clawlike anchor. I’d asked him a million times what on earth he would need it for, why