Unstoppable (Their Shifter Academy #6) - May Dawson Page 0,51

yet?” I asked, already knowing the answer. If he’d debated whether or not to tell me, he certainly hadn’t told Rafe.

He shook his head. “He knows I talked to Frederick, that my friends are in Elegiah, and that Frederick claims to be working against the Establishment. But I didn’t go into the….details… yet.”

I raised an eyebrow, prompting him to go on.

He pulled a face in response. “We’ve got to get the shield, and my friends are all amazing criminals. We could use them.”

“Why does this not surprise me?” I teased. Of course Silas would have out with the best… of the worst. “But that’s not why you want to rescue them first. You don’t really think you need them.”

He chewed his lower lip absently. “The old Silas wouldn’t ask.”

“I like this version better,” I promised him. He was always so confident, it was strange to see Silas hesitate, and it made me want to wrap him up in a hug. Instead, I reminded him, “I’ve been on the receiving end of all your manipulation before. You stole some of my memories. It’s not good for a relationship, Sy.”

“I gave them back.” The kettle began to whistle, and he took it off the stove and poured hot water into two mugs before adding tea bags and stirring in rock sugar. As he handed me a mug, he added, “After all, I didn’t want to keep the memory of our spectacular first kiss to myself forever.”

I smiled over the top of my mug, then took a sip. Silas promptly took my cup back from me and said, “It hasn’t even finished steeping yet. You are a savage.”

“Did you just take my tea away?”

“I can’t speak to the rest of your world, but so far… Americans as a whole do not seem to deserve tea.”

I took my cup back, my fingers briefly overlapping his long, narrow ones. He smiled down at me, and I smiled back; something about bantering with Silas was warm and comfortable as a blanket.

“I don’t know what I’d do without you, Silas Zip.”

He raised his brows. “I can think of six things you can do without me.”

I shook my head, suddenly certain that we had a discussion we needed to have about just how important he was to the family and the team. But now was probably not the time.

“Just talk to them, Silas,” I urged him. “We won’t let you down.”

He wrapped his hands around his cup. “That’s too big a promise, Maddie. Even when we love people, even when we have the best of intentions, we let them down. That’s just part of being human.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I do,” he said. “You want me to be unnecessarily honest, and gamble on Rafe being reasonable…which would be fine except that I’d be gambling my friends’ lives. Or I could play it safe, and just tell Rafe that we need them to succeed. Why wouldn’t I twist the roll of the dice?”

“Because it’s wrong?” I prompted him. I could imagine how Rafe would react to being lied to; our little team was already fractured enough.

Silas’s face was stubborn. “It’s not wrong to protect my friends. To finish the mission.”

“It’s wrong to lie to people you love.” My voice grew heated, in contrast to his unshakable calm. At the moment, I wanted to shake that cool demeanor.

He shrugged. “Some things are more wrong than others.”

“Please—” I began, desperate to get Silas to listen to me. But how was I going to reason him into believing in a different set of ethics and expectations than had been forged in his brutal childhood?

“What’s wrong?” Rafe demanded from the doorway.

My heart fluttered, as if I’d been caught doing something I shouldn’t. Apparently Rafe had given us as much time to talk as he could bear.

“Maddie and I were just discussing a little trip to Elegiah,” Silas said. I moved to his side to face Rafe and Jensen, and he rested his elbow on my shoulder, the gesture familiar—he’d done that even before the two of us began a relationship, when he’d offered me easy, comfortable friendship in a world where everyone else seemed to be against me.

Silas added, “And everything about Elegiah is wrong.”

I stared at Silas, knowing that telling the truth to Rafe would feel reckless to him.

Loving people is terrifying. To love someone is a reckless act, at times, or at least it feels that way. The thought that I might read Rafe wrong and he might deny Silas the