Archenemies (Renegades, #2)(93)

Nova curled her fingers around them. Even now, all these years later, she could hear the gunshots inside her head, deafeningly loud. She wasn’t convinced that a set of headphones would allow her mind to rest, after ten years of terrors.

Or perhaps it didn’t have much to do with the headphones at all. She flushed, remembering how it had felt to lay her head against Adrian’s chest. To listen to his heartbeat. There had been a feeling she couldn’t recall having experienced since she was a child.

The uncanny sensation of being safe.

Adrian was watching her, his expression serious. “It’s all right, Nova,” he said, leaning toward her. “It’s been weeks since you came in contact with Max, and this is the first time you’ve slept since then. I’m ninety-nine percent sure that still makes you a prodigy.”

She blinked, realizing how drastically Adrian had misinterpreted whatever he was seeing on her face. He thought she was worried about her powers, but that was a long way from the truth. She knew her true power—Nightmare’s ability to put people to sleep—was intact. She wasn’t afraid of that.

No, what she feared was something far, far worse, and had much more to do with the way she had sunk so easily into oblivion while in the arms of Adrian Everhart.

She was afraid, even now, of the way her fingers were twitching to reach out and touch him, when she never felt compelled to touch anyone, unless it was to disarm them.

And she might have been terrified of how hard it was to keep her gaze from straying to his mouth, or how her own traitorous lips had started to tingle, or how her own heartbeat had become an entire percussion section inside her chest.

Adrian’s eyes narrowed, just slightly. “What’s wrong?” he asked. A little suspicious, a little uncertain.

“Nothing,” she whispered.

Everything, her mind retorted.

What was she here for?

Not to sleep. Not to tell Adrian all the secrets she’d kept locked up her entire life. Not to be reminded for the umpteenth time how things might be different, if only …

Well. If only things were different.

What was she doing here?

Her gaze darted up to the boughs of the surrounding trees, where she spotted an all-white parrot. “The birds are new,” she said, eager to change the subject. To think about something else, before her mind tracked to kissing again.

Adrian didn’t respond for a moment, and she desperately wanted to know what was going through his head.

Had he thought about kissing too?

Her fingers curled around the blanket that had been tucked around her while she slept. Twenty-four hours. He must have been awake for ages now. How long had he been sitting there while she slept? Had he been watching her? And why was it that the possibility normally would have been annoying, if not downright creepy, but now all it did was make her worry that she might have said something incriminating in her sleep? Or, worse … drooled.

No. No, that wasn’t worse. She mentally shook herself, telling her thoughts to get themselves in order.

This was why sleep was dangerous. It addled her senses, and she needed to be on full alert. It made her vulnerable, regardless of how safe she had felt in Adrian’s arms.

“It felt like it needed wildlife,” said Adrian, “and I had some free time. And now I know that I can only draw so many parrots before losing interest.”

She shook her head warily. If Callum ever got ahold of Adrian’s sketchbooks, he would be beside himself. “You’re incredible, you know that, right? I mean … you can create life. First that dinosaur, and now an entire ecosystem?”

Adrian laughed, and though his skin was too dark to be sure, she was almost certain he was blushing. “I don’t think of it like that. I can create … the illusion of life.” He tracked the blue wings of a bird as it hopped across the canopy overhead. “I have a vague idea of how birds fly, and I know they eat bugs, and if they were chased by a falcon they would run away. But they’ll never learn or grow beyond what they are now. They won’t build nests or hatch eggs. They’re more like … like automatons, than real birds.”

Nova peered at him and tried to feel like his humble comments were warranted, but she knew he was underselling himself.

Typical Adrian.

Before she could respond, someone shouted from what seemed like miles away—

“Adrian! Dinner’s done!”

Nova tensed, surveying their jungle sanctuary.

She had forgotten, completely forgotten they were indoors at all, and not in the overgrown ruins of a long-dead city.

They were at his house. His mansion. The one he shared with the Dread Warden and Captain Chromium.

And his dads were here.

Adrian, too, seemed momentarily shaken. “Right,” he said, closing the sketchbook over the pencil. “Are you hungry?”

Her lips parted. Suddenly her breaths were coming in short, uncomfortable bursts.

Dinner. An everyday family dinner.

With them.

Shutting her mouth again, she forced herself to nod. “Yeah. Actually, I’m famished.”

“Me too.” Adrian stood and offered a hand, which she pretended not to notice as she pulled herself up using the crumbled stone wall. She wasn’t ready to touch him again. She didn’t want to know how much she would enjoy it.

By the time she turned back, his hand had slipped into his pocket. In addition to the long-sleeved tee, he had changed out of his jeans into gray sweatpants, and there was something so intimate and relaxed about it that she almost found him even more handsome this way.