“I thought Adeline was going to be some kind of guardian or something?” she said, frowning.
He nodded. “That’s one way of looking at it. But I’ll still be hunting Blights.”
She scowled. “You can’t agree to this. How long before you don’t just hate what’s happened to you, but hate the person to whom you’re bound?”
His gaze dropped from Charlie’s. “I hate her already.”
Oh.
Now she understood Adeline’s mealymouthed innuendo. And she understood exactly how bound Vince was going to be. They’d be tethered together. She’d be wearing him.
“That’s why you and I need to be apart for a while,” he told her. “I will never stop feeling the way I do about you, Char. But I won’t be the same. Someone will be trying to control me.”
She remembered him talking in his sleep. Adeline. Adeline, don’t.
The thought made Charlie’s skin crawl. “I can get you out of the cuff. We can run for it.”
He shook his head. “If we did, they wouldn’t be hunting just me.”
“I don’t care,” Charlie told him.
He put his hand to her cheek. “They told me that I need to prove I’m trustworthy, and that once I do, I won’t need to be tethered. I’ll get out of this. I’ll find a way for us to be together.”
Oh, they were going to find a way out of this all right.
“And they’re going to do it today?” Of course they were. That was why Adeline had been there. They were going to stitch him on as soon as Charlie departed.
Vince turned away, so that she couldn’t see much of his face, but he looked resigned. And she was making it harder. “Today, yes. I’ve already agreed.”
She could tell that he hated that she was making it harder.
“Tell me one thing,” she said. “If you could, would you choose me?”
“Over anything,” he said.
“Okay,” she said finally. “I think this is a bad decision, but I’ve made lots of those.”
This was what he’d learned from being Remy’s shadow: if there was a problem, he was supposed to throw himself at it. He was supposed to let himself get captured so he could try to kill an ancient Blight, was supposed to give up his freedom to make sure the Cabal wouldn’t feel threatened. If there was a terrible task, he was the one who was supposed to do it. If there was a difficult emotion, he was the one who was supposed to feel it.
His golden lashes caught the light as they swept down over his cheek, hiding the smoke of his eyes. “Sometimes there are no good decisions.”
And wasn’t that just the truth. “If I can’t talk you out of it, then how about I distract you? I bet we’ve got a couple minutes before they kick me out.”
His eyebrows went up, clearly astonished. Maybe he thought she’d have a problem with his smoke-filled eyes, or the fact that he was a Blight. Or maybe he thought that no one was crazy enough to want to screw around in a cold, concrete room with someone whose ankle was cuffed to the floor.
Well, welcome to the absolute mess that was Charlie Hall. She reached up and dragged his mouth to hers.
For a moment, he went utterly still, and she wondered if he was going to push her away. Shame heated her cheeks.
Then he kissed her as though he had never thought to do so again, hands cradling the back of her head, fingers in her hair. For a moment, there was only the sensation of lips and teeth and tongue. Of skin, and the scent of him that wasn’t masked by bleach or soap, like a charge of electricity in the air.
And when he pressed her back against the wall like he had outside the bar that first night, she grinned up at him.
“Charlie Hall,” he whispered into her hair. “There will never be anyone like you.”
“For which we can all be grateful,” she whispered back, regretting wearing the stretchy pants, which were hell to get off.
* * *
The hard part was walking out of the room. But she did, stomping down the hall. Waiting for him to call her back to tell her that he’d made a huge mistake and they should run after all. He didn’t, despite how much she wished he would.
Once she’d gone down four flights of stairs, she found her way back to Bellamy and his red velvet beanbag. He wasn’t alone. Vicereine was there, and Malik. Neither of them seemed particularly surprised to see her, but they also didn’t seem happy about it.
“Hello,” Charlie said, brushing past Malik to find a cushion of her own to settle on.
“You did us a service,” he said. “The Cabal owes you something. We like to settle our debts. If the larger world gets involved, our disputes will only make them nervous.”