Chapter 4 4

Wren

I woke sometime after two to the sound of voices downstairs.

For a long, disoriented moment I lay perfectly still in the unfamiliar dark, heart hammering, trying to convince myself I'd imagined it, some leftover fragment of a dream bleeding into consciousness the way it had on the plane. 

Then I heard it again, low, urgent, unmistakably real moans, coming from somewhere on the ground floor, and every hair on my arms stood straight up.

Zara was asleep down the hall. I knew this because I'd checked on her twenty minutes earlier, unable to settle myself, and found her sprawled diagonally across her bed with one arm flung over her face, dead to the world in the specific, boneless way only Zara ever managed to sleep. Which meant whatever I was hearing wasn't her.

I told myself it was nothing. A television left on somewhere. The pipes settling in an old house. I told myself several increasingly unconvincing things as I crept out of bed and into the hallway, my bare feet silent against the hardwood, moving toward the top of the staircase with a caution that felt, in hindsight, almost comically inadequate to what I was about to find.

The sounds got clearer as I descended, and clearer, and considerably more specific, and by the time I reached the bottom step, my whole body had gone hot with an understanding I very much did not want to have.

That was not a television.

I should have turned around right there. I want that on record, for whatever it's worth, that some functioning part of my brain absolutely understood, standing at the bottom of that staircase, that the correct and dignified response was to retreat immediately, silently, and never speak of this again.

I did not turn around.

I crept toward the sound instead, some catastrophic combination of disbelief and morbid curiosity propelling me forward, and found the source through a half-open door near the dining room, light off, curtains open just enough to let in a slice of streetlight, and two people very much not alone in that room.

Were these.. burglars? Fucking hard against Kai’s wall?

Is this how they do in this America? 

I registered the cheerleader uniform first, absurdly, a flash of red and white still half on, and then the hair, bright, unmistakable red, and then, with a lurch of pure horror, the face of the man underneath her.

I don't remember deciding to scream. I remember the sound leaving me before my brain had fully caught up with what my eyes were reporting, and I remember slapping wildly at the wall until my palm found the light switch, flooding the room in sudden, merciless brightness.

"Oh my God," I gasped, or possibly shrieked, both hands flying up to cover my own eyes a full second too late. "Oh my God, I'm so sorry, I didn't, I didn't know anyone was here."

My eyes, entirely without my permission, dropped for one horrifying half-second before I managed to wrench them back up, and some deeply unwise part of my brain, apparently unsupervised by any remaining sense of self-preservation, thought, distantly, that he was considerably larger than seemed reasonable, and considerably harder, and oh my God I need to stop looking immediately.

"What the fuck," Kai roared, scrambling backward, snatching at anything within reach to cover himself, his face contorted with a fury I'd genuinely never seen on him before, not in nine years, not even the time Rhys had put a dead fish in his hockey bag. "What the actual fuck are you doing in my house?"

"Your …uhh uhh my sister let us in," I managed, my whole face burning, still unable to fully look at him, staring instead at a spot on the wall somewhere over his left shoulder like it might rescue me from this moment through sheer force of will. "The hotel had a fire, we had nowhere else to go."

"MY SISTER!?” His voice cracked on the word, somewhere between fury and disbelief. "What sister? You don't have a sister that's supposed to be in this house, I have exactly one sister and she is supposed to be in a concert Or whatever right now, not you standing in my front hallway watching me."

"I'm not watching anything!"

"You watched plenty! You watched a handful."

The girl, redhead, apparently, judging by the way she was now scrambling for her own clothes with visible mortification, made a small, strangled sound and grabbed at a shirt that clearly wasn't hers, and I realized, with fresh horror, that this entire nightmare had an audience of at least one more person than I'd originally accounted for.

"Kai," she demanded, voice tight, "who the hell is this?"

"No one Reid. A nobody," he snapped, yanking his trousers back on with more violence than the act strictly required, still glaring at me like I'd personally engineered this entire catastrophe out of spite. "She's nobody, she's my sister's supposed friend, she was just leaving."

Nobody. Of course. Nine years and I was still, apparently, nobody.

"I am leaving," I announced, my voice climbing with something that felt dangerously close to hysteria, backing toward the staircase with my hands still raised like I was under arrest. "I am leaving right now, I am so sorry, this was a mistake, this entire trip was a mistake."

"Damn right it was a mistake." Kai advanced a step, fully dressed now, fury radiating off him in waves, and I registered, distantly, blood trickling from what appeared to be a fresh cut somewhere near his temple, though I had absolutely no idea how that had happened and no intention of asking. "You cannot just let yourselves into my house."

"YOUR SISTER let herself in! With YOUR passcode! Which YOU gave HER!"

"That doesn't mean she gets to bring random people."

YOU…YOU PSYCHOTIC SEXY ASS ANIMALLLL! 

I wanted to so badly scream, or bite him I don’t know which one came first.

"I am not a random person, I am literally standing in this house because there was an actual fire, Kai, an actual emergency, and this was the only option available."

"MUM. DAD." Zara's voice cut through the chaos from the top of the staircase, sleepy and confused, before sharpening instantly into alarm. "What is going on down there, why is everyone shouting?"

She appeared at the top of the stairs in an oversized t-shirt, hair a wild tangle, blinking down at the scene below with the particular disorientation of someone who'd been deeply asleep thirty seconds earlier, and her face went through several rapid transformations, confusion, then delight at spotting her brother, then abject horror as she registered the half-dressed cheerleader standing awkwardly by the dining room table.

"Oh," Zara said. "Oh, no. I should have texted you I was coming."

"YOU THINK?" Kai's voice actually cracked on the word, and for one wild, inappropriate second I nearly laughed, hysteria bubbling dangerously close to the surface.

"In my defense," Zara offered, descending the stairs with considerably more composure than the situation warranted, "you're supposed to be at training. You're always at training. This is genuinely the first time in recorded history you've been home. What are you doing here Kai?."

"I live here, Zara, this is literally my house, why is it strange that I'm occasionally in it."

"It's strange because you're never in it, that's the entire reason I thought it was safe to."

"I DON'T CARE WHY YOU THOUGHT IT WAS SAFE."

I stood frozen at the base of the staircase through this entire exchange, mortification and adrenaline warring violently in my chest, watching twin siblings shout increasingly circular accusations at each other while a cheerleader I'd never met stood by awkwardly clutching someone else's shirt, and thought, with a clarity that felt almost peaceful amid the chaos, that I needed to leave this house immediately, tonight, regardless of the hour, regardless of the cold, regardless of anything at all except the burning, humiliating need to be anywhere else on earth but here.

"I'm leaving," I declared, to nobody in particular, already backing toward the front door.

"Wren, wait."

I didn't wait. I grabbed my coat off the hook by the door, shoved my bare feet into the first shoes I found, and walked directly out into the cold Manhattan night, leaving chaos and shouting and a boy I'd apparently seen entirely too much of behind me, my whole body still shaking with something I refused, absolutely refused, to examine too closely until I was several blocks away and safely, thoroughly alone.

I should have just remained with my mother in the UK o!

FUCK!

The night air hit me like a slap, sharp and cold enough to sting, and I walked fast and aimless down an unfamiliar street with no plan whatsoever beyond putting distance between myself and that house, my mind cycling uselessly through the image I could not, no matter how hard I tried, un-see.

I had made it exactly four blocks, shivering, furious, thoroughly regretting my choice of footwear, when I heard a car slow down beside me, engine low and expensive-sounding, and felt my stomach drop straight through the pavement before I'd even turned to look.

Of course it was him.

The window rolled down as the car matched my pace, crawling along the curb, and Kai leaned across the passenger seat, jaw tight, that same cut still visible near his temple, dried blood dark against his skin.

"Get in the car."

"Absolutely not."

"Wren." His voice had dropped into something low and dangerous, entirely different from the panicked fury back at the house. "It's the middle of the night. You don't know this city. Get in the car."

"I know how to use a phone, I'll find my own way, you don't need to concern yourself with my transportation."

"I'm not asking."

"Then I suppose it's a good thing I'm not particularly interested in what you're asking or not asking," I shot back, quickening my pace, my bare ankles screaming with cold, refusing to look at him directly even as the car kept perfect, infuriating pace beside me.

"You're going to catch hypothermia before you find a cab at this hour, in this neighborhood, wearing whatever those shoes are supposed to be."

"That sounds like my problem."

"It becomes my problem the second something happens to you while you're wandering around my city at three in the morning because you stormed out of my house," he snapped, and something in the specific edge of that sentence, my city, made something in my chest flare with fresh anger. "Get in the car, Sokolov . I am not asking a third time."

I stopped walking. I don't fully know what possessed me to stop, standing on that cold pavement with my arms wrapped around myself, but something in his voice, hearing him call me that..that last name of mine, some mixture of command and genuine, grudging concern I couldn't quite parse, made my feet simply refuse to keep moving.

The rain, which had been threatening the entire walk, chose that exact moment to start falling in earnest, cold and sudden, and within seconds I was soaked through, hair plastered to my face, and Kai, watching from the dry safety of his car, actually had the audacity to look smug about it.

"Get in the car," he repeated, quieter now, though no less certain. "Please."

That please, more than anything else, was what finally broke my resolve.

I mean, what’s the worse that could happen.