Take the Key and Lock Her Up (Embassy Row #3)(11)

I’m not hungry, but I force myself to eat—to keep my body fed, to be a good influence on Jamie, who is still far too thin and too weak.

Besides, the way Dominic is acting, we may not stop for lunch, for supper. We may never stop again, and so I take slow, steady bites of my pancakes. I eat my scrambled eggs. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that I have absolutely no idea what any day might bring.

The diner is cold but far from empty. The only noise is the scrape of forks against plates, the distant, sizzling hum of frying bacon. And, beneath it all, there are whispers.

I can see the girls out of the corner of my eye. They’ve piled purses and backpacks into the corner of a booth, and the three of them lean across the Formica-topped table. They’ve pushed aside plates of barely eaten food and filled their cups with more sugar than coffee. But, most of all, they watch us.

No. That’s not true. They watch Alexei.

Eventually, Dominic gets up to pay the bill. The girls slide out of their booth and collect their things, shooting glances our way.

“You have admirers,” I say.

“Excuse me?” Alexei looks at me as if maybe I am speaking Japanese.

“You didn’t notice your fan club?” I jerk my head in the direction of the three girls. They’re all wearing cheerleading uniforms. It must be Friday, I realize. Game night. They’re probably getting ready to go to a pep rally, maybe take some tests. They are getting ready to be normal for one more day.

They’re the queens of their school; I can tell it by the way they sit and talk and toss their hair.

I’m a real-life princess, but I’ll never be as royal as the three of them.

“You notice everything,” I tell him. “Do you really expect me to believe that you didn’t see three girls in cheerleading uniforms checking you out?”

Alexei glances up, blue eyes through dark black lashes. “I do not notice girls,” he says. “I notice girl.”

And with those words, my brother coughs. “Well, I think that’s my cue to excuse myself.” He slides out of the booth and heads toward the bathroom, slowly. He actually holds on to one of the leather-covered barstools to steady himself as he goes.

The cheerleaders watch him. Just a few weeks ago they would have been eyeing both Alexei and Jamie, but my brother isn’t well, and it’s obvious even to them. Whatever swagger he used to have flowed out of him weeks ago. We left it puddled on the embassy’s dining room floor.

It’s coming back, I know it. Slowly. Surely. But it’s not coming fast enough.

“He’s not getting better, is he?” I ask, terrified of the answer, but needing to ask it anyway.

Alexei pushes his empty plate away and pulls mine in front of him, shoves a fork full of my pancakes into his mouth, then considers.

“He has the strongest heart of anyone I have ever known. He will recover.”

The frustration that’s been building inside of me for days is starting to boil now. It’s all I can do not to yell when I say, “Not if we keep dragging him all over creation. Not if we keep giving him fluids in the back of a car and not taking him to a doctor when his fever spikes, and … he won’t get better like this.”

“Yes.” Alexei pierces me with a stare. “He will. He has to.”

“He needs to rest,” I say like a petulant child, complaining about not getting her way. “He needs to stay in one place and rest.”

“We can’t stop running, Gracie.” Alexei pushes away my plate as well, his appetite suddenly gone. “You know that. We can never stop running.”

I want to yell and scream about how wrong he and Dominic are to doubt me—that I know Jamie better than anyone and I know what is best. I wish I could tell them that they’re wrong.

But they’re not.

And I hate that most of all.

“Jamie could stop running, you know …”

“Gracie, we—”

“He could.” I cut him off, make him look into my eyes. “He could stop if they had something—if they had someone—else to chase.”

In the silence that follows I can actually feel Alexei shifting, changing. He sits up straighter, leans closer. He does everything but grab me by the hands, force me to stay in this booth and within his grasp. I can actually feel Alexei’s fear.

“Gracie, if you think you can—”

“Hey!”

When I see a fuzzy blue figure out of the corner of my eye it takes me a moment to remember the cheerleaders. They stand at the end of our booth, pink backpacks over blue uniforms, all three of them looking down at Alexei, who doesn’t even seem to notice that they’re there, wearing uniforms that are the exact color of his eyes.

I look up at the middle girl, the one who spoke. “Hi,” I say, but the girl acts like I haven’t said a thing.

“So my friends and I were wondering … do we know you?” She runs her hands along her backpack straps, pushing her chest a little closer to Alexei.

“Sorry,” I say. “We’re not from around here.”

“It’s just that …” the girl says as if she’s still under the impression that she’s having this conversation with the cute boy and not the annoying girl he’s eating with for some unknown reason. “You look super familiar, and we thought we’d come say hi. So … hi.”