A Lesson in Vengeance(74)

Ellis’s lips curve into a frown. “Are you all right?” she says, a softer edge rounding her tone. Her gloved hand tilts my chin up so that I have to meet her gaze. “Felicity. Tell me you’re okay.”

The darkness around us is now absolute. I can barely make out Ellis’s features, can’t even tell the color of her eyes. They’re pale like glass but alive, flickering with light. Or maybe I’m just dizzy, exhausted, half-frozen. She cups my cheek.

I exhale. My breath shudders out of me to cloud in the wintry air. “I’m okay.”

“Are you sure?”

I nod. Ellis’s teeth catch her lower lip for a moment, but then she stands, offering a hand to pull me up. She tugs me away from the coyote’s carcass and into a streak of moonlight that filters through the forest canopy.

I must be mad, truly mad—as if killing that coyote knocked my brain off-kilter—because I find myself deliriously thinking how beautiful Ellis is. Her skin is pewter in this light, all her color reduced to myriad shades of gray, like a black-and-white photo given life.

“I can’t believe I killed it,” I say.

“I can’t believe you killed it, either,” Ellis admits. Her hand is on my waist, steadying me as I stagger over fallen branches. “You didn’t have to.”

“I had to.” I don’t know how to explain it to her, not fully. I don’t even know how to explain it to myself. But I couldn’t…After everything, after the story Quinn told me about Ellis and her rabbit…I couldn’t let her pull the trigger. I couldn’t make her do that again.

Or maybe I just needed to know if I was capable of it. If I had that dark streak inside me, running black and cold enough to take a life.

It turns out I do.

“Come on,” Ellis says. She laces her fingers together with mine. “Let’s go back.”





I don’t remember much of the trip out of the woods and up to the house.

What I do remember is Ellis’s hand gripping mine the entire time, the taste of sweat on my lips. The common room light is on when we ascend from the garden up to the house proper, but we evade Quinn entirely. Instead Ellis takes the steps two at a time; I go behind like a pale shadow, my bared hand cold as it trails along the banister.

She goes to her room, and I follow.

I kick the door closed behind me and Ellis pulls off her gloves finger by finger, watching me with this wary look, like she still expects me to bolt.

“I told you I’m fine,” I say. It comes out more persuasively now, my voice steadier away from the dark.

“I know what you said.”

“And you know I’d tell you if I wasn’t fine.” I offer her a small and wavering smile. “Shame has never stopped me from falling apart on you before.”

She laughs and the taut thread tied between us eases a little. Eases, but doesn’t unravel.

Ellis presses her bared hand to my sternum, right above my heart. I wonder if she can feel it beating against her palm—too fast now.

“You’re brave, Felicity,” she says. “You’re the bravest person I know.”

And then she kisses me.

The dizzy feeling doesn’t abate. Instead of swaying on my feet, I cling to her with both hands, my head spinning and her tongue in my mouth. Ellis’s body is hard and firm, and I can’t stop touching it; she presses me back against the shut door as her open mouth skims my cheek. I arch closer as she peppers kisses along my jaw, my throat.

“I’ve wanted you,” she murmurs, and those three words are sudden heat; when she pulls back, my lipstick is smeared across her mouth, a scarlet streak cutting past her jaw. Her lips are parted and still damp.

I need to kiss her again, but when I try she tilts away, then smiles. “I want to hear you say it.”

My breath cuts out of me in shallow half gasps. Both my hands twine in fists around the fabric of her shirt.

“I want you, too,” I say.

Ellis’s smirk widens. This time when she kisses me, it’s harder, more desperate. I’m desperate, too, shucking off her jacket and waistcoat, Ellis’s fingers fumbling over the buttons on my shirt in turn.

My hands find her waist, smoothing down toward her narrow hips. God. I can tell just from this, even with her body clothed in thick tweed and wool, that she’s strong. Powerful.

I need more.

Ellis’s forearms bump against mine as she unknots her tie and yanks it free. The drag of that fabric against her collar sends an unexpected shiver down my spine.

Maybe any other day, or with any other woman, I would have been embarrassed. But there’s something about this night—or about Ellis herself—that makes me feel confident. Sexy.

Invincible.

The rest of our clothes come off, and then we’re moving, the backs of my legs hitting the edge of the mattress. Then we’re on the bed, and Ellis is there, touching me.

I wonder if my skin feels hot against hers. I’m burning up inside.

“Fuck,” I gasp, and Ellis laughs against my collarbones.

“Oh dear,” she murmurs. “Language, Felicity.”

I love the way my name sounds on her voice: husky and low, gravelly in a way that makes me shiver. Being here with Ellis, like this, feels inevitable: as if I could trace our friendship back to the day we met and discover roots there, the original seed of something that would become this.