Thin Lines (The Child Thief #3)(59)

With that thought, I started gathering up any trash we’d left around the place, including pieces of the vegetables and scraps of cloth.

Jace put a hand on mine quite suddenly, and I stilled.

“Leave the trash,” he said.

“Why?” I asked, confused.

He smiled a bit. “If they find the place and find trash in it, maybe they’ll think we’re coming back to it. And if they think that, they might spend less time searching the rest of the forest.”



I slept badly, partially because I was incapable of lying on the leg with the bruise, and partially because I was intent on listening to the wolves outside (and making sure they stayed outside, rather than coming into the cave, questing for the food that I’d sometimes given them before).

I was also listening for a change in the tone of their howls, because I figured that might mean there were intruders in the area. I doubted the Authority would find the rock face we’d climbed, and even if they did, I didn’t think they’d assume that we had climbed it. That narrow ledge wasn’t immediately obvious. But if they did somehow find their way up that rock face, and then into the chasm we’d walked through to get here, then they’d be in the wolves’ territory, and the wolves should react.

The final and somewhat most pressing reason I was having trouble sleeping, though, was the large male sleeping right behind me. It wasn’t that he was doing anything wrong. In fact, he was deliciously warm, and by the time he’d finally appeared again, after having spent an hour shifting and hiding the supplies with Kory, the night had turned chilly, and I’d moved instinctively toward him, sucking up the warmth as quickly as I could. No, the problem was that he was there at all—and that I still had no idea what I was supposed to do with him. He’d spent much of the previous day taking care of me, taking care of all of us, and I hadn’t had a chance to thank him. I didn’t even know how to thank him, or what kind of thanks would be appropriate. In our situation—

“If you don’t stop squirming around, you’re going to wake up even stiffer in the morning than you will believe possible,” a sleepy voice murmured in my ear.

I grew still, my heart hammering, and tried to act like I was actually asleep. Like I’d been squirming in my sleep, because of a dream. That was right, I’d just been dreaming.

“Hmmm?” I asked, stretching and doing my best impression of a person who’d just woken up.

A soft snort was the first answer. “And don’t act like you’ve been asleep. I’ve been mostly asleep myself, but I’ve felt you lying there stiff as a board all night, and that’s when you’re not acting like there are ants in your blanket or something. That’s not the way a sleeping person acts.”

He took me by the shoulder and rolled me over onto my back, then propped himself up on his elbow and leaned over me. The fire, which he’d banked into mere coals earlier, was still glowing, and the orange of it glinted off the natural amber of his eyes, playing havoc with my insides.

Talk about a set-up. The middle of a summer night, a firelit scene, us under the same sheet…

“What’s wrong?” he asked, reaching to brush my cheek with the tips of his fingers. “You’re shaking, and I know you’re not cold. I’ve been lying as close to you as I could all night just to keep you warm.”

What was wrong? It was a good question, and there were a lot of answers. If I was being honest with myself, though, none of them mattered as much as the question around our safety.

“I’m worried,” I admitted. “Worried that the Authority is going to somehow find us. Worried that everything is going to go wrong with getting into Samsfield tomorrow. Worried that we’re not going to be able to find this secret agent person, and that she won’t be able to give us what we need. Or that she’ll end up being someone we can’t trust, like Walter. Worried that the Authority has found our friends and they’re in jail, or dead. Worried that we’re all by ourselves, and there’s no Nathan or Little John to tell us what to do…” I paused, surprised at the flood of words, and stopped to actually consider what I’d said. It was more than I’d meant to say, and with that acknowledgement came even more fear.

I bit my lip, trying not to let it show on my face, and Jace chuckled softly.

“That’s a whole lot to be thinking about in the middle of the night,” he chided. “Especially on a night like this.”

He meant a night where we were lying in a cave together under a sheet, the fire glowing softly next to us, everyone else in the cave safely asleep. Oh God, I thought, terrified and embarrassed—and elated—all at once. This was it. This was the moment we’d been dancing around basically since I met him and made that stupid joke about a “sew job.” He was going to kiss me. I knew it.

And with Ant right there across the cave. How horrifying.

“On a night like this?” I asked, my lips trembling.

He frowned. “Well, yeah,” he said. “Tomorrow we’re going to be taking our lives into our hands—intentionally this time. I mean, I hope for the best, but it’s not the safest thing I’ve ever done. Going into any sort of civilization is dangerous, even if it’s not the town where the Authority is searching for us. We’ll all do better if we’ve had a full night’s rest. Really, you should be sleeping. I should be making you sleep.”