Legacy (Sociopath Series Book 2)(48)

“*.”

“Arsehole.”

“Frigid bitch.”

“You love me really.” She yanks her hand away and rolls over, yawning. “I love it when we play Mean Girls.”

I clutch the book a little harder in disgust. “Stop trying to make Mean Girls happen. It’s not going to happen.”

A lazy grin spreads across her face. Leo smiles so rarely these days; it’s worth playing along with her pop culture bullshit just to see her lips pull up to the left before her white teeth play through.

She’s trembling.

Her eyelashes waver. The sheet vibrates.

My pulse shivers with hers; for long seconds, I see past the smile, down into the meat of her where every cell is on alert. That’s what obsession does to you. People tell you it’s one-sided, but there’s always connection, and when she feels, I almost feel. Echoed empathy. I like the way it tastes.

Problem is, it doesn’t matter to me what she’s feeling. It just matters that I can see it, and sometimes, I can’t help myself. I push.

“Go talk to Gwen,” I tell her. Before I shove you back down against the pillows and pull your seams apart until the fear seeps through.

“Fine, fine. Slave driver.”

I still get a kick out of her naked body. As she pulls her clothes from the leather bucket chair in the corner of our cozy cabin, our skin games are evident; soft pink lines along her buttocks, her lower back, and when she pulls on her panties, a flash of the jagged zig zags along her inner thigh. Bisecting her rib cage is the paper-white tape and padding I applied to the new scratch. Eight wounds in total since the beginning, and perhaps, on this trip, she’ll relax enough to let me inflict a couple new ones. I push a hand up under my t-shirt and graze the bullet hole she gave me, then the cross-hatched seam of the surgeon’s knife. Chills prickle up my spine. You shouldn’t try to change the ones you love, they say. What a load of crap.

If she wears a bikini, her scars will show. We’ll be on display together for all of the empty island to see; hollow eyes watching, imagined shadows calculating, and nothing to fear but the number of inches between us at any given time. Maybe running away wasn’t such a bad idea after all…?

I pull on a t-shirt and track pants so I can follow Leo into the lounge cabin. It’s around twenty feet long, lined with recliner chairs in padded navy blue; the smell of freshly cut fruit hangs in the air, and pale pink light paints the cream walls. On NYC time, it’s early afternoon, but this part of the world is already melting into the spattered agony of sunset. Our destination in the Maldives is ten hours ahead of NYC and by the time we arrive in Male, it’ll be early morning there. Gwen engineered this on purpose, of course. We need to arrive quietly.

Ash is lying on the thick ivory rug in front of the television, watching Transformers with headphones on. He winds the wire around one finger, chattering to himself in between mouthfuls of apple from a plastic plate. Harvey’s not here—must be sleeping in his cabin, or sitting up with the pilots—but Gwen and Ethan sit with just a chair between them, both playing absent-mindedly with their phones.

Ethan hasn’t noticed me. “You need to delete Facebook,” he tells Gwen in a solemn voice. “He’ll flip if he sees you messing around on there.”

She sniffs. “Why?”

“Because—because privacy—”

“Because,” I say, leaning over the empty seat, “if you happen to accidentally locate yourself on there, we’re f*cked.”

“I’m scheduling posts so it looks like you’re elsewhere,” Gwen says curtly. Her eyes are scrubbed of makeup, though a vague suggestion of plum gloss remains around the line of her lips. “That’s all.”

“May as well sleep while they’re uploading. The WiFi’s almost dead.”

Ash clocks me and Leo, and tears the earphones out to bounce up.

“Where have you been? Did you really sleep all that time?” he shrieks, clutching at my knees. Leo lingers at my side, clutching a glass of water; he eyes her with something between suspicion and curiosity. “You said I wasn’t allowed to sleep with a dolly. How come you are?”

Leo nearly spits out her water. Ethan raises his eyebrows, purses his lips, and swiftly looks away.

I’m about to tell Ash to mind his mouth—he’s being deliberately rude—but then I remember who I’d sound like. Jesus. A rock turns in my belly, heavy and rough.

Leo folds a table down from the back of a chair, and places her water on it. Then she kneels down so she’s eye level with Ash. “I’m not a dolly. But we can play if you want.”

He bobs up and down on his bare feet. “Uh…I don’t really play with girls.”

“Ash.” Ethan calls from his seat. “Be nice, please.”

He peers at Leo from under his mop of dark blond hair. “You know how to play Release the Kraken?”

She cocks her head. “I don’t think we had that one in England.”

“Ethan can show you!” Excitement bubbles from that invisible place all kids have—the place that shuts down the moment you ask them to brush their teeth, but goes batshit at anything Disney. “Ethan! Show the girl the Kraken!”

I walk around and sit down in the empty seat between Gwen and Ethan. “Tell me Kraken isn’t a metaphor.”