29. Clara

CHAPTER 29

Clara

I take a long time waking up the next morning, and when I finally open my eyes, it's to buttery sunlight streaming in through Thomas's windows. Thomas's, not mine. Because I slept in his bed last night.

I did so much more in his bed last night.

The dull, pleasant ache in my body makes me want to stay in bed for hours more. Maybe Thomas wouldn't mind keeping me company…

But then I remember the war. I remember our argument from the night before, and how we never really found a solution. I remember that Thomas turned his back to me, and I turned my back to him, and we slept with space between us instead of soaked in each other's body heat.

I roll over in bed, ready to try to bridge that gap, ready to try again to convince him of what needs to be done- but the other half of the bed is empty. Sitting up, I search the bedroom and listen for movement from the en suite or closet, but there's nothing.

He probably just stepped out for some breakfast , I tell myself. He'll be back in a minute .

My clothes are lying in a heap beside the bed from last night. I retrieve them and dress, then move to the bathroom to rinse out my mouth and run fingers through my tangled hair. Even after I finish my morning ablutions, there's no sign of Thomas. Stomach clenching a little with nerves, I return to the bedroom to wander and wait.

It's too difficult to resist snooping, at least a little. I examine his desk, which is, of course, immaculate, and run my fingers over the spines of the books on his bookshelves. When I get up the nerve to try one of the drawers on the desk, I find them locked, and I don't try to force them open. His closet is filled with carefully pressed and sorted clothes, all of them business casual or fancier. I finger the fine cloth of his button-up shirts and think that this is almost as intimate as kissing him.

My lips tingle. He kissed me last night, and it wasn't just a peck. His hunger was naked and primal. I felt it in the working of his jaw and the sweep of his tongue and the scrape of his teeth. It was all I could do not to be totally consumed, but if I had been, I don't think I would complain.

Either way, last night between us felt different. In his car, at the party, I'd been frantic with desire, and he… Well, he was just calculating the entire time, wasn't he? But last night, first kissing me and then letting me ride him- that surrender meant something. That tenderness meant something.

Did I ruin it by telling him I could still be of use?

I circle the room again, this time testing more drawers on the dresser, on the side tables, restless enough to crawl out of my own skin. In the drawer of the table on the right side of the bed, the side Thomas slept on last night, I'm shocked to find a gun. It doesn't have a silencer, and I recognize it as the unloaded gun Thomas used in the bistro to intimidate Mr. Russo.

A very bad idea begins to grow inside my mind. For a moment, I'm shocked and appalled that I'm capable of such thinking. But I meant what I said to Thomas last night. I can still be a good tool.

It's been twenty minutes and Thomas still isn't back. Is he planning to return at all, or is he avoiding me once again?

Well, if he's going to leave me unsupervised…

I go to the door and test the knob before realizing that of course Thomas wouldn't have a room that could be locked from the outside. I've gotten too used to doors that can't be opened. Taking a deep breath, I swing open the door- and Raleigh, passing by just on the other side, shrieks in surprise..

She jumps so hard she hits the opposite side of the hallway before she realizes it's just me. Her double take might be funny if I wasn't the one she was finding inside her brother's room in the late morning.

"Clara?" Raleigh says slowly. "What are you… doing here?"

I have no good lie or excuse. And if I did, the heat I feel suffusing my entire face would instantly give me away.

As the telling silence stretches, an entire array of emotions pass over Raleigh's face. Horror, disgust, disbelief, and, worse than all of those- hurt. It's visible for only a second before Raleigh clamps down on it and seals it away behind a new emotion. Anger.

"Is this… what everything's been about?" she asks slowly. "You didn't care about his schemes or about stopping your uncle, you just wanted to-" Thankfully for both of us, she cuts herself off, looking a little green. "I don't even know what to say."

"That's not it," I say quickly, but what it is I can't possibly say. "I wasn't- we didn't- I- mean-"

Raleigh holds up both hands. " Stop . Please. I want absolutely no information about what you and my brother are doing together. None, okay? Fuck it, none ." She takes a deep breath, and whatever else she wants to say, she seems to shove it aside. "I was coming to find you because I figured you should know, and no one else was going to tell you. Your uncle bombed one of our underground clubs last night. Killed a bunch of people and partially collapsed the bar on top of it. Thomas is in an emergency meeting to plan a counterattack." Her eyes are hard when they meet mine. "That war you wanted to avoid? Yeah, well, it's here now."

My stomach drops through the floor. People died hours ago, and it's my fault. No matter what Thomas said, I have to leave now. I have to put a stop to this.

"Okay," I hear myself say from miles away, "okay. I have to go back to the Speare estate. I'm going to stop my uncle." I hesitate, but only for a moment. "I'll never ask you to help me again, I promise. But will you show me a discreet way out of here?"

Raleigh's eyes go so wide I can see the whites around her irises. She scoffs, in disbelief, in rage, I don't know. I can see that she wants to say something cutting, but with a sharp shake of her head, she discards it. "Fine. Fine . Follow me."

She stomps down the hall toward the stairs, and I follow close behind her, though I'm almost afraid she wants to take a swing at me. We listen at the landing, but the stairs are quiet, and we go down to the first floor and slip around the side of the staircase to a door tucked at the end of a short hall. Raleigh moves like a storm crossing overhead, her long strides eating up the hardwood floor. At the door, she pauses, presses her ear against it, then throws it open and leads me inside.

I find us in an enormous pantry stocked with rows of full shelves. It's cool and dry and dark in here, except for small windows near the ceiling letting in some of the sun. Raleigh leads me unerringly through the maze of shelves to a door on the back wall, which opens onto a pitch black stairway leading down into the earth. My heart, which was already pounding hard, kicks up to a new gear.

I recognize this stairway. The way to it has changed from my childhood, but as we descend into the basement, memories rise up to greet me. This is a part of the old house that survived the fire, and one that I was trained to run to at the first sign of danger. My mother and I were on the way here, in fact, that fateful night everything changed. Uncle held us up, turned us in the opposite direction, told us we were leaving instead of hiding. I told my mother I didn't want to leave- that I had to find Raleigh- but she wouldn't let go of me, and in the end I let her pull me out of the house.

At the bottom of the stairs, I don't need Raleigh to point me toward the old china cabinet stored in the corner that swings aside to reveal the escape door. There's a bunker room there, but there's also a back door, in case the bunker itself is in danger of being breached. We walk in silence almost side by side through a tunnel made entirely of cement, lit only by red emergency lighting. It stretches out and out and out, leaving the estate above our heads far behind, somehow feeling longer than it did when I was a child doing an escape drill.

The door at the far end has a heavy wooden beam bracing it closed that takes both Raleigh and I to lift up and out of the way. Sunlight floods the tunnel, stinging my eyes. When I blink the tears away, Raleigh and I are standing on the threshold of a field of warehouses, edged by a dirt road that leads back down into the valley in one direction, and deeper into the mountains in the other.

I can follow this road into the city and probably make it to my uncle's estate in the next couple hours. I can only hope that Thomas will be bogged down in meetings until then so he can't come after me.

Before I take off, though, I owe Raleigh more than an apology. I turn to her, my throat closing up. She hasn't left the shadow of the tunnel, and she seems more uncertain than I've ever seen her.

I open my mouth to try to tell her how much it means to me that she's helped me so many times, despite it all. But before I can get a word out, Raleigh blurts,

"I set the fire in my house."