Page 51 of Sherwood
Lox tilted her head up. Her eyes glittered with something almost like mischief. “Well, I’m definitely not. I’m something much better.”
“And what’s that?”
“A thief.”
“Indeed.”
I pressed my forehead to hers and wondered if this had been inevitable all along.
From the moment I bit Marian’s wrist.
From the moment I saw Lox on our first mission in Carpathia, all green eyes and sparks of fire.
Lox found my hand, laced her fingers through my own. “Marian’s waiting for us,” she murmured. I opened my eyes and looked down at our hands.
“You think—the three of us—?”
“We’ve seen it work before, haven’t we?” she said. “President Colchester, his First Lady, and his Vice President—if the rumors are to be believed, they made it work too. Why not us?”
“One, because we’d be on the run from the entirety of the United States intelligence apparatus. Two, because you and I are only capable of eating each other alive.”
“But maybe she was what we needed all along,” Lox said as she searched my face. “The two of us together—we’re like fire burning more fire. But with Marian…”
Yes. With Marian, it somehow worked, clicked, in a way I could never have predicted. The itch in me to take, to wield and to hold, it would never go away—and it would never be fully satisfied with a dominant who was just as hungry for dominion as me. But with Marian between us…Marian, the accidental obsession, the accidental beloved…
“Okay, but what if Marian doesn’t want this? What if she doesn’t want two separate dominants obsessed with her, possessive of her?”
Lox gave me a slow, wicked smile. A dimple dug into her right cheek.
“Why don’t we ask her ourselves?”
ChapterThirteen
RAFE
From above,Sherwood Forest had been a knobby green mass barely worth looking at, and from the road, it had been nothing more to me than an environment to search, different from a shelled city or remote mountain village only in its appearance, not in function. When I’d looked it at before today, I’d only seen the trees as obstacles to vehicles and sight lines, I’d only seen the streams and endless, searching tree roots asterrain, the messy, mossy chessboard I’d need to move my pieces on.
Today, I saw it differently.
Lox and I edged from the concrete shell of the house into a fern-choked tangle of growth, and I felt my shoes on the soft soil between the trees. We crept between thick cedars and firs until we reached a deer track by a stream, and I saw the labyrinth of nigh-invisible paths that spiderwebbed through the forest, only revealing themselves to someone who wasn’t looking for the idea of what a path should look like, to someone who trusted that beyond a chink in the ferns might be a trail worth following.
This wasn’tterrainat all. This was a world all in itself, an entire universe, and one that could only be perceived from inside of it, from the forest floor as one pushed their way through.
No wonder the aerial surveys had turned up nothing.
Lox led me this way and that, over ropey tree roots and around fallen logs and under skeins of moss. We slipped the security net set by my colleagues as easily as rain slips through the trees to the ground, and we’d done it not with expensive tech or elaborate misdirection or anything other than Sherwood itself, dense and maze-like and impervious to the casual visitor.
We stopped near a steep slope overlooking a nest of fallen limbs and hemlock roots.
“Your phone,” Lox said. It was the first thing she’d said to me since we’d left the house.
I handed it to her. I didn’t hesitate, didn’t stop to think about what this meant, because I already knew.
But as I put the phone in her waiting hand, my own hand lingered, my fingertips resting on her wrist, the glass of the screen cool against my palm. A soft rain began streaking down around us, and the world was filled with the pattering of raindrops on the leaves above, and on the ferns below.
This was it. The last step. And we both knew it. We both knew that I could snatch my phone and tear back to the house before the others made it there; we both knew that I could snatch it from her palm and then make a call that would end with Lox captured, or worse.
If I lifted my hand, then I was really doing this. I was leaving the mission, the CIA, my job.
