Page 142 of Seven
I sat in the car with the engine running and watched the ocean murder itself against the rocks.
I'd gotten rid of the limo last night and swapped it for an SUV.
No matter how hard I tried not to think about her, she was there—lodged deep into the forefront of my brain. And that damn kiss… My mouth still burned from the contact even though it lasted less than two seconds.
You're beautiful.
Fuck.
Men were not supposed to be beautiful.
Men were supposed to be rough.
Yet, she saw something in me no one ever did, and that made all those stupid emotions scream inside me. My body was like a goddamned volcano about to erupt. If I were to stay with her in one place, I wasn't sure I'd be able to control myself.
And the…loss of control was the most terrifying feeling ever.
Like the ocean outside my windshield. Completely unknown and ready to swallow you up.
I checked my burner once more, registering all the missed calls from her that have been slowly creeping up into double digits.
It was shitty of me to leave her hanging, but I needed to figure out what was happening in my head.
This was a lonely stretch of the PCH somewhere between Malibu and Ventura. The sky was the color of granite, and the clouds were thick and angry. The sprayhit the breakwater in white eruptions, the wind caught it, and everything past the windshield was a shifting sheet of water.
I'd parked in the same spot I always used when I needed to think. Not that thinking ever helped. Besides, it didn't happen often. But sometimes you had to go through the motions—pretend you could get ahead of whatever was coming, pretend you were more than the sum of your code and your orders.
I looked at my gloved hands on the wheel. They were steady, but there was a current underneath, some pulse I couldn't shut off.
On the passenger seat, lay that same manila envelope—unopened—that Father had given me. I'd been carrying it around like it was something precious, which wasn't far from the truth.
It seemed that it'd been forever since he handed it to me. So why hadn't I worked up the nerve to look inside?
I took off my gloves, reached over, picked it up, and thumbed the flap. My skin prickled where it touched the edge.
Part of me didn't want to know.
Another part of me did.
I rested the envelope on my lap. In the silence, you could hear the air between the waves, that slow, sucking pause before the next breaker. There was a comfort in it, maybe because it was predictable. Maybe because it didn't care about anything except gravity.
I set the envelope back on the seat and traced the lines of the tattoo on my chest over my jacket.
I was eighteen when I'd had it done. The wings were the only real memory of the past I'd been living in before Father found me. I had no parents, no birthday, no name. Just a number and an old burn scar and, for some reason, the vague recollection of an angel figurine.
A sound broke through the rumble of the ocean—my earpiece, buzzing a second before Viper's voice crashed in.
"Seven, you alive?"
"Why wouldn't I be? You can't wait to get rid of me?"
"That's a new one?"
"What are you talking about?"
"For once, you speak like a real human and not like a machine."
I waited a heartbeat before replying because he was right. I answered his questions with one of my own, which was not my typical behavior. "So?"
