Page 19 of Mayhem

“There it is.” I stepped closer, slow enough that he watched every inch disappear between us. “I was starting to worry you weren’t going to tell me what I’m allowed to do.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“I know what you mean.” I reached out and straightened the strap of his bag where it had twisted against his shoulder. He went rigid beneath my fingers, and something ugly and delighted curled through me. “You mean I’m not supposed to be standing here. You mean you found yourself a nice expensive school and some new friends and people who follow you around so nobody mean can get too close.” I looked past him toward the empty end of the corridor, then back at his face. “That last one’s not going great, by the way.”

“Stay away from me.” He backed up another step, and this time I followed without thinking about it. “How did you find me?”

I tilted my head. “That’s almost insulting.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I. You really thought you were that hard to find?” I expected him to keep asking how I’d gotten there, maybe demand to know who had helped me or how long I had been watching him. Instead, his mouth tightened, and whatever he had rehearsed for this moment finally came spilling out.

“I didn’t tell them your name.” The words came so quickly I nearly missed them. “I didn’t give them anything about you, and I never told them who your family was. I could have, Echo. They asked me. I kept that from them.”

I stared at him long enough for his confidence to start slipping again. “Oh. That’s the speech.”

“What?”

“The one where you explain why what you did wasn’t actually that bad.” I folded my arms and looked him over. “Go ahead. I want to hear this.”

“It’s not a speech.” His words started tripping over each other now. “You think I wanted any of that? I didn’t know what they were going to do. They already knew about the ledger. They weren’t going to stop asking questions, and I thought if I gave them something, they’d leave us alone.”

“Us?” I let the word sit there until his mouth closed. “You keep saying that like there was still an us when you handed strangers something that belonged to me and disappeared.”

“I was trying to keep you alive.”

That hurt enough to wipe the smile off my face.

My hand closed around the front of his shirt and drove him backward into the wall. His breath left him with a hard grunt, the back of his head clipping plaster, and both of his hands came up around my wrist immediately. He didn’t really fight me. Nichlas had always been like that when he got scared—halfhearted resistance while he waited to see what the other person would decide to do with him. “Protect me?” I asked, staring into his face. “That’s what you’ve been calling it?”

“I didn’t know they were going to hurt you.”

“You gave them my ledger.”

“They already knew it existed.”

“You gave it to them.”

“They were going to kill me!” The confession cracked out of him before he could soften it, and for a second we both went still. Nichlas swallowed, his grip tightening around my wrist as though he could drag the words back inside himself. “You don’t understand what they told me.”

I leaned closer. “You could’ve just said that first. You were scared, so you picked yourself.”

“It wasn’t that simple.”

“It really was.”

“I thought they’d take the ledger and leave us alone.”

“There’s that fucking us again.” I tightened my fist in his shirt. Anger pressed hot behind my ribs because he was still trying to turn cowardice into sacrifice after everything his choice had cost me. “You ran, Nichlas. Whatever happened to me after that wasn’t important enough for you to come back.”

His eyes flicked away. “I had to leave.”

“Because you were scared.”

“Yes.” He said it louder this time, almost angry now because fear had nowhere else to go. “Yes, Echo. I was fucking scared. You have no idea who these people are.”

That almost made me smile again. “There you go. That one sounds true.”