Page 58 of Dreadful

I look at him—the blood drying in the hollow of his throat, his shirt hanging open at the collar where I grabbed it, the face that looked so fucking different thirty seconds ago—and I can’t reconcile that Bishop with this one. The one who held me up against this same wall like I was something worth holding.

“What’s wrong,” I whisper.

He catches the hem of his shirt and drags it up to press against his neck. The gesture is so casual it makes my stomach turn. “You got what you wanted, didn’t you?”

Something inside me goes very still.

I blink hard, forcing back every bit of emotion threatening to leak out of me.

No.

Absolutely fucking not. He doesn’t get that too.

I straighten my spine and lift my chin. “I remember it being better.”

He stills, his hand pressing against his neck. Then, from beneath the low shelf of his lashes, his eyes climb up to find mine. The way something moves when it’s trying not to be caught moving.

There you are, I think.

It’s nothing. A fraction of a degree. But after sixty seconds of watching him perform total indifference, I feel that hairline crack open up all the way down my sternum.

I let one shoulder rise and fall, putting indifference I absolutely do not feel into my voice. “But maybe your brothers have just set the bar somewhere you can’t clear.”

His tongue runs slowly along the inside of his split lip, and his head tips a fraction to one side.

A vicious little spark of satisfaction catches in my chest.

He steps back into my space, and then my shoulders are against the wall again and his forearm is braced beside my head, close enough that the warmth of his skin touches my cheek without quite making contact. He angles his face down toward mine—and I think, for one suspended second, that he’s going to kiss me, that I’m going to fucking let him—but his mouth drifts past mine, skims the edge of my cheekbone, and settles at my ear instead.

The slow graze of his jaw raises a line of goosebumps from my neck all the way down to my shoulder blade.

“You’re a lot of things, Bellamy Hale. Thief, sharable, orphan. Liar.”

I turn my face toward his, bringing our mouths close enough that I can feel the warmth of his breath. “And you’re a fucking coward, Bishop Calloway.”

A floorboard creaks somewhere behind him.

He moves before I can react, shifting between me and the sound and pulling a gun from the back of his waistband in the same smooth motion.

“You gonna shoot me, honey?” Coco asks from the hallway.

Bishop straightens without any real urgency, apparently unconcerned with the fact that his mother just walked in on the aftermath of whatever the fuck just happened in her family room.

Coco strolls into the room, her eyes lingering on her eldest son before returning to me. “You all right, honey?”

“I—”

“We’re fine,” Bishop says.

I cut my eyes toward him, but he’s already looking at Coco.

She studies the two of us for another long moment before nodding. “Find your brothers,” she says as she walks away. “It’s time to clean up. And Bishop? Get the power back on now.”

I push away from the wall before Bishop can say another word.

Whatever happened in the last ten minutes can join every other confusing, infuriating, painful thing between us in the increasingly overcrowded box in the back of my mind with his name on it.

And this time, I’m fucking nailing it shut.