“We’re wasting time.” My fingers twitched. The desire to paint and to draw slid through me. “You can’t stop thinking about her either. Don’t pretend you can.” I shoved open the door and he sighed.
Pacing me all the way to the door, Liam said, “We’ll be back with her soon.”
Yes. We would.
“But first, your friend.”
“Yeah,” Liam agreed with a sigh. “My friend.”
CHAPTER 32
LIAM
“That’s it?” Ezra demanded, glaring at me. “You’re just letting me go?”
“I’d have let you go a few days ago if you hadn’t been such a dick,” I told him honestly. Rome was dead silent and had been since we walked back into the room. “You weren’t leaving me a lot of choices.”
“But whatever the fuck you were doing here, you’re done now, is that it?” Anger soaked the words but it was more than just rage. For all that he acted like he didn’t give a damn about anything, Ezra fell prey to the same fears as the rest of us. The fear of losing the ones we cared about.
Lainey. She had to have been the leverage that Adam kept shutting him up about. I’d had time to think about it since the near miss the other day. The king used leverage when you didn’t cooperate. The threat designed to keep you in line, should you suddenly develop independent thinking. Rome was on that list.
He’d made the mistake of going for him once. I returned the message in kind. His would-be assassins had all gone back in body bags. Still, even if the message had been received, the king could still try to leverage him against me. It was why we could never relax our vigilance and why I kept my parents as far away as possible.
They didn’t need to be dragged into this fight.
“For the most part,” I said, finally.
“I suppose you’re not even going to tell me what it is.” He dragged a hand through his disheveled hair. The abrasions on his wrists said more about how much he’d tried to get out of the zip ties than anything else. I’d set him free as soon as we got back and he moved around the room with slow, halting steps.
In hindsight, restraining him to the chair and limiting his movements probably hadn’t done him any favors. But I didn’t have time for his volatile temper or unpredictable actions. The only person I’d ever seen come close to tempering him was Adam, and even then—that was fifty-fifty.
“No.” Arms folded, I kept an eye on him. “We picked up your car, it’s outside. It’s got gas. Go home.”
“Man, you’re not even going to fucking help me?”
“I can’t,” I said. Unfortunately for him, it was the honest truth. “Right now, I have my own problems that I need to deal with.”
Ezra cut his gaze past me, then back. Rome stood by the door, a silent sentinel. “Then answer this for me…”
“If I can.”
“Have you seen Adam?”
It was a direct question and deserved a direct answer. I didn’t think he’d like mine, but I couldn’t offer him much more. “The last time I saw him was almost three weeks ago. We were both summoned to a meeting.”
“Fuck,” Ezra swore. Yeah, I didn’t have to explain who summoned us. Technically, Rome wasn’t supposed to know anything about this life or those choices. So Ezra would risk a hell of a lot if he brought it up. “You haven’t seen or spoken to him since?”
“Nope.” Then, before he could bring up Emersyn’s best friend—which I didn’t want to focus on how strangely intertwined this knot of connections was—I added, “I can’t help you, right now. Once I get this shit sorted out, I’ll see what I can do.”
It was the best I had to offer.
The glower he wore didn’t offer much in the way of understanding or acceptance. “Remind me not to do any more favors.”
I snorted. “I’ve never asked you for any. And you’re not asking me now.” Because he absolutely wasn’t. He wanted information. He wanted me to come to his aid. Like I said, we weren’t friends. The Royals didn’t show their loyalty that way.
They never had.
At the moment, he’d just have to take what I could give him.
Pivoting, he stuck his hand out. “Give me my gun.”
“No,” I said with a shake of my head. “Your wallet and your phone are in your car. The phone’s got no juice and there’s no charger in there. It’ll take you a minute to work on that.”
Not leaving him at my back armed. I might like the guy, but I wasn’t an idiot. Pivoting, I headed for the door.
“Where are the keys?” Ezra asked as Rome opened the door. I held up the set in my hand as I walked outside. I lifted my chin to Rome to head for the car. We’d ripped the phone out of the hotel room. If Ezra cooled the fuck off, he could go ask to use the phone in the office.
I wasn’t waiting around for that.
Three steps from the SUV, I pitched the keys to his Porsche 911 toward the green belt that bordered along the side of the hotel. It wasn’t exactly a heavily wooded area, but it’d take him a minute to find them in the grass.
“You’re an asshole, O’Connell,” Ezra said from the doorway, glaring at me.
“Yep,” I agreed. I was definitely an asshole. “Go home. I’ll call you when I’m free.”
“Don’t do me any favors,” the other man yelled, and I touched two fingers to my temple and saluted him before I slid into the driver’s seat. Rome waited until I had the SUV started before he joined me.
“This is a bad idea,” he said as I accelerated out of the lot.
“Maybe, but he can’t help us with this and he’s already caused us enough delays.”
“You going to help him?” Rome drummed the fingers of his right hand against his knee. The eerie stillness gripping him since Emersyn vanished on us seemed to have been cured by her return.
Thank fuck.
“That’s what I told him.” I shrugged. The GPS told me we were roughly 98 minutes from our destination.
“You lied to him.”
I frowned. “What?”
“You lied to him about his friend.”
“I haven’t seen Adam in almost three weeks.”
“That part was true.”
I sighed.
“But you have spoken to him.”
“Actually…” I resisted the urge to punch the dashboard. I needed a fight, badly. We couldn’t get to our destination soon enough. “I haven’t spoken to him. So no, I didn’t lie to him.”
“If I asked you?”
Cutting my gaze to the right, I met my twin’s stare. “Don’t.” Then I added, “Please.”
Rome nodded. “I don’t really care.”
Yeah, I knew that.
“But you’re hiding something.”
“We’re all hiding something.”
“I’m not.”
I laughed. “No, bro, you don’t hide anything. You just don’t talk about something if you don’t want to talk about it.”
He nodded, but when I glanced at him, his attention was on the window. Impatience seemed to writhe in the air around him. The only thing keeping him in the seat was that we needed to deal with this guy.