Page 34 of Cruel Abandon (Fallen Royals 5)
Instead of leaving us, he slides into the front seat of our waiting car. The driver nods to him and glances at us in the rearview mirror.
“What is he doing?” Whitney whispers to me.
“Making sure Sky goes home and stays home like I told her,” Liam replies.
I scowl. “You’re not my keeper.”
“Maybe I should be,” he snaps, twisting around in the seat. “Since you clearly can’t make rational decisions on your own.”
“You’re being insensitive.”
“What if this kidnapper is posing as a driver?”
“Hey, man, I don’t want any trouble,” the driver cuts in, scratching his neck.
I roll my eyes. “I’m sorry about him. He has no filter.”
“And you have no common sense,” Liam shoots back.
“I have common sense—you’re just paranoid.” I lean forward. “Those girls are unrelated—”
“Stop,” Whitney yells. “I can’t handle your argument.”
The driver screeches to a halt in front of our building, and Whitney flies out of the car. She doesn’t even wait for me to open my door before she’s inside and disappearing up the stairs.
“We’re here,” the driver says pointedly, glancing back at me.
I’m the train wreck in this situation?
“You’re getting two stars,” I inform him, then step onto the sidewalk.
Liam circles around the back of the car, and it pulls away in a hurry.
He raises his eyebrows at me. “Your roommate is a piece of work.”
“You’re the piece of work,” I say.
His gaze darkens. It was easy to forget in the police station and then in the car that he was the one who broke into my house. He’s roughed me up a time or two, even.
A dangerous thrill runs through me.
This is the part of my brain that’s broken: the area that detects danger and warns me away. The little voice that should be shrieking an alarm is quiet—and it has been quiet since I saw him this afternoon.
Because, what, I trust him?
Hardly.
I’m just removed from the situation. Whitney’s best friend has only been gone for a few days, and that’s nothing. Talk to me when she’s been gone a week, a month, when the fliers with her face on them are so old people start putting new ones over them. When only a small collection of people remember that those parents lost their daughter and haven’t received closure. When all the hope of finding her drains back into the ground.
“Go inside,” Liam says.
I jerk back, even though he made no move to touch me.
In my mind, I map out how the night would go: Whitney would lose her composure. The old fears would return, and maybe she’d cry. Or yell. Or talk about how awful Liam is. She wouldn’t give me any real information, and she wouldn’t say what the detectives asked.
We’re not even friends.
I went with her in solidarity, because she’s my roommate. The one person who puts up with me. But we keep even that a secret, and no one knows where she lives. That she lives with me, the outcast. The freak who snitched on Howl.