Taste a Thousand Deaths (Marionettes of Myth #3)

Chapter Four

Nekane wrapped a measuring tape around me that night, her dark blue eyes pinched and her bleached hair tucked into a loose bun. She measured my hips, waist, bust, shoulders, and neck. I didn't know why and she wouldn't tell me. All she yielded was a cheerful, "Wow! He was spot on."

Then she walked away, humming a light melody.

Yuuhi only shrugged and displayed empty palms when I asked him about it.

He was a bad liar.

But when I crawled up next to him in bed and settled in for the night, I let the question go. With his arm curled around me, my head on his shoulder and my hand on his chest, our bodies together, I didn't care about anything else except our little room together, our little sanctuary where I could tell him all the things that Cain had said.

His heart lay dormant in his chest. It didn't beat, never shifted. But it wasn't dead. I believed that. I believed that someone who could grip me as if I'd be the last person he'd ever have, someone who sobbed even if there were no tears, couldn't be dead. He was cold, but I burned with a perpetual fever, and he was the ice that kept the boiling water in my body from bubbling over.

I didn't believe that someone who had saved me as many times as he had could be anything but thriving with life. And when he laughed as I told him about drunken Cain, his chest vibrating against me and his fingers squeezing my shoulder, I nearly worked up the nerve to ask him about moving to the next level.

But the surge of courage left as soon as it had hit. We fell into peaceful quiet and he drifted off to sleep.

The wind groaned outside. The curtains shuddered. The house sighed into silence.

I couldn't sleep.

I rolled over and checked my phone, set next to Ra, on the nightstand. After two in the morning.

I collapsed onto my stomach with my face in the pillow. It had been a while since my last restless night. What had spurred this one? Toivo's possible blood connection to dads? The mention of Cassius?

No. I couldn't give Cassius that control over me.

Yuuhi shifted beside me. I lifted my face to see him settle onto his side. Sleep held him, a sleep that looked like death when he laid with absolute stillness. Sometimes it scared me. Sometimes I had to touch him and make him stir, just so I knew he was still alive. I missed the ignorance of death.

I eased myself from the bed. He didn't move. He slept a little easier these days, too. Maybe he had a lot of catching up to do.

My feet made no sound on the plush carpet as I left the room. The hallway rested in near perfect darkness and my eyes strained to make sense of the static gray shapes. My fingers ghosted along the glaze of the freshly painted wall. The stairs swept me into the conjoined kitchen and living room when my nose picked up his scent.

I found him in the kitchen, a room so spacious with marble counters and an island beneath a skylight and everything that Toivo's little heart had ever wanted in a kitchen. But it wasn't Toivo who occupied the kitchen this time.

Jason had pulled one of the chairs up to the floor-to-ceiling windows, the glowing screen of the tablet filling the room with a ghostly light. My foot planted on the first tile of the kitchen, spreading condensation along the cold surface, when he said, "Trouble sleeping again?"