Free Lead Heart (Seraph Black Book 3) by Jane Washington

upright.
    “You needed to see,” he answered Noah tightly. “What was in the box, Seph?”
    “Hurts…” I muttered. “Can’t feel my legs…”
    He passed a hand over my thigh. “You’re fine, sweetheart. There’s nothing wrong with your legs. You’re not injured anywhere.”
    I slowly focussed on his face, blinking away my tears as the comprehension slammed into me.
    “Shut that off,” I groaned, slapping my hands over my ears.
    Cabe walked over to the phone in the corner of the room and pressed a button on it to stop the song looping before slipping the phone into his pocket with a frown. He must have recognised that it was Silas’s. I pulled my hands from my ears hesitantly, scared that I might accidently hear the song again.
    “He knew I would paint him eventually.” My throat was dry enough that my voice rasped. “He must say it whenever he’s alone.”
    “Say what?” Quillan prodded, his eyes digging into me.
    “ You have to stay away ,” I repeated angrily, pushing out of Quillan’s arms and rising unsteadily to my feet. I pitched sideways and he caught me, but just as quickly stepped back to give me space. “He knew the song would make me want to reach out to him. He knew I would see him eventually.”
    “Who?” Cabe asked quietly. “Silas? You… you saw him? You…” He frowned, walking to the base of the painting I had just done on the ground.
    It wasn’t exact—a result of all the spilt paint and my less-than-refined technique of spreading the paint around with my hands—but the hang of the head, the strong line of the shoulders, the muscles bunched up in pain… it was all unmistakably Silas. Cabe’s mouth dropped open and recognition sparked in his golden eyes, lighting up something that rebelled against belief, flocked toward hope, and shrank from reality all at once. I knew the look; it was one I wore often. He turned back to the walls that he and Noah had been in the process of covering and his eyes grew even wider, the dread inside him seeming to win against his other emotions. Noah didn’t move closer, but I could tell that he wasn’t far behind Cabe in his understanding of the situation. His pale eyes moved slowly from my still-shaking legs to the red box on the ground and to the wounds on the walls before settling on my paint-splattered hands.
    “You’re bonded to them,” he spoke faintly, but his jaw was set. He didn’t need convincing. He knew.
    I turned toward Quillan and found him staring at me, instead of Noah. This seemed to be the real reason that he had brought Cabe and Noah in. He wanted them to start seeing things and realising things for themselves. We had both underestimated their inability to go against the false beliefs that had been planted inside their heads, so the only way to get them to discern the truth was by playing on their emotions and allowing them to naturally come around to the conclusions we needed them to. Unfortunately, I wasn’t convinced that this conclusion would help us, because it had the potential to put an even bigger barrier between them and me. If they knew that I was bonded to their brothers, they would try even harder to stay away from me out of respect for their family.
    “How did we not see this earlier?” Cabe asked. “How did we not even consider this as a possibility?”
    His expression had turned completely inscrutable. That wasn’t a good sign. Cabe was absurdly good at hiding his emotions—so good, in fact, that he never appeared to hide anything at all. His true feelings were always carefully tucked behind whatever emotion he wanted to display, so when there was no emotion on his face whatsoever, it hinted at the immensity of what he was hiding.
    “Only you can answer that,” Quillan replied, casting me one last look before walking out of the room. Again .
    I watched him, flabbergasted, as he disappeared. Not wanting to be left alone with Noah and Cabe while Quillan’s words still hung heavily in the room, I