Free Girl From Above #3: Trapped by Pippa DaCosta

slowly, softly—every movement primed with purpose—closed my cabin door. I watched the sweep of her silvery hair fall across the tops of her shoulders, and how her sweats hitched against her body. She was truly a delicious combination of silver and steel. I was still watching her when she wrapped her cool fingers around my throat and slammed me into the wall with enough strength to bend the panel and spritz stars into my vision.
    She leaned all of her precise grace forward and pushed her face close to mine. Deadly intent glittered in her sharp blue eyes. The instinct to fight almost broke through my bubbling sense of panic, but her grip wasn’t shutting off my airway. She knew exactly how to hurt me, and right now, all she had to do was pin me still. Her next fucking words would be the killer.
    “You’re lying,” she said. “With your words. With your body.”
    I’d gripped her wrist and felt exactly how steel-like her arm was. If she didn’t like what I said, she’d snap my neck like Tarik had snapped Jesse’s. On Mimir, when she’d shot me in the head, there had been tiny flecks of doubt in her words. But now, there was only unyielding determination.
    “Kill me and you can’t fly Starscream out of here,” I rasped.
    She cocked her head. “I can fly Starscream. ”
    “Really?” A wry smile slid across my lips. “I could have done with knowing that. I’d have made you my second instead of my asshole brother.”
    She slowly blinked and tilted her head the opposite way, roaming her analyzing gaze over my face. This wouldn’t go well. My heart was racing, and my thoughts were all over the fucking place. Fran, Ade, Jesse … and Haley before all of them. Asgard, Bruno, the Candes, and the cops. I could take a beating, but even I had my limits.
    “One, look—”
    “Lie.” Her grip tightened.
    “Fuck.” I can’t breathe. She’s going to kill me here, in my cabin, and they’ll all think I deserved it. “It’s not lies,” I wheezed. “I’m … I’m sick. I haven’t had a drink.” Her grip loosened again. “It’s withdrawal.” I made myself hold her gaze, even if it felt like she could see inside my head, into all of my messed-up shit.
    “Do you think I’m so easily fooled? Yes, you’re sick, Caleb, but from the moment you greeted me at the police department, you’ve been lying. It’s not about Jesse’s death. I’ve studied your response to the accusation of guilt, and there is guilt, but something else happened. Something that is ongoing.” For a few seconds, she looked as though she might want to say more, or perhaps that was my own assumption. “I know guilt,” she said, her voice softening. And then her fingers released me and I dropped the few inches to the floor.
    Starscream’s recycled air had never tasted so sweet. I breathed it in and bowed over, bracing my hands on my thighs as the oxygen rush went to my head. I had to focus through the pounding headache, which had flared back to life with a vengeance. I had one more move left. One more way of throwing her off the scent of my lies.
    “There is something.” I straightened but stayed slumped against the wall. “I didn’t want to tell you because it’s fucking private, but seeing as you’re so hell-bent on knowing everything, you might as well know this.” I wet my lips and opened my mouth to speak, but found the words lodged in my throat. She waited, infinitely patient. Shit, I had to say it. Best to get it over with. At least she’d know it was true. “I fucked Jesse. I was thinking of you. She knew it. Then the synth killed her. I’m an asshole, okay? Are you happy now? Fuck, it’s like Sunday confession all over again. Only with you, I gotta confess or die.”
    She blinked her fine, perfect eyes and her smooth lips parted by the tiniest of margins. “That would account for the guilt.”
    I massaged my neck. “We’ve already established that I’m all kinds of fucked up. You can leave now, so I can jerk off to