I couldn’t be sure about Jude, but I was pretty sure we’d had the same epiphany after the whole thing: we loved Rafe like a brother, but he wasn’t a god, just a man, as fucked-up as we were.
“I need some kind of plan,” Lilah said to no one in particular while her coffee brewed. “Rafe’s a dick but he’s also right. This isn’t my home.”
“We’re working on it,” Jude said, still sketching.
Lilah grabbed her cup and took a careful sip. “Working on what?”
“On figuring out what Lombardi is up to so you can go back to your life,” Jude said, his attention on the drawing. He was like that when he drew — not fully present, like he’d stepped through the page into the scene he was bringing to life.
Lilah’s forehead crinkled in the adorable way it did when she was trying to figure something out. “What are you talking about?”
“Don’t worry about it, boss.” Jude had taken to calling Lilah “boss” when she got demanding. She’d frowned the first time he’d done it, but she must have been okay with it because she never told him to stop.
“Don’t make me stab you with that pencil, Jude.”
He looked up, blinking to clear his vision like he was waking from a dream. He set the pencil down and closed the sketchbook. “We know you can’t stay here forever, but you can’tgo home until Vic and Mr. Suit are neutralized as a threat, so that’s what we’re going to do.”
Lilah was the one who’d given the name “Mr. Suit” to the mysterious guy who visited the Dive, and since we didn’t have a name for him, we’d taken to doing it too.
Lilah leaned against the counter. “How? And why didn’t you tell me?”
There were lots of things we hadn’t told Lilah, but she didn’t need to know that.
“Because it’s none of your business,” Rafe said. “Let us work.”
“In this case yourworkis very much my business,” she said. “I have a right to know what’s going on.”
I put the two freshest pancakes on a plate and set it down in front of the empty chair at the island. “These are for you.”
She glared at them suspiciously, then crossed the kitchen to sit down. Lilah could never pass up food. It was one of the things I loved about her because I felt the same way.
“These look amazing, but they’re not getting you off the hook.” She reached for the syrup. “Start talking."
21
LILAH
“It’s prettyobvious Lombardi isn’t in charge of whatever’s going on,” Jude said.
Even though it was first thing in the morning, he looked good. It shouldn’t have surprised me — one of the things I’d been forced to admit in the privacy of my own mind was that my three new roommates always looked good, which only added insult to the injury of relying on them for a roof over my head — but somehow it still did.
I tried not to stare at the flex of his biceps as he rubbed at the gold stubble along his chiseled jaw, but I had to look somewhere, and the strain of his dark blue T-shirt across his chest and cut biceps was no better.
I tried for his face instead and was immediately sucked into his soulful brown eyes.
Godammit.
I shoved a huge bite of pancake into my mouth, both because Nolan’s chocolate chip pancakes were the best and I wasn’t about to let them get cold and because it gave me something to focus on besides Jude’s model-perfect face and body. “You think Mr. Suit is in charge.”
I felt hot, like I might be getting a fever.
“Don’t you?” Nolan asked.
I didn’t have to think too hard about it before nodding. “Probably. Vic’s actually pretty dumb.”
“We tried casing the place,” Jude explained.
“The Dive?” I couldn’t hide my surprise. They’d given no hint that they cared one way or another about the situation — the girls who were being kidnapped, my own state of limbo.