Rebel

“Come home soon, then,” she whispers back.

Her expression softens, and she leans against me, her body warm. It feels, as always, right.

“My home is where you are,” I murmur

I keep my hand around hers and pull her toward me. Then I kiss her, our lips barely touching, as tenderly as I can

I think of the night we shared, all our moments of awkwardness, the slow dance of getting to know each other again. The potential of a lifetime with June. If there’s any reason to make it back up to the surface, it’s for that—and I’ll be damned if Dominic Hann takes that chance away from me. I have lived through revolutions and war, massacres and illness. I’m going to survive this too, and so will my brother.

I bend toward her. My lips gently touch hers, and for a moment in time, we stay locked together. Then I pull away. “I’ll be back before you know it,” I say.

“I’m okay,” I finally whisper, nodding at June. “Just a nightmare. It’s fine.”

My body’s drenched in sweat and trembling all over. Apparently, I collapsed on the couch and drifted off to sleep while waiting for Eden’s message to come in, for him to tell us that he’s securely in Hann’s circle. The image of young Eden bleeding to death on the table is still fresh in my mind. I close my eyes in an attempt to blink it away, but it lingers like a stain against my eyes.

There are smooth hands on my face, but it takes me a moment to realize that they belong to June. In the darkness, I can barely make out her eyes. She’s looking at me in concern.

I jolt awake with a shudder.

June holds out the device from earlier, then brings up a
transmission that looks like it came from somewhere underground. “Obviously, he heard this transmission,” she says. “And with that display, he’s going to think he struck a blow against us. It should also make Eden look trustworthy enough to him, that he came to warn him about a plan that actually happened, that clearly you didn’t want to happen.”