I awoke from my nap with a start. Desperate deep breaths tried to calm my pounding heart and slow the blood rushing through my eardrums. My body was practically soaked in sweat despite the strange chill that still lingered from the week.
Paranoia from the nightmare ate at my mind, clinging my eyes to each pocket of absent light of my bedroom. The deep shadow beside my wardrobe seemed to shift—
My nerves jumped again when a set of knuckles rapped against the hardwood. "Angel," I whispered resentfully as I climbed from my bed, slipping my shorts back on. "Who is it?"
"Mazikeen, open the door," my dad's muffled voice called through the plank.
I let out a quiet sigh with a slump of my shoulders, knowing exactly why he was here. The doorknob opened under my palm but instead of waiting for him to enter, I strode back over to my bed and plopped down on the duvet. A chill washed over me, but I masked it by crossing my sleeved arms over my chest.
Hodge stood in my doorway looking more nervous than he usually did. Pale skin was more pallid and clammy in appearance and he balled his fists in the front pockets of his slacks, all obvious tells that he had something on his mind. "How are you doing?" he asked casually as he shut the door behind him.
"Fine. Just tired," I mumbled, picking at a loose threat of my sleeve cuff.
"You got home pretty late last night—"
"By the Angel," I interrupted loudly and shot up from the bed, pacing the room to avoid standing still as I received a lecture.
The disarming tone he walked in with was replaced by his authoritative one. "Everyone is worried about you, including myself."
"I can take care of myself, dad—"
"You don't think I know about what happened three days ago?" His cheeks reddened angrily, much like mine did when I would get worked up. "How a Drevak had nearly gotten to you on your walk home from that Angel-forsaken club?"
I threw my arms up in exasperation. "I handled it, didn't I?"
"No, you didn't. Jace did," he realized his voice had raised and lowered it to a whisper with a shaky deep breath. "You are incredibly lucky they were watching over you. Yet you still test your luck by continuing on this path of recklessness."
My throat constricted and my voice strained through angry tears. "I have been far closer to death than that." This was the reason I had been avoiding my father. Deep down, I felt resentment for his absence during the war, how he wasn't there to comfort me as I lay dying on a grassy hillside. Instead of answering, he looked down to the floorboards. "Is this the only reason you came up here? To scold me?"
The frustration he wore from my disobedience morphed into a look of concern, his green eyes shifted to the closed door connecting my room to the shared bathroom. "No, I'm here to tell you that you have a new neighbor."
My eyebrow raised in question. "Okay but why—?"
"And that you should keep your distance from him," he interrupted in a low murmur.
Raihn had mentioned that he made Hodge nervous, but this was more—he was…terrified. The air in the room seemed to get colder, I hugged my arms to my chest. "Why? What's going on?"
"I can't—" he paused and fisted his hands in the air, silently pleading with me to keep my voice down. "I can't get into that right now. Chalk it up to protective fatherly instincts."
"'Protective fatherly instincts.'" I rolled my eyes. "And where exactly were those instincts when Damon was around?" He paled and opened his mouth to retort but I raised a hand to stop him. "Look, I'm alright. You've kept me alive this long. I'm safe."
"Just stay away from him, for me," he pleaded. "He's dangerous."
I bit my tongue, not wanting to hear more. "Fine. I'll see you at dinner."
I knew if I dodged this dinner I was sure to expect another lecture from my father.
Despite the rumbling in my stomach, I was not prepared to sit at the dinner table surrounded by people who barely contained their pitiful expressions toward me. So far, there was only one person who didn't look at me with sympathy or concern—and he probably didn't know it was dinner time.
Bounding up from my bed, I made my way out my bedroom door and stopped a few feet from my neighbor's, hesitating to knock on the wood out of fear of what had happened earlier. Luckily, as I had made up my mind to tempt the knock, the door swung open before my knuckles made contact.
There, in low hanging jeans and an open zip up hoodie with no accompanying shirt, stood the stranger from the balcony with a raised scarred eyebrow and a smirk. His shoulder donned a white bandage that had begun to bleed through with dark blood, but he still leaned against the doorframe with thick arms crossed over his chest.
"Is this a bed call?" he joked, giving another flash of gleaming white teeth.
The high points of my cheeks flushed but I rolled my eyes. "I was just coming to tell you that dinner is ready but now I think I'd rather have you go back to sleep and starve."
"Ooo, venomous," he chuckled. "Will you be there?"
I inhaled and exhaled heavily. "Do I want to be? No. Consider my presence a requirement for the sake of my father's blood pressure." My brows furrowed at the bandage that took my attention once more, remembering that he flinched in pain hours earlier. I gestured to the dressing. "Is that from the attack this morning?"
He shrugged as if he was unphased. "Hodge stitched me up. Don't tell him I said this, but the old man is losing his skill with sutures."
"He doesn't suture as much anymore. Lucky for you, he taught me when he was at his best. Let me fix it, I'll make sure it heals straight enough to keep movement in your shoulder."
He only stared with amusement for a few moments, running mischievous eyes up and down my figure. I fought hard not to cover myself as he made me feel naked in the hallway. "Alright," he finally answered. "Meet me in the bathroom." His door clicked closed and he was gone, giving a subtle hint that his room wasn't going to be a shortcut to our adjoining bathroom.
With a shrug, I stalked back through my room and into the bathroom door where Raihn was already waiting against his closed door with hands in his pockets. "Sit," I ordered, pointing to the closed toilet seat behind me while I dug through the cabinet under the sink for the first aid kit.
"Anybody ever tell you how abrasive you are?" he asked as he obeyed, plopping down onto the ceramic structure.
"New York will do that to you. It's practically a social standard to talk down to every person you encounter." I set the kit on the back of the toilet and got close enough to inspect the damage to his shoulder. The tape peeled off easily, and the gnarly slash beneath it made me grimace. Blackened, haphazardly stitched tissue smelled faintly of ichor.
"Pretty isn't it?" He lounged back until his head thumped against the gray wall behind him.
I bit my lip. "I'm pretty sure it's infected."
"Don't worry about it, gotta keep the white blood cells on their toes."
With a deep sigh, I began to clean the area with an alcohol towel. "Why exactly do you detest the use of your stele?"
"I don't like to rely on runes to survive. My body can heal itself just as well."
"Give or take a few weeks slower."
"I like to take my time with some things," he winked.
As much as I wanted to roll my eyes and make a witty comment back, the sudden strange flare of heat under my clothes distracted my train of thought. I was only barely able to keep my face from flushing a deep crimson.
My fingers set up the needle and thread before beginning to fix my father's messy job of connecting the blackened flesh back together. I had to get closer to be more thorough, so without a second thought, or really even a first, I placed my knee between his spread legs on the toilet cover and straddled his thigh until we were nearly flush together. I had only realized what I had done when I saw his throat bob from the corner of my eye and felt his shoulder tense beneath my fingers as I stitched.
"Almost done," I mumbled, feigning like I interpreted his tension as pain.
He chewed the inside of his cheek. "If Hodge is your father, who is your mother?"
The image of my mothers face displayed behind my eyelids and a small smile tugged at my lips. "Her name was Elaina, she passed away during the Uprising."
He visibly blanched, wiping the smug expression from his features. "I'm so sorry."
"Don't worry about it, I was really young." My hands suddenly shook and stabbed too deep into the muscle. He hissed and grasped the thigh between his knees. "Sorry," I said quietly.
His hand lingered for a moment, softening its grasp until it became a gentle caress before dropping back to his knee. The contact was gone but microscopic lightning bolts still shot through my skin, bringing blood directly up to the high points of my cheeks. I fought back a shiver.
"You can torture me as much as you like," he chuckled.
I blinked a few times. "Are you always so suggestive?"
"Only since I noticed your cheeks turn pink when I am." A rough knuckle quickly scraped against my cheek while he laughed at my visible discomfort. His hand was cold like ice, keeping me grounded enough to swat it away with a roll of my eyes.
I carefully taped a clean bandage to the freshly stitched gash and gave it a solid pat, making him bear his teeth in pain for a moment before giving me a sharp look. "All done," I stated flatly as I left his lap and washed my hands in the sink.
"Thanks," he grumbled as he shrugged his jacket back over the bandages.
I watched him through the mirror. The way he held himself made him appear tense, as if he was waiting for something, anything to come barreling through the wall. Or perhaps he seemed as though he wanted to say something.
"No problem," I tried to sound light hearted as I dried my hands on a small towel. "I do recommend you use your stele next time. For convenience sake."
"How else will you get to practice your sutures?"
I decided to take a page out of his book of narcissism. "If you want me around more often, all you have to do is ask."
"Considering we share a bathroom, maybe I'll see more of you in general," he quipped back with a smirk and a smooth gaze down my figure.
I pushed back the incoming redness of my cheeks. "I can already tell I will hate having you as a neighbor."
He stood with a groan of pain from aching muscles. "I get that a lot."
With an amused scoff, I left the bathroom only to feel a presence following close behind through my bedroom. Raihn occupied the space at the foot of my bed, looking around the area as if he was bewildered by the mundaneness of my decor.
Posters of rock bands, indie artists, and movies I liked haphazardly clung to the walls with strips of tape that threatened to unstick at the slightest gust of wind. Swords I no longer used sat on display hooks above the headboard of my bed, they had been the first ones I trained with in my youth. Pictures were chaotically pinned to the walls with thumbtacks, some showing my friends, others of places I wished to go, but the one I cherished the most was the fading 24 year old photo of Elaina and my father holding me as a baby…
"You're invading my private space," I grit, crossing my arms over my chest and shifting my weight to my hip. My throat felt tight and my chest burned deep enough that I thought it was my heart sizzling in pain, but I knew the sensation was incoming tears that I desperately wanted to avoid releasing.
He seemed to not notice my emotional state as he grinned harder than I have ever seen while striding from poster to poster. "Horrible choice of words."
"Real mature," I rolled my eyes but the taunt was enough to dampen the fire. "Get out of my room."
"I like it here," he said simply as he walked to my dresser and pulled a lacy pair of black panties from the open drawer with one finger. "Oh, I really like it here."
I blanched and ripped the material from his clutches, shoved them to the back of the drawer, and slammed it closed. The space between him and the dresser was intercepted by my body. A finger poked hard into his chest, pushing him back a step. "If you don't get out, you'll find me strangling you with them in the night."
"One day together and you already know what I'm into." A rough finger grazed under my chin, but I slapped it away.
I stared at him, weighing the decision to spill the beans or not for the sake of my own curiosity. I decided it was worth it. "Why is there a ward on your door?"
All playfulness in his face dissolved into hard stone. The muscle in his jaw flicked as tension grit his teeth together. I had half a mind to take it back and retreat from the look alone, but he was playing games that I wasn't willing to play. Crossing boundaries that I wasn't going to let slide.
He took a step closer, then another, until I instinctively backed into my dresser, knocking over bottles of perfume and near empty handles of alcohol. "If you know what's good for you, you'll stay out of there."
My heart was in my throat and my palms dug into the handles of my drawers to keep me grounded. "Pretty hypocritical of you to say as you're currently trespassing and touching my things."
Icy eyes regarded me for a moment before his face loosened and he backed away with his palms up. "Alright, fair enough." He stepped out into the hallway, throwing a raised brow my way. "Satisfied?"
"Barely," I quipped, physically flicking away the tension in my nerves.
The corner of his mouth upturned into a smirk. "Let's get downstairs before your father has an aneurysm."
Sensing that there was no way he would divulge the secrets of the ward, I relented, following him down the stretch of hallway.
If I had the energy and willpower to find the answer, I would. But for now, the only thing I could think about was participating at dinner to Hodge's satisfaction, then escaping to Pandemonium where I can forget that I live next to an instigating prude.
Though, I did have to admit that having social interaction that wasn't predicated on rehabilitating me was refreshing, regardless of the fact that he was annoying and bothersome. His charm was redeeming, as well as his features, the way he held himself, and his wit. But all those factors still didn't change the fact that I would kick his ass if I got the opportunity.
I guess that is something to look forward to.
