“It’s almost like you want it to be my father or Kurt.”

“I don’t want it to be them, but who else could it be? My parents wouldn’t have known who to go to, but they told someone! Then Liz magically senses me coming back from the dead and look! Look. Olivia is here, isn’t she?”

Silence greeted me, and I felt like doing a happy dance, because I knew I’d gotten Hayden thinking. But when he did speak again, it was a total letdown.

“We should head back, Ember. In the morning, we’ll try to figure it. My brain is too fried right now.”

My head jerked up. Hayden sounded different, off. I climbed off the bed and waited while he extinguished the candles. He kept his back to me the entire time, not speaking. My nerves were like a tight bundle in the pit of my stomach, unraveling with each passing second we didn’t talk.

I pulled the hood up and hunkered down in the hoodie once we stepped out into the near-freezing night air. Overhead, the moon peeked through the naked branches while we headed back to the house in silence. Each glimpse of Hayden I snuck, my stomach rolled. His face was set in hard lines, closed-off and distant. He stared straight ahead, and never once did I feel his gaze on me. It was like those precious moments in the cabin, when he’d admitted how much he wanted to kiss me, hadn’t even happened.

We stopped at the stairs, and I wasn’t ready to let this go. “I want to talk about”

“I know,” he said, “but I don’t want to. Not tonight. I’m beat. It’s late.”

“But”

He stepped forward, tipping his head down as he did so. “We can’t talk about this now. We’ll wake someone up. Go to bed, Ember. We’ll talk in the morning.”

I stepped back, my heart twisting. “Okay. Tomorrow morning, right?”

He nodded, and before I could say anything else, he disappeared down the hall.

Chapter 19

Chapter 19

I didn’t see Hayden in the morning or even that afternoon. Actually, I didn’t get a chance to see him at all Saturdaynot for more than five seconds. I was damn sure he was avoiding me.

By Sunday afternoon, the momentary satisfaction of casting doubt on Cromwell and crew soured. Hayden had always believed his adopted father’s involvement with the gifted was to do something good, but whoever had wanted Olivia had killed to try and get her. And whether Hayden liked it or not, the evidence pointed to one of his family membersone of the people he trusted.