“This isn’t a game to me,” he said. “I haven’t quite figured out whether it’s one to you yet or not, but the feelings I have for you are real.”
His words stunned me to my core. How the hell was that possible? I had known Julian my entire life, and I still couldn’t bring myself to utter those words like that to him. Even now that I knew how Julian felt, it still felt weird and unnatural for those words to roll off my tongue in his direction. So how in the world did Adam feel like that with me after only this small amount of time? It boggled my mind, and yet I wanted more.
So, so much more.
We went to sit down on the side of his bed, and he turned to face me as he explained what I was about to get myself into. But, it was hard to focus after the truth bomb he dropped straight in my lap.
“The vetting process is Lineage’s initiation,” he started as he took my hands in his. “Those that are born into Lineage families don’t have to endure it, but those of us that are brought in from the outside do. I’m not going to lie to you, Lisette, it’s brutal.”
“I’ve been through brutal already,” I said confidently. “I survived my mother’s death, my father’s reputation, and abandonment. I’m pretty sure I can take whatever they dish out.”
Adam shook his head, and I felt a pit grow in the bottom of my stomach. “No, you don’t understand. The process is designed to break you. Mentally, physically, emotionally. It’s to test your loyalty to the person who is sponsoring your transfer.”
“Sounds charming,” I said.
“There are people who have died when going through the vetting process, and countless others that wished they would have.”
I suddenly felt horrified, and Adam could tell.
“Died?” I asked. “Are you serious?”
He lifted his hand to stroke the hair that was hanging down at the side of my neck. “Yeah, unfortunately, I am.”
“How was it when you went through it?” I asked.
Adam smiled compassionately and then leaned back slightly to make room for his arms to lift his shirt up over his head. The heated memory of our bodies together in the cemetery started to crawl back into my mind again, and I felt my heart start to beat quicker. Adam took my hand and touched one of my fingers to a thorn on his tattoo.
“I got this inked after I made it through the vetting process. Each one of these thorns represents a moment during the vetting that I thought I wanted to die.”
I moved my hand to be able to see his whole chest. There were probably a hundred thorns.
“Then why did you do it?” I asked in horror at what he must have gone through. “Why didn’t you just quit and leave?”
His eyes found mine. “Because then I wouldn’t have been able to get this close to you.”
I blinked. “What?”
It didn’t make sense. Adam couldn’t have joined Lineage just to be closer to me. He would have had better luck just coming into the halfway house to see me while I was working than to go through some terrible initiation process in order to join a rival school that I wasn’t even allowed to set foot on.
Adam cupped my cheek. “That night your mother was killed, I knew you’d end up here someday.”
“How could you have possibly known that?” I asked.
He smirked. “I saw it in your eyes…the insatiable thirst for truth and revenge. I knew then that you would never let this go, and I knew that I wanted to be with you when you tried to avenge your mother’s death.”
My mind was blown. Not even Julian had been able to reach the part of me that was buried so deeply that only I knew it existed. It would have been unbelievable to anyone else, which is probably why Michael and his mother overlooked Adam’s cunning and thought of him simply as a benign adoptee.
But I saw him for who he really was…a secret weapon.
“I can’t say that I love you,” I said as I remembered his words in front of Marta. “I don’t know how I feel about anyone right now. I don’t even know if I am capable of any feelings other than anger and emptiness.”
“I know,” he said softly. “Maybe one day I’ll tell you about my anger and emptiness too, and maybe by then you’ll be able to say those words back to me.”
There wasn’t any more talk of the initiation as Adam wrapped his arms around me and pulled me to lie down next to him. I had been on the shoulders of two men, in two beds, within the last two days. And to be honest, I couldn’t sort out my feelings about either one. The only thing I knew was that for right now, at that moment, I felt safe again.
That night was the first dream that I dreamt on the Lineage grounds. I was walking alone on the campus at night, and I saw Adam in the distance coming toward me. As he got closer, Michael appeared on the path between us. It looked as though they were going to fight each other, but when Michael raised a hand toward him, Adam simply looked sadly over the top of Michael’s shoulder at me. I started to run toward him, but in my dreams, things never seemed to play by the rules of real life, so my movement was slow as if I were trying to wade through honey. Instead of striking him, Michael reached into Adam’s chest and began to pull out the roots and thorns that were now somehow real instead of just a tattoo. I watched in horror as the roots unwound from Adam’s chest and spilled onto the ground in front of him as he fell to his knees, and then finally fell forward onto the stone path. Michael turned to look at me, still holding a fistful of bloodied roots in his hand and smiled in a way that made my skin crawl.
I woke up startled and drenched with sweat, as my nightmares usually caused me to be. Adam sat up next to me and put his arm around me as he stared with worry into my eyes.
“I’m okay,” I said. “It was just a bad dream.”
But a noisy commotion came from outside the door that caught his immediate attention before we lay back down.
The bedroom door swung open, and Michael, along with several other Lineage guys, stood smiling at us in the near-dark. Adam stood up in front of me in the bed and put his arms behind him as if he were trying to protect me.
“Now, now,” Michael taunted. “You know this is unavoidable.” His voice changed into a dark, commanding order. “Stand down, Adam.”
To my surprise, Adam slowly lowered his arms and stepped out of the way. He stared at me, helplessly from the side of the bed.
“What’s happening?” I asked him in fear.
“Your initiation,” Adam answered flatly.
I’m not sure what happened next because something was thrown over my head blocking my vision and leaving me to flail around in darkness as I tried to suck in a few breaths from behind the cloth that was covering my face. I thought about what Adam had said about people dying here. I didn’t want to die here. I supposed I would if I had to in order to avenge my mother, but that still didn’t mean that I wanted to.
I felt several sets of hands lift me up and try clumsily to carry me away. I felt their uneven footsteps on the ground outside jar my body as they took me somewhere, and from the length of it, it seemed a great distance away from Adam. When they finally dropped me down, my tailbone smacked against something cold and hard, and my hands flew to my face to take off whatever had been swaddled over my head. But even as I pulled it off, I still couldn’t see anything. I was somewhere in complete pitch darkness. I reached my hands around over the floor and felt a cold stone ground beneath me. I used my hands and feet to feel around until I got to the edges of the stone four walls. I was in an exceedingly small, very dark, and very cold room. The temperatures had been steadily dropping as the season approached winter, and from what I could tell, this little structure wasn’t somewhere inside. I tried to be still and calm and to gather my wits about me. Then I heard the faint sound of breathing and knew that I wasn’t alone in this place.
“Who’s there?” I called out. My voice bounced off the walls of the stone room.
