I wasn't there yet. Nope. Not yet. So I took the coward’s path and rose to head inside as well. Except I needed to pass Zed to get around the fire, and he wasn't backing down so easily. He grabbed my wrist as I moved closer, holding me totally immobile with just his fingers.
"Dare, why are you being so fucking stubborn?" he asked in a rough whisper. It was a fair fucking question to any outsider, anyone who didn't know us or everything we'd been through together. But Zed knew. He knew so much more than I’d ever wanted him to know... and I couldn't get that out of my head.
Everything I'd told Lucas in that car had been the truth, but there was more to it. There was so much pain and desperation tangled up in my history with Zed, and I couldn't shake it. I hadn't made peace with my own past enough to take Zed out of the friendzone completely. It was all so much worse now that I knew he'd seen what Chase had done to me on those recordings.
My whole body shuddered as the memory slammed into the front of my mind, and I stifled a gasp. I wasn't... Nope, no way. I wasn't remotely ready to deal with those memories yet, and I couldn't take things further with Zed without addressing those issues.
"Hey," he murmured, standing up but not releasing my wrist. He wasn't holding tight, and his thumb stroked gently over my pulse point as he tilted my face up with his other hand. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make you feel—"
"It's fine," I croaked, cutting him off before he could elaborate on what emotion he'd just recognized in my eyes. "I'm just..." I trailed off with a small shrug and a bitter laugh. "Really fucking damaged."
Zed gave a small shake of his head, his gaze holding mine as his fingers brushed over my cheek. "That's where you're wrong." His voice was so soft, his lips barely moving as he spoke. "You're a diamond, Dare. All the shit you've gone through, all the damage Chase tried to make stick? It's just revealing more of your shine."
My breath caught as he leaned in, but this time it was just a gentle kiss to my cheek. This time he was the one to walk away. Frozen, I could do nothing but stare after him, then with a long exhale I sank my ass back down to the seat Zed had so recently vacated.
I took a couple of minutes to pull my shit together, pouring another glass of Scotch and downing it in one huge gulp. Shaking off the intense need to scream or cry or... fuck, run after Zed and climb him like a scared cat on a tree, I headed inside to check on Cass and Lucas.
They were already set up in the living room with Cass's professional tattoo gear that Zed had picked up from his apartment a few days earlier. Lucas was shirtless on the padded table, his arms linked behind his head and an easy, excited smile on his face as he chatted to Cass.
My one-armed Grumpy Cat was hunched over the table sketching out a rough outline of the design he'd put together for Lucas. He'd started drawing it weeks ago, and I'd spotted it on his desk when I was at his apartment. There was no mistaking who it'd been for because it was made up of all things that screamed Lucas.
"I'll fill in the details while I work," Cass told him, handing over the rough sketch. For some reason, he wasn't showing Lucas the whole design he'd already completed in his sketchpad, but I wasn't going to call him on it.
Lucas cast his eyes over the paper, then shrugged. "I trust you, bro. You clearly know what you're doing." He indicated to the fact that Cass was pretty much head to toe covered in tattoos, and Cass huffed a sound that was close to a laugh.
"It might hurt a bit over the scar tissue," Cass continued, preparing all his work tools one-handed. "Or shit, maybe it won't hurt at all. Depends how your nerves are healing."
Lucas just grinned. "Can't hurt more than getting the scars in the first place, huh?"
Cass snorted. "Too fucking right, Gumdrop."
I hesitated a moment, unsure whether Cass was cool with me staying to watch him work. But damn, I wanted to.
He raised his head to peer at me when he was finished prepping everything and tipped his head to the vacant seat beside him. "Sit down, Red. I might need your hands."
Biting back a smile, I did as instructed, pulling my seat closer so I could get a good view as he worked. There was no way he actually needed my hands; he was too damn stubborn not to do it all himself. But I was happy to take the excuse.
"I'll do you next," Cass murmured, shooting me a wink as he started his tattoo gun.
I just licked my lips and grinned. I already had a few tattoos, so I sure as fuck wasn't going to refuse that offer. But chances were he was going to wreck himself on the hours of work he had ahead on Lucas.
"We'll see," I replied.
Cass worked in silence for a few minutes, the only sound in the room from the buzz of his tattoo gun as he began inking Lucas's chest. But when Zed joined us, he flicked the sound system on, and Cass grunted his approval at the rock music that poured from the hidden speakers dotted around the room.
I quickly became mesmerized watching Cass create a work of art on Lucas's flesh, and propped my head up on my hands to watch without being a distraction. Lucas gave a heavy yawn about half an hour into the session and closed his eyes.
When he didn't open them again, I grinned and peered closer.
"Is he seriously sleeping through a tattoo?" I asked quietly, and Cass paused to glance up at Lucas's face.
"Huh," he grunted. "That's a first. Gumdrop's a bigger psychopath than I gave him credit for."
"High pain and low boredom tolerance," Zed murmured from the other side of the dining table where he'd been drawing idly in Cass's sketchbook. Zed had never been an artist to the level of Cass's tattoo creations, but he'd gone through a graffiti phase as a preteen and still had a tendency to doodle little patterns or create logos in the margins of documents or on my newspapers.
I smiled at Lucas's peaceful face. He really did look like he was properly asleep and totally unbothered by the work Cass was doing on his chest.
"Did you get anything useful from Lucas's mom today?" Zed asked, closing the sketchpad and tossing it back onto the table.
I shook my head slightly. "Not... exactly. She was vehemently against us digging around about the Guild."
Zed nodded. "So she's been threatened."
"Seems that way," I agreed. "But she gave me a small clue. She has a framed picture of Lucas's dad on her dresser. Nicolas Porter. She seemed to very deliberately look at his picture as I was leaving."
"You're thinking her room might be bugged? That's why she was unwilling to talk about the Guild?" Zed leaned forward, clasping his hands together on the table as he stared into space, thinking. "Or at least that's what she believes, whether true or not."
I gave a one-shouldered shrug. "That was my guess. We searched her room at Lucas's house, but there was nothing there."
"They moved around a lot, didn't they?" Cass murmured without raising his head from his work. He was doing it all one handed, so he had to frequently stop and reposition himself to get the angles right.
"Yeah, ever since they left Shadow Grove when Lucas was four." I sat up a bit straighter. "That's a good point. It would make more sense if she had a safety deposit box or something, right?"