Shadowed

XXV. Nothing

"Don't do it, Rowan," cries Angella from the corner. "Whatever it is, don't take the deal, you can't trust them, they're—"

Bang. A bullet whizzes through the air and buries itself in the wall barely inches from Angella's head.

Jade smirks, satisfied. "I didn't have to miss, you know."

Angella slumps back against the wall and nods, biting her lip. But I know Jade wouldn't shoot her now. She hasn't had the chance to torture her yet. Jade wants Angella bleeding, screaming, begging for death. She wouldn't end her life so quickly.

"Anyways," says Kara firmly, eyeing her Hunter with something like pride, "our negotiation. You have something we want."

"My immortality," I say. My voice feels strange and faraway.

Kara nods. "And we have something you want."

"What's that?" I ask uneasily. My heartbeat thrums in my ears.

"Your friends' lives," says Gio, his dark eyes calculating. 

He scans the room, gaze landing on Angella in the corner, Jade's gun still pointed between her eyes. Abby, half-dead on the floor. Drew slumped next to her, trying to staunch his bleeding neck with the fabric of his t-shirt.

Suddenly, my breath is stuck in my throat. This is exactly what I feared would happen.

"You wouldn't. You wouldn't." But even as I say it I know it's a lie.

Four sets of eyes, utterly cold and unrelenting, stare back at me. My knee is throbbing. My pulse is fast, like maybe my heart knows how close I am to the end, and it's determined to keep pumping even in my last moments.

Gio turns, gazing off into nothing. I can almost see the cogs of his mind turning, calculating, plotting. His stare is icy, like he knows he holds lives in his hands. Like he doesn't even care.

Something clicks in his brain. His eyes flash for a moment.

Finally he speaks. "So, Rowan," he says coolly, "what do you say? You'll let us drain you of your blood."

"Only if you let them live," I say, holding his gaze.

"Don't," hisses Angella, eyes widening. Almost immediately, another bullet flies past her with a bang, ripping an identical hole in the wall on the other side of her head.

Jade rolls her eyes. "I'm this close to gagging you, bitch," she warns, hands wrapped around her gun menacingly, like she's dying to pull the trigger again.

"Your blood, then, Rowan," says Kara. There's no emotion in her voice as she readies the silver-handled dagger, kneeling next to me on the ground and grabbing my arm with fingers like iron, cold and strong.

I wrench my arm away. The bullet wound is stinging, pulsing with waves of red-hot pain, but I block it out. That's nothing. Pain's nothing.

"I never agreed to anything," I say firmly. My voice wants to shake. I won't let it.

"Oh, but you don't have a choice," says Gio, a strange, triumphant sheen in his dark eyes.

I eye him petulantly. I know I don't have a choice. I know that as long as Drew's, Abby's, and Angella's lives hang in the balance, they have every bit of sway over me. 

Half of me hates how helpless that makes me, how easy I am to manipulate. 

But I remember the blush coloring Drew's cheeks, and his golden smile. Abby's playful taunts and fiery protectiveness. Even the fear written across Angella's face right now. Fear for me. She's not afraid of what they'll do to her, but to me.