Losing Lila Read Free Page B

were trickling down my cheeks and onto his chest. I tried to stop them, but they just kept coming.
    ‘We left him. We just left him, Alex.’
    Alex’s grip on me tightened. His fingers went under my chin and he forced it up so I was looking him in the eye.
    ‘We had to, Lila.’
    I stared at him. Did we?
    ‘It was the only thing we could do,’ he said. ‘If either of us had gone to help him, we’d have been shot too. We’ve talked about this. Jack would have done the same thing. He would have wanted you to be safe.’
    A part of me knew what Alex was saying was true, but it wasn’t enough to make the guilt untwist the knots it had made in my gut.
    ‘But Alex, what if he’s—’
    I thought about Ryder lying dead in the dirt and of Jack at his side with a bullet wound in his chest and scrunched my eyes shut. He wasn’t in a good way. That’s what Key had said. He was in a coma. He could be paralysed. He could be dead . And I didn’t know because I was here. And Jack was there. And so was my mum. And there was no way of getting to either of them because between us and them was the Unit.
    Alex put his hands on either side of my face. I opened my eyes. He was looking straight at me. ‘Jack’s fine,’ he said, ‘I know it. He’s too tough not to be. And anyway, Jack has a very good reason to stay alive.’
    ‘My mum?’ It was a good reason. We had thought she was dead, but she wasn’t.
    ‘That,’ Alex said, a smile pulling at the corner of his mouth, ‘but I was thinking more that he’ll want the opportunity to kick my ass.’
    I laughed through my tears. ‘Yeah, he wasn’t too happy, was he?’
    ‘No more than I deserve.’
    ‘No, don’t say that.’ I scrambled to sit up. ‘You can’t do that to me again. You can’t leave me again because of Jack. Because you’re scared of what he thinks. I can’t – I won’t go through that again—’
    I thought back to the days just before all this kicked off. To Alex’s promise not to hurt me, and the way he’d left me so easily, thinking he was doing the right thing. When I thought about it, it made me feel as if the Unit had fired that weapon of theirs right at my heart.
    Alex sat up too and took my hands in his. ‘Lila, I promise you I’ll never leave you again, ever. I promise you that I’ll keep you safe and that we’ll find Jack and your mum, and I promise that even if Jack does kick my ass, which one day I hope he will, I will still never leave you.’
    I weighed his words, analysing their content. Alex had been known to twist the meaning of things. He’d tricked me that way before. I considered him: the arctic-blue eyes, the bruised shadows beneath them, the dark blond crew cut growing out, the soft curve of his lips, the familiar frown line running between his eyes that always made me want to reach out and smudge it away.
    ‘I promise, Lila,’ he said. ‘No hidden meanings. I’m not going to leave you.’
    He leaned forward and kissed me, still smiling. My whole body melted away, the muscles becoming as soft as sponges dipped in a hot bath, all the guilt and worry disappearing back into the corners of my consciousness, where I preferred them to stay.
    After a few minutes Alex pried me off him. I sat up grudgingly as he swung his legs off the bed and watched as he bent to plug the light back into the socket. We had taken to unplugging electrical equipment as a precaution every time we moved to a new hotel room. When it came to proximity to Alex, I couldn’t control my ability and we didn’t need to be advertising our presence to the Unit with a Vegas-style sound and light show.
    ‘Seriously, we have to focus,’ he said, rearranging his T-shirt and running a hand through his hair.
    ‘What do we have to focus on ?’ I had thought the bed was a pretty good thing to concentrate on.
    ‘Get up,’ Alex said.
    I narrowed my eyes in suspicion, but slowly got up off the bed and stood in front of him.
    ‘OK, we need to practise.’
    I