“But it’s more than that.” His voice was heavier, tired. “He’s not questioning the whole halfling shit anymore. He knows we’ve got to find her.”

Understanding rippled through me. “You think Val is the halfling?”

“Yeah, babe. It’s what I’ve been thinking for some time. It’s why I wouldn’t tell you who the other person I was looking into was. Didn’t want to put that crap in your head if it turned out not to be the case,” he explained.

Holy Sunday-sized shit balls.

Ren and David, the sect leader, thought the halfling was Val. To them, it made sense. Then didn’t they have to be worried out of their minds that Val was already in the process of getting pregnant with the doomsday baby?

“She must’ve figured it out somehow. Maybe a fae got to her and found out,” Ren added, and then yawned. “I know her parents are denying it. Both are claiming that they’re her actual biological parents, but who would fess up to that shit?”

My stomach sunk. “Where are her parents now?”

“Don’t know. Don’t really care.”

Pressure clamped down on my chest. I opened my mouth to tell him . . . to tell him what, exactly? That I knew for a fact her parents were innocent of shacking up with a fae? How could I prove that without incriminating myself? I closed my mouth, and oh God, I was a terrible person, a legit horrible human being.

Well . . .

Nope. Wasn’t quite a human being now, was I?

Oh my God, I needed my brain to, like, jump off a freaking cliff. What in the hell was I going to do? I couldn’t let her parents go down, because I seriously doubted they had anything to do with what she’d done. And they would go down. That was the way the Order operated. Her parents would’ve been deemed a threat and there was only one way threats were dealt with. Unease blossomed in my chest, along with a hefty dose of fear.

“You sure you’re okay?” he asked suddenly.

“Yeah,” I breathed, forcing my tense muscles to relax. I refocused. “Has David said anything about that crystal Val took?”

“He doesn’t know what it is.” Ren paused. “Or he’s not saying. Not sure if he trusts anyone at the moment, but I’ve put some feelers out to see if anyone in the Elite has an idea.”

Couldn’t blame David for not trusting anyone. Hopefully someone knew about the crystal. I thought about Merle. She’d randomly mentioned a crystal once before, but I was reluctant to involve her and her daughter. I didn’t want to bring trouble to their doorstep. They’d been through enough.

His hand tightened along my hip, and then he found my cheek in the darkness once more, and kissed me there. I let him fall asleep this time, but I stared into nothing as my mind jumped from one screwed up situation to the next. Stupid tears burned the back of my throat, but I fought them back, because if they fell, Ren would wake, and I was feeling too weak, too ripped open to keep this very big, very horrific secret under lock and key.

But as I lay there, the fear inside me grew like one of the vines that had crawled its way up the wall and over the balcony railing. There was no shaking the feeling that no matter what I did, things were going to go bad.

And they were going to go bad fast.

Chapter Three

I’d originally planned to get my butt out of my apartment and make my way to the headquarters on Thursday, but that’s not what I ended up doing. Instead, I checked in with Jo Ann, my only non-Order friend. Unsure of how to explain why I had disappeared from class and hadn’t been very communicative, I went with the trusty old “I got mugged” excuse, which was sadly believable, but there was a good chance that was the second time I’d used that excuse to explain away random bruises. I really needed to come up with something more creative, because I was sure there was going to be another instance when I was going to have to lie to her.

And that sucked.

Besides the fact that I liked her and enjoyed how genuinely kind she was, being around Jo Ann made me feel . . . normal. Like I was any twenty-one-year-old about to turn twenty-two in two months. That I could have things like a degree and a boyfriend. Like I wasn’t shirking my duty by enrolling in classes at Loyola—classes I was most likely going to fail.

That served as a cold reminder that I wasn’t normal.

I spent the bulk of Thursday dealing with my rather ineffective attempt at being normal. I’d tracked down the syllabus, but only managed to get a return call from my statistics professor, of all people. After bluntly telling me I’d missed way too much time, he explained I needed to talk to my advisor and then mic-dropped on me by hanging up.

My advisor didn’t call me back until Thursday afternoon, and it wasn’t a good call, but honestly, out of everything else, it almost felt like not a big deal. Just another reason to eat my feelings through the last box of pralines.

I’d missed too much time, a week here and a few days there, and I had a choice that really wasn’t much of a choice at all. Fail classes due to already missing so much time, and it was only the beginning of October, or withdrawal from the semester.

I was going to have to withdraw, and it was hard not to laugh at the tiny, almost pathetic voice that said I could reregister in the spring or once things calmed down. As if things were ever going to calm down.

As I tossed my phone on the couch cushion, I told myself that I was still Ivy Morgan. I was still her even if I had to drop out of college, even though I was a halfling. I was still her. No matter what.

I had to keep telling myself that.

So I stayed in my apartment, on my couch, Thursday and Friday. Ren and Tink were relieved about that. Their reasoning for me “taking it easy” came from two very different places.