You Wouldn't Dare

Chapter Four

It had been a week since Jace and I had come to our little... understanding.

Don't get me wrong or anything, we still were nowhere near being friendly with each other.

Just because he'd decided to get up off of his lazy ass and do something that wasn't completely hostile did not mean that we were suddenly BFF's or anything.

I still hadn't made any move to sleep on the bed that had been provided by him.

In my short seventeen years on this earth, I had never slept on anything softer than my worn out old military bed that smelled like pure dust, and I wasn't just about ready to make the transition to something that was fit for a queen to sleep on.

Plus, the floor alone was much softer than my old bed at home.

It must have been at least 5 inches of thick carpet, and I could hardly feel the floor beneath me as I curled up with my blanket at night.

And I didn't want to owe him anything either.

For all I knew, the whole thing could just be some sort of huge trap that he was waiting for me to fall into.

I wasn't about to get too comfortable.

* * *

My first, peaceful sleep was interrupted by what sounded like small, feral beasts.

Feeling every inch of my body go into high alert, I sat up, listening hard for any more of the sounds.

At first I thought I had imagined it, but then it happened again... and again.

Narrowing my eyes, I threw off the blankets and stood up, grabbing the thin hoodie that I had come to love over the course of the past week.

I followed the sounds down the stairs of Jace's ridiculously large house, finally stopping outside of a room with large, metal doors.

Well, it certainly looked inviting.

I mentally imagined myself cracking my knuckles like a badass before I pushed one of the doors open.

Inside was something that I never would have expected to witness.

Jace was standing in the centre of the room on a blue mat. Maybe 'standing' wasn't the right word. He was crouched low on the ground and I could only see the side of his face from where I was standing.

He was wearing another one of his black t-shirts and a loose pair of grey sweatpants, both of which were darkened with sweat.
His hair was ruffled, some of it plastered to his forehead.

This was just too strange, even for me.

"Um," I called out. "Good morning?"

Jace spun around, and in that same moment something from the ceiling dropped and landed on top of him, causing him to let out an 'oomph' in shock.

The thing- which I learned turned out to be a person- stood up and let out a whoop of triumph. "And he said it couldn't be done! Little cousin, you have a lot of work to do."

Jace muttered something under his breath that I didn't quite catch. The other boy was grinning like an idiot.

A very attractive idiot.

Like Jace, this boy was very eye-catching, but in a completely different way.

Where Jace was all gold when it came to looks, the other boy reminded me of the night sky.
He had ruffled black curls springing up around his head, and his eyes were blue, like the petals of a pansy flower, or the blue of a bottle glass.