Unspoken: The Lynburn Legacy by Sarah Rees Brennan Read Free Book Online

against their respective sides of the lift, hugging the walls, and Kami mentally placed herself elsewhere.
    So, what’s going on with you?
she asked Jared. At exactly the same time, he asked her the same question.
    Amusement rolled through them both. Kami found herself smiling. She saw the delinquent smile too, mouth a subtle curve. His face went grim again as he noticed her watching. He probably thought her smile meant she was flirting with him. “Don’t worry,” she told him. “You’re not my type.”
    He looked away from her. “Back at you.”
    I’m not doing much
, said Jared, warm in her mind, the amusement lingering.
Just stuck in an elevator with this creepy Asian girl giving me a death glare
.
    Kami’s whole body recoiled. She was just staring at him, her vision blurry around the edges with panic. When the lift doors opened, she pushed herself off the wall because this wasn’t possible, because she was leaving the library and going home and never laying eyes on this guy ever again, not if she could help it.
    His hand shot out and slammed down on a button. The doors closed and he slammed another hand on the lift wall, close to her head. The clang reverberated in her ears. He was standing next to her suddenly, much too close, bowed down so she was looking directly into those cold eyes. “Kami.”
    Kami wasn’t shaking. The world was shaking her, the world was shaking apart and about to fall to pieces. Nothing made sense anymore. “Jared?” she whispered. Her voice was changed like everything else, sounding as if it did not belong to her. She lifted a hand, seeing her fingers tremble in the space between them, up to touch his face.
    Jared grabbed her wrist.
    They stood absolutely still for a moment, looking at each other. Kami didn’t dare move. She could feel her pulse pounding against his palm. He was real. He was here, and she was scared.
    He let go of her and stepped back.
    They were on opposite sides of the lift again, just like before, except now he was watching her. The cold lights had swallowed up his eyes: they were pale and awful, the kind of eyes you might fear watching you in the darkness when you walked home alone. His feelings hit her, not like having someone reaching out but like someone throwing something at her. She had never felt anything like this before in her life.It was like being enveloped by a storm with no calm center, with no calm anywhere to be found. Kami felt blinded by it, by Jared’s fury and panic and, above all, his black terror.
    The link between them had become an onslaught. Kami could not just tell what Jared was thinking, she could feel it. She could not escape, could not untangle the strands of herself from him. She tried to visualize walls in her head, shields that she could hide behind, feeling both exposed and lost.
    “Stop it,” she said, her voice catching.
    “You stop it!” he whispered back.
    They sounded like terrified children, and strangers who hated each other. Kami could not tell who was the most afraid.
    The doors of the lift opened again with a cheerful little ping. The fluorescent lights of the library spilled in over their tense tableau. Kami could see Dorothy at the checkout desk in her fuzzy pink cardigan, squinting over in their direction. She saw a ripple pass through Jared’s body, like the tremor that moved through wild animals just before they ran. For an instant she thought that he would simply bolt.
    She was wrong.
    First he took one step and closed the distance between them. She was trapped between the wall and his body, looking up into the strange light of his eyes.
    “Stay away from me,” he hissed in her ear. Then he exited the lift with so much force that it rocked.
    Kami came out a moment later, blinking in the light. She was not walking steadily.
    “Are you all right?” Dorothy asked, leading Kami around behind the desk and sitting her in Dorothy’s own chair. “Wasthat Lynburn boy bothering you? He came in with a letter from