Page 72 of The Devils in the Details

“Hello, Zephyr.” His voice was low. Deliberate. “I’ve been waiting for a moment alone with you. And look, the universe provides.”

I went very quiet. Very cold. The kind of cold that lived in the neighborhood of something primal and had been there longer than I was willing to admit.

Theo’s free hand found my hip. His thumb traced a small circle through the fabric of my shirt, and the gesture was so deliberate, so specific, that my skin registered it as a threat.

“I’ve watched you.” His mouth was close to my ear. His voice dropped lower, each line worse than the last, a detailed inventory of what he wanted to do to me delivered with the calm of someone who had been thinking about it for a very long time. “Every time you stand next to him. Every time you touch him. I’ve thought about what those hands would feel like on me instead. What you would sound like. What you would do if I —”

I could feel his arousal pressed against me. Hard. Deliberate. The pressure of a man who had decided that proximity was consent and consent was a formality he could dispense with.

My free hand worked at the palm over my mouth. Fingernails finding purchase against his skin, buying fractions of an inch. Not enough. Not nearly enough.

My other hand was locked around the switchblade with the grip of someone who had used it before and had no philosophical objections to using it again. The blade was open. Warm from my hand. Waiting.

Theo tightened his hold. His fingers dug harder into my cheek. His hips pressed forward. His breath came faster against my ear, and the sound of it was the sound of a man who had decided that this was happening.

I stopped trying to peel his hand away.

I drove the blade into his thigh with everything I had instead.

The sound he made was gratifying. A scream, high and ragged, the noise of a man who had not seen that coming and was now revising several previously held assumptions about how his afternoon would proceed.

His hand left my mouth. His body folded. He hit the floor hard, one hand clutching his leg, blood already darkening the fabric of his tailored trousers with the efficient spread of something that had found a path and was taking it.

I stepped back. Assessed the angle. The blade had gone in clean — deep enough to matter, not deep enough to hit anything arterial. I was not trying to kill him today. Today was about communication, and the communication had been received with what I considered appropriate volume.

Theo was making sounds on the floor. Wet, ragged sounds. His hand pressed to the wound, blood seeping between his fingers, and his eyes found mine with the hatred of a man who had just discovered that the person he considered prey had teeth.

I looked at him for one beat, two. I considered wrapping the wound. I genuinely did not want to. I finally concluded that Theo had hands and at least one of them still worked, and first aid was a courtesy I was not inclined to extend.

I kicked him in the face.

Not hard. Precise. The movement of someone who had learned to fight in streets without rules and had developed opinions about which parts of the human face responded most effectively to applied force.

My bare foot connected with his jaw — a short, sharp impact — and Theo’s head snapped back against the floor with a sound that suggested several things had been rearranged and not all of them would be returning to their original configuration.

He went still.

I stood over him for a moment. His breathing was ragged. Blood on his lip. Blood on his thigh. The switchblade was still in my hand, warm and wet, and I wiped it clean on the leg of his trousers because his trousers had probably cost more than my monthly rent and I considered this a form of taxation.

I stepped over him and pout of the room. I turned and closed the door, then turned back.

Directly into Ari’s chest.

Ari’s hands were on my arms before my brain had fully registered that the chest I’d walked into was his chest, which said something about my situational awareness that I was not going to examine too closely because examining things required coherence and coherence was several exits behind me.

His black eyes moved across my face. Fast. Precise. The inventory of a man who was running a damage assessment and did not like the initial findings. His hands checked my arms, my shoulders, my face — thumb brushing my cheek where Theo’s palm had been, fingers tracing the line of my jaw with the specific attention of someone cataloguing bruises that hadn’t formed yet.

“I’m fine,” I said. My voice came out steadier than it had any right to.

“You’re bleeding.”

I looked at my hand. A thin line across the knuckles — Theo’s fingernails, probably, a mark I hadn’t noticed in the adrenaline haze of stabbing a man and then kicking him in the face, which was a sequence of events that had not been on my afternoon agenda and was now retroactively occupying several slots.

“It’s not my blood.” I met his eyes. Held them. The corridor around us was smoke and broken plaster and the distant sound of something structural having a very bad day.

None of that mattered because Ari was looking at me like I was something that had been threatened and he was now recalculating several previously held assumptions about the appropriate response.

Ari went very still. The stillness that happened when the temperature dropped and the air got thin and the man standing in front of you had just decided that someone was going to have a very expensive conversation with gravity.