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“Of course you’re right there,” she muttered under her breath.
Read him, a dark part of her demanded.Read him and see the truth your instincts know for a fact.
“Yeah, and then what,” she said.
You know what you want to do.
Xhex laughed. “Far as I’m aware, I’m at work and perfectly happy overseeing my staff and watching the crowd. So what Iwantto do is my fucking job—”
If you read him, you are free to do what you want.
In the recesses of her mind, she was aware that the back-and-forth was taking “talking to yourself” to a level that should probably be professionally assessed, but it was fine. She was fine.
Everything was fine—
“I’m free now.” She looked away from the man to prove the point. “Free as a bird.”
Read him.
“Will you leave me thefuckalone—”
“Sorry, I’m just following up on the text you sent earlier?”
With a jump, Xhex focused on her second-in-command. T’Marcus Jones was pointing to his iPhone as if to prove he wasn’t wasting her time. Not that the former Marine ever wasted anything.He was a consummate professional, always in control of himself and anyone around him. His black shirt might have had STAFF on the back in big letters, but like he’d be confused for anything other than BADASS?
What the hell had she asked him to do?
To cover her confusion, she waved his arm down. “Yeah, yeah. Good. What’s the answer?”
His brows went up. “Ah, I did it?”
“What?”
“I set the schedule for next week and sent it out to everyone?” When she just blinked at him, T’Marcus leaned in, like maybe if they were closer together she’d understand what he was talking about better. “You told me you were coming in late tonight and asked me to take care of it first thing. Bobby, the new hire, is covering for Mike while he’s on vacation, and the rest of us are splitting Bobby’s night off on Wednesday. S’all good.”
“Oh. Right.” She cleared her throat. “Thanks.”
“You need something else?”
“I’m fine.” Making a show of checking her watch, she said, “Is it me or is this night crawling?”
T’Marcus nodded and asked her something she didn’t track. As she nodded to whatever it was, what she was really concentrating on was the flare of panic kindling in her brain stem—and when he walked off, she told herself to get her shit together.
This time, the voice in her head wasn’t someversion of her own, but Rehvenge’s:Your grid is still collapsing.
Rubbing her bloodshot eyes, she said, “No, it isn’t.”
As she answered yet another disembodied opinion, and then resolutely blocked out Blade’s second opinion on the subject, she looked back for the man in the hoodie—
He was gone.
Her senses came alive, and she moved without being aware of deciding to. Her body ambulated on its own, striding forward, shuffling through the humans getting their good time on. Tracking her prey—
Black sweatshirt wasnotprey, she reminded herself. No, she was just going to talk to him. Get him to leave peacefully.
Go on about his business before he got hurt.
Moving along, her eyes sharpened on the heads around her, weeding out the blond and red-haired, the long-haired, the mullet, and the braided. No hoodie thickening the nape of a patron, anywhere. But she hadn’t been talking long. He couldn’t have gone far—
