“Tell me something,” he whispers, voice sweet. “Are you playing with my daddy?”
I blink again. Real slow. I try to line up the two copies of him until they overlap. It almost works. “Your who?” I ask, because the words don’t make sense. Nothing makes sense. My brain is a fucking carousel and Luca is the horse that won’t stop spinning.
Luca scoffs like I’m the dumbest thing he’s smelled all week. “Daddy, pretty boy. Doctor Death.” His smile widens, sharp. “Kai. Mine.”
I stare at him. Then at the hallway. Then at him again.“…You call Kai Daddy?” I ask, because surely—even in my state—that’s the more important question.
His eyes narrow. “Obviously.” Then he presses one manicured finger to my chin, tilting my head up. “But you? You crawling into his container? You kneeling at his feet? That’s my game, sweetheart. I don’t share.”
I snort. Or try to snort. It comes out more like a stumbling laugh caught in molasses. “I wasn’t—”My brain stutters. Reboots.“—not like that.”
Luca looks me over, slowly, like he’s assessing damage. Or competition. “Mhm. Funny. You smell like his drugs.” His hand drops from my chin to my chest, tapping once over my sternum. “And his disappointment.”
I try to swat his hand away. I miss. Completely. Probably hit air. Or one of the duplicate Lucas. “Go away,” I mumble, which is pathetic even to my own ears.
“Oh, absolutely not.” Luca steps forward, forcing me back against the wall. His smile is pretty enough to kill someone. “See, junkie, I like my chaos controlled. Mine. And you—” he drags his finger down the center of my chest, slow enough to raise goosebumps I can’t deny— “you’re fucking with the ecosystem.”
“I didn’t do anything,” I protest, but it comes out slurred and soft. “Kai just—he just helped. That’s it.”
Luca laughs, a bright, delighted sound that somehow feels like being stabbed with glitter. “And you think he helps for free?” he says, tapping my cheek with two fingers. “Everyone here belongs to someone. You might want to pick carefully.”
My stomach flips and the hallway tilts again.
Then—like a thunderclap—footsteps.
Heavy. Purposeful. Familiar.
Luca’s eyes flick past me toward the sound, and his grin turns wicked. “Speaking of ownership…”
A shadow falls over us. A presence. A gravity that makes the air shift.
I don’t even need to turn around to know.
Rafe.
And I am very high, still leaning against Luca, still smelling like Kai’s drugs and shame.
Perfect.
Rafe’s voice hits the hallway like a gunshot made of gravel and hell. “KAI! Get your feral dog offmyferal dog!”
My entire spine tries to jump out of my body. Luca’s snort is sharp, delighted, musical in the worst way—like he’s been waiting for this exact explosion. He steps back just enough to make it look like he’s innocent, but he leaves one hand on my hip out of pure spite.
I’m too high to do anything but stare straight ahead as Rafe stomps down the hallway, looking absolutely unhinged—jaw clenched, hair a mess from practice, gear half-off like he didn’t even bother unstrapping everything before storming after us. He looks at Luca’s hand on me and his eye twitches in a way that makes every molecule in the room consider evacuating.
Kai appears in the doorway behind Rafe like a ghost summoned by swear words. He doesn’t even look surprised. “He came to me,” Kai says blandly, which is somehow worse. “I didn’t send him out to be harassed.”
“Harassed?” Luca scoffs, flipping his hair off his forehead. “I was welcoming him back to the land of the living. Someone’s got to, since you two are too busy measuring whose leash is longer.”
Rafe’s head snaps toward him. Slowly. Silently. Terrifyingly.
Luca just beams like a gremlin. I, meanwhile, am trying to focus on which one of the three Rafes I’m seeing is the real one.
Rafe steps betweenus, shoving Luca back with one arm without even looking at him. Then he grabs my chin—hard—and lifts my face up so our eyes meet. “Julian,” he growls, scanning me, pupils, breathing, the way I’m swaying on my feet. “How high are you?”
“Uhhh…” I try to count fingers. Fail. “Moderately?”
“That is not moderately,” he snaps. “You can’t even stand—”
