I arch an eyebrow at him. He arches one right back, then folds both arms behind his head and settles into the mattress like a man who has never in his life been more content, openly, shamelessly relishing every second of this.
I don’t have the energy to entertain his nonsense.
The exhaustion is already crawling back over me, heavy and grey, dragging at my limbs—so I let my eyes do the work instead, scanning the room from my perch.
Guards at the perimeter, guns drawn, which I file as decorative; men that nervous, that far away, are furniture with triggers and nothing more. Doc in the corner, arms crossed, watching me with that fathomless steel-blue patience, his library scent threading faint through the antiseptic.
Beside him, a tall pale shape it takes my sluggish brain a beat to label—the mortician, the funeral one, Crowe…Silas, that was it, lilies and beeswax and old graves.
The redhead detective near the door, scentless and sharp. And one more.
A figure in black I don’t recognize, long navy hair spilling past his shoulders, standing a little apart and watching me with an odd, fixed fascination that crawls under my skin and stays there. Not the hungry watching I’ve grown used to from the others. Something cooler. Like one that studies.
I dislike it instantly and completely, the way an animal dislikes a smell it can’t place.
I turn my head back to Riot, slow and deliberate, and lift the knife to point its tip across the room at the navy-haired stranger.
“I don’t like him.”
The words come out firm and flat, scrubbed of feeling, and they make Riot arch that brow again, like he wants confirmation that I mean exactly what I appear to mean. So I pout. That, apparently, settles it past all doubt, because his amusement drains into something colder as he turns his head toward the man in black.
“Out,” Riot says.
The stranger and the detective both frown, exchanging a glance heavy with shared objection. Silas, delighted, begins to whistle a low tune.
Doc sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose between two fingers.
“I’d genuinely rather not add another body to this afternoon’s tally,” he says, mild as ever, “so I’d take him up on the suggestion.” He says it with the flat certainty of a man who harbors no doubt whatsoever that Riot would cheerfully murder this stranger for the sole and sufficient crime of being disliked by me. “Bishop. Detective. The room’s a touch crowded.”
It makes me smirk, that certainty, even as exhaustion gnaws at the edges of it—the casual confidence that my whim is law enough to clear a room of armed authority.
The navy-haired man—Bishop, then—holds my gaze a beat too long, something unreadable moving behind his fascination, before he turns and goes, the redhead stalking out at his heels.
Silence settles in their wake.
The guards, sensing the temperature drop, slowly lower their weapons—apparently I’ve been downgraded from threat to invalid, which suits me, because the truth is I have nothing left.
I’m so suddenly, bottomlessly tired that I can’t hold myself up against it, and before I’ve decided to, I let my forehead sink down to rest against the warm bare expanse of Riot’s chest.
His scent folds around me—woodsmoke and worn leather and warm iron, the smell of a building mid-burn, and somehowit doesn’t frighten the part of me still drowning in fever; somehow it steadies it.
His hand comes up at once and cradles the back of my head, broad and careful, fingers threading into my hair, and that single gentle pressure flips something in me like a switch thrown in a dark room.
The fight goes out of me all at once.
I melt, a groan, low, because the melting comes with a price—my skull has begun to spin in earnest, the room tilting on a slow sick axis I want no part of.
“You good?” Riot rumbles beneath my cheek, the words vibrating up through his chest.
“Dying,” I mumble into his skin. “Of a headache. Tragic. Put it on my stone.”
Somewhere above and behind me, Doc’s voice, talking about a concoction—something to ease the withdrawal, to take the worst edges off the crash my body’s grinding through. I don’t catch the rest.
The words blur and smear and slide away from me, because I’m already slipping, the fever-water closing back over my head, pulling me down and under into the dark.
But this time the dark doesn’t take me back to the pole, or the stage, or the man with the deed to my body.
This time it takes me back to the cafeteria.
