Reece side-eyed him. “Why?” he said suspiciously.
“Just want to make sure we’re starting at a baseline somewhere near normal.”
“And what, pray tell,” Reece said, with biting sweetness, “is the reason you think it’s about to rise?”
Grayson coughed. “Pretty sure it’s going up as we speak.”
“Well,empath specialist, maybe stopsetting it off.”
Grayson hesitated.
“What?” said Reece.
“Nothing.”
“Oh no, that was not nothing, that was hesitation. Whatever it is you don’t want to tell me, say it anyway.”
“If you’re sure you want to know,” said Grayson. “I wasn’t gonna say it, but you’re a touch high-strung even by empath standards. When was the last time you read someone?”
Reece drew back. “Why would you ask that?”
“Most empaths have a lot of people in their life. Hard toempathizeif it’s just you. I don’t meet a lot of empaths as alone as you seem to be.”
Reece quickly looked forward, out the windshield. He didn’t want to think about this, about any of this. “I haven’t read someone myself since March,” he said tightly.
“March,”Grayson repeated. “You know you’ve got all sorts of neurotransmitter and other issues, don’t you? Because that empath brain would rather get its feelings from others than make its own? Just one more way y’all don’t have the self-preservation instinct God gave a rock. Why so long ago?”
I felt so much pain I thought I was dying and now I have nightmares and hear everyone else lie what’s wrong with me do you know?
Can you help?
“It—I—it wasn’t a good experience,” Reece managed to say.
“Oh.” He could feel Grayson’s gaze on him. “Someone I need to have a conversation with?”
Reece shook his head, the movement jerky. “No. That person isn’t—”alive“—around. Not anymore.”
“I can travel.”
Reece huffed, not a laugh, not over this, but a tiny bit lighter. “Cute,” he grudgingly admitted. “But why do you keep pretending that the Dead Man would stick up for an empath?”
“Have Ipretendedabout anything since we met?”
Reece hesitated. No, Grayson hadn’t—not when he’d cuffed Reece over the hood of his car, not when he’d talked him down in Stone Solutions until the phantom pain had stopped.
Reece shook his head to clear it of those thoughts. “Sorry, still not falling for it. Maybe that’s how you fool other empaths, like,hey baby, you just be your high-strung self and let me handle all that scary danger, but respectfully, AgentDead Man, I’m pretty sure youarethe scary danger.”
“Fair enough,” Grayson muttered.
They climbed out of the car and approached the awning. “Are you ever going to tell me what this place is?” Reece asked.
“A club.” Grayson pressed a tiny doorbell adjacent to the metal doors. “Of a sort.”
After several moments, creaky bolts began to move, and then one of the metal doors swung open to reveal a mountain of a man in all black, even taller and thicker than Grayson but with a friendly face and relaxed shoulders. “Sorry, we don’t open until—”
The giant paused midsentence as his gaze landed on Reece—more specifically, on his gloves. “Oh, you’re here about the job! Pretty sure the boss will fall all over himself to hire you. You’ve nailed the look.”
Reece blinked. “The look?”
