But he hadn’t realized just how much he missed Cora, and how very alone he was. How nice it felt to have Ben include him with complete sincerity.
So Reece shut his mouth and took the ears.
“Ben!”
Ben glanced down the bar. “I gotta help Ink,” he said ruefully. “But call me sometime, okay? I’m not trying to piss off your boyfriend—we can just be friends.”
“Grayson’s not my—”
Ben had already disappeared.
Reece sighed and slid the ears onto his head. Imagine Ben actually thinking Grayson was his boyfriend.
He pulled out his phone and turned on the screen, and his new background lit up with Grayson’s smoking hot gym selfie.
Wild, the ideas people came up with.
Like many hotels, the Leviathan had restrooms on the first floor, practically hidden from the lobby down a corridor past the elevator. The men’s room was empty as Officer Stensby slipped through the door.
He leaned against the sink and pulled out his phone. The screen was blurry; he probably should have stopped a few whiskeys ago. But it didn’t matter; if the deposits were in his bank account, then he was done promising Beau Macy he’d be at all the upcoming AMI events; he was withdrawing all of it and buying a one-way ticket to Puerto Vallarta.
The door suddenly opened. He looked up from his phone to see that short guy who’d come to the dinner with Gretel Macy, the one with the annoying Texas drawl—Alex, he’d heard Gretel call him.
“Hi, officer,” Alex said. “I was hoping I’d catch you alone.”
Stensby narrowed his eyes. This kid was bold, shoulders straight and chin up, like he had all the right in the world to follow a cop into the men’s room. “What do you want?”
Alex stuck out a foot, hooking the garbage can. “I thought we could chat.”
Stensby shoved the phone into his pocket. “Not interested.” Wait—was Alex now wedging the garbage can under the handle? So the door couldn’t be opened from outside? “What the hell are you doing?”
“I have this thing.” Alex kicked the garbage can into place, his gaze never leaving Stensby. “I don’t like liars.”
Stensby was rapidly going from irritated to pissed, a buzz to his anger that must have come from the whiskey. “I don’t know who you think you are or what you think you’re doing,” he said, starting forward, “but I don’t appreciate being cornered.”
“Your rage has a hair trigger, what a shock,” Alex said dryly. “To be fair, being around AMI this evening hasn’t been great for my temper either, but that just makes it even easier to light you up.”
The fuck was this kid talking about? Stensby’s anger was rippling over him, clouding his vision alongside the whiskey. “I don’t have time for this.” A moment later, he had Alex backed against the wall. “You’re about to catch a lot more heat than you bargained for.”
“I’m afraid you have it backwards, officer.” Alex put his hand on Stensby’s bare arm.
And the world began to dissolve, leaving only Alex.
“Now, see, Gretel I couldn’t thrall,” Alex said, as the rage began to shift, replaced by a deep-set ache to serve and please, to devote himself to Alex, that was spreading through Stensby’s chest. “I needed her to be able to use her brain. But you seem like the type who traded rational, nuanced thinking for fear and rage long ago, so no need to spare your intelligence, or lack thereof. How about you tell me what you’re doing here?”
Stensby was going to tell himeverything. “I’ve got this buddy who’s been in AMI a long time, and for ages he’s been telling me these theories about how dangerous empaths are, like how they can read your mind and shit.”
“Always with the mind reading,” Alex said, with a shake of his head. “For the record, we can’t do that, though we don’t need your thoughts when we have your emotions. But go on.”
Of course Stensby would go on. He’d go on for hours, if that was what Alex wanted. “I never liked empaths, but I figured if they wereactuallydangerous, the government would do something, right? We sure as hell wouldn’t have had that nervous, useless empath consultant right there on the police force. Or so I thought, until the Hathaway murder.”
Stensby shook his head. He’d been so naive. “We got called to Stone Solutions. I was one of the first on the scene, and I saw our supposedly harmless empath consultant on his knees next to Cedrick Stone’s unconscious body. He didn’t look like an annoying, barely functional pacifist on that roof; he looked guilty as fuck. But we were ordered to just...let him go.”
Stensby was angry all over again. “They said Cedrick Stone was responsible for that senator’s death, but he was covered in blood on that roof, and the papers say he’s been in the hospital ever since. Reece is clearly a lot more dangerous than we were told, and they let him work with thecops. I saidfuck thatand started going to AMI meetings. I started listening to Keith. But then last week, Keith comes to me and says he heard from someone higher than AMI. And he says they’re going to do something about empaths—they just need recruits. And that I could help.”
Alex’s eyes were fixed on his. “Recruits for what?”
“I don’t know and I didn’t bother to find out,” Stensby said. “Keith put me in touch with someone who offered me a pile of money to get Jamey out of town and I saw my ticket out of all of this empath crap.”
