Akasha’s smile turns dangerous.“Sounds like a date.”
I point at her with the cup.“I have a knife.”
“You do.I gave it to you.You’re welcome.”
I should be annoyed.I am annoyed.But there’s something almost normal about this.A woman in my apartment is teasing me about a man.Tea in my hand.Morning at the windows.My body aches from bad sleep, not from fresh wounds.
For one breath, I can pretend I am only tired.Not haunted.
Then Akasha’s expression softens, and the pretend moment breaks.“What else happened?”she asks.
I look at the window.
The curtains are pale gray.Too sheer for my taste.Anyone across the street could look in if they cared enough.I make a note to go and buy darker ones.Then I hate myself for needing them.Then I hate the vampires more for making curtains feel important.
“I remembered something,” I say.
“The symbol?”My gaze snaps back to her.
She grimaces.“Aldron told me this morning.No details.Just that you remembered a mark, and he wants everyone who knows anything in his office.”
“How does he know?”
“No idea,” she says, “but he is like that.”
“And now he wants everyone in his office?”
“Not everyone.Aldron, Korvin, Ari, me, Knox, Cruz.Maybe Krishka, if she gets here in time.”
My stomach knots.Knox.I still feel the echo of his eyes on me.The way the black swallowed the brown.The rumble in his chest.The rough plea when he told me to go home.
Please.
I should have been afraid.Maybe I was?Maybe the problem is that fear no longer works the way it should.The vampires looked human enough until they opened their mouths.Knox looks like violence, even when he is trying to be gentle.My body should pick the obvious danger, but it doesn’t.
My body, stupid thing that it is, remembers the way he stepped between Cruz and me without touching me.It remembers the way he sat when I told him to.It remembers heat snapping through my fingers when our hands brushed over a packet of gauze.
I flex my hand around the cup, and Akasha notices.Because of course she does.
“I’m not asking,” she says quietly.“But I am here.”
The words settle between us, careful and kind.I don’t know what to do with kindness when it asks for nothing.
So I shrug.“Then be here while I brush my teeth.”
Her smile returns.“That I can do.”
Twenty minutes later, I am dressed in black jeans, a dark green sweater, and boots I can run in if running becomes necessary.I have the knife strapped to my thigh beneath the sweater’s hem.Akasha sees me adjust it and says nothing.
Let’s call it progress.
We take the elevator down in silence.Not awkward silence.The useful kind.The kind that lets me count my breaths without someone filling the air just because they are uncomfortable.
The elevator smells faintly of polish and old magic.And something else.Smoke.Leather.Rain-warm earth.
Knox.
The scent is faint, but it hooks under my ribs all the same.My pulse shifts.Not faster exactly.Deeper.
