I needed the money. I needed to buy Sophie an amazing gift, and now that Pietro opted out of my life, I had taken it upon myself to get her that custom cane myself. Boston, however, was not exactly overflowing with dignified employment opportunities a few days before Christmas, and it turned out that working on a PhD in history opened fewer festive seasonal doors than one might hope. So an elf shift at the mall was, for the moment, as good as it got. According to the woman who hired me, I should have considered myself lucky to get it at all, since they were experiencing something she called an elf shortage with total sincerity.
I honestly wished I were joking.
So here I was, for the third day in a row, making sure the line stayed orderly, that snotty crying children didn’t knock over the decorations, that their little petri dish hands remained off my costume, that demanding mothers didn’t try to jump the queue, and that creepy fathers didn’t attempt to look up my skirt or down the neckline of a dress that showed far more cleavage than I considered remotely necessary for Christmas-related employment.
I was, it seemed, the ideal elf height. At least according to the hiring manager, who had said it with the solemnity of a casting director discovering her breakout star. Unfortunately, I was also, in her words, “a little more curvaceous than the usual elf,” which meant that even the larger size of the costume was doing some irresponsible work across my chest.
“Excuse me,” a woman snapped, materializing at my elbow with a stroller the size of a military vehicle and the expression of someone never once told no. “We need to go next.”
I gave her my customer-service smile, which felt less like friendliness and more like a hostage negotiation tactic at this point. “There’s a line.”
She blinked, as if the concept itself offended her. “Yes, but my son is getting fussy.”
I looked at the child in question, who appeared to be asleep with a cracker stuck to his forehead.
“That seems like a manageable level of distress,” I said.
Her eyes narrowed. “Do you know who I am?”
“No,” I said. “But the people behind you were here first, so unless you are secretly Santa, I’m afraid the answer is still no.”
The teenage girl behind her snorted so hard she almost dropped her peppermint mocha.
The mother huffed, muttered something about standards, and wheeled the stroller back into place with all the dignity of a defeated warlord.
I had just begun to feel a small, private glow of victory when a man near the front of the line smiled at me in a way that instantly made my skin crawl. Late thirties, wedding ring, expensive coat, eyes lingering a fraction too long in all the wrong places. He leaned a little closer when I stepped over to fix the rope barrier.
“Cold out here, isn’t it?” he said.
“That tends to happen in December.”
His gaze dipped. “Bet the costume doesn’t help much.”
I straightened slowly and looked him dead in the eye until the smile on his face began to strain. “No,” I said. “But public humiliation might.”
He coughed, stepped back, and suddenly found the floor fascinating.
I watched him shuffle awkwardly farther up the line and thought, not for the first time that week, that while I understood there were many fetishes in this world, the elf one was most definitely not on my list. What was it with men and costumes, honestly?
Then, as my eyes tracked lazily past him toward the outdoor store across the walkway, my whole body tensed.
A man was standing there watching me.
Not obviously enough to draw anyone else’s attention and not in the greasy, lingering way I had learned to recognize far too easily over the years. This was worse. His gaze was cool, direct, and assessing. It made the hair at the back of my neck rise before my mind had even caught up.
I went still.
The mall was busy, bright, overdecorated within an inch of its life, and full of enough holiday noise to make my concern feel absurd. I was not alone. I was not in an alley. Pietro and his family made sure the people who took me were dead or as good as, and even if I was no longer part of that inner circle, I knew enough to be sure their reach did not end just because our relationship had. Adam, too, had ceased to be the threat he once was. I found that out the night before while on the phone with Sophie, who informed me with shameless delight that his father was arrested for corruption two days earlier and that Adam himself was now under investigation for malpractice. I had not asked for details. They were not needed. It had Pietro and Hoka written all over it, or perhaps Alessandro, and while I had no proof, I knew influence when I saw it.
And yet a strand of fear still lived in me, and I hated it.
I held the stranger’s gaze. Fear had taken up enough space in my life already. It had lived there too long, eaten too much, and left too little behind. I was done feeding it.
He kept looking at me, his eyes so blue they seemed almost unreal from that distance, pale enough to look unnatural under the mall lights. Then, slowly, he smiled. Not warmly. Not mockingly. More as if my refusal to look away had confirmed something he had hoped to find.
“Edwina? Edwina!”
My head snapped around with a jolt, momentarily disoriented before remembering, with no small amount of irritation, that my elf name was Edwina, because when I had suggested Emily, the manager had looked at me as if I had proposed ruin Christmas.
