Blue eyes. Pale, light, almost silver where the dark should be — nothing, nothing like Xaviar’s. The rest of his face won’t hold still, blurring at the edges like it hasn’t decided to be all the way here yet.
But the eyes don’t blur.
The eyes stay. Fixed on me. They don’t leave me for a second.
A shiver goes through me.
I have never seen this man before in my life.
And I know him. I know him the way I know my own hands. Bone-deep, no question in it, the kind of knowing that was there before I looked.
His face is going now, fading at the edges, and I grab for it anyway — my hand comes up and finds his jaw, sharper even than Erik’s, sharper than anything, and then there’s nothing under my fingers at all, just warmth and the shape of where he was. He’s saying something. I can almost—
“Starlight. Stay.”
And the stay pulls long and thin and snaps—
I’m awake.
I come up off the mattress so fast the room lurches. Heart slamming against my ribs, body still humming everywhere, thighs clenched tight, underwear soaked through, every single nerve in me standing up to swear on its life that it happened, that it was real. That it was thorough and unhurried and complete and every second of it wasreal.
My room. My bed. Streetlight through the blinds. The green dress wound up around my waist like it lost a fight, makeup wherevermakeup goes when you don’t take it off. Real. Stupidly, ordinarily, disappointingly real.
Something’s crushed in my fist.
I uncurl my fingers. The note. Of course it’s the note. I don’t remember holding onto it. I don’t remember anything betweenprobablyand now except a pair of eyes that won’t quite leave the inside of my head.
My fingers move before I’ve told them to and unfold the paper.
Always listen to your heart.
Well. That’s vague. That’s deeply unhelpful. That’s a fortune cookie that took a wrong turn. I read it twice anyway, like the second time might come with footnotes.
My pulse will not come down. I sit there in the dim light in my ruined dress and wait for my brain to do the thing it always does — reach out and find the reasonable version and hand it to me, gift-wrapped.You read too much. You drank too much. You fell asleep with the man across the hall stuck in your head and a smutty paperback in your bloodstream and your brain put it all in a blender and hit go. That’s all this is. You know that’s all this is.
I wait for it.
I always get there. That’s the whole thing about me, it’s the one reliable trick I’ve got. I always find the boring door and I always walk through it and I always, always believe it on the other side.
I sit there and I reach for the door and there’s no door.
There’s just the eyes. And thealwayswith a history behind it. And a body that is still, right now, certain it was touched.
I’ve got nothing.
But there’s one thing I know, all the way down to my core.
That wasn’t Xaviar.
Chapter 7
Leif
Something’s ringing.
I don’t move. Moving is a decision and I haven’t made it. It can ring.
It rings again, longer — the tone that doesn’t quit on its own. I open one eye. The comm sits lit on the far table, throwing blue across the wall. I leave it. Most things that want me in the dark want something I’m not going to give them, and they give up faster than they think they will.
