Page 144 of Dead Beat

“Do you even hear yourself? Achilles never really got to see peace. No one knows who he might have become.”

“Maybe it’s better not to know.”

“Meaning?”

“You belong with someone smooth and shiny.”

“Someone like Penny?”

“That’s not what I said.”

He waited, watching her.

“Okay, yes,” she admitted. Alex hadn’t meant to wander down this path, but here she was. “Someone like Penny. Someone who makes sense in…” She gestured to the splendor of the Virgil bedroom, the stained glass, the polished wood, the velvet coverlet. “All of this. I get it. You don’t need to feel bad about it.”

“I don’t.”

“Good.” She could say it, even if she didn’t mean it.

“Because it isn’t true.” He snagged her arm and drew her to him. “Don’t roll your eyes. As much as I appreciate you letting me off the hook the night before we both face near-certain death, you’re going to have to accept that I actually like you.”

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

But he wouldn’t stop. “I grew up in an empty mansion with no one but a cat for a friend and I killed my own grandfather. Do you really think I belong with someone like Penny?”

Alex lifted a shoulder. “Yes.”

“Because I’m boring?”

“Because you belong in places like this. Because you’re welcome in any room you walk into. Because you’ve never seen the inside of a cell. I’m not like that.”

“No, you’re prickly and strange and vexing and foul-mouthed and weird. It’s thrilling.”

“Would you please stop talking?”

“Do you not like me?”

“Of course I like you.” What wasn’t there to like? He was handsome and brave and dangerous and he smelled fantastic and what was she supposed to do with all of that? With kindness and laughter and orgasms in abundance? “Doom I can handle. I just don’t like … hope.”

“Too bad.”

I will break this, she thought. I will ruin it. I don’t know how, but I will. And it would be so much worse to lose him once she’d gotten used to him, to his weight in the bed beside her, to the warmth in the crook of his arm, once he had become her shelter. But the truth was she was already used to leaning on him. She’d done it even when he wasn’t there.

Her phone pinged and she seized it.

Darlington nipped her shoulder. “You are a coward.”

It was a text from her mother. No big decisions tomorrow! Mercury in retrograde.

Alex’s heart gave a funny squeeze. This might be the last text she ever got from her mom.

“Put your T-shirt on,” Alex said.

“Are you kicking me out of bed?”

“Just oblige me.”

He did, and she tugged on her tank. Then she held out her phone and took their picture. She looked anxious, her smile slightly crazed. He was dazzling. Before she could think better of it, she sent the photo to her mother.