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“Phineas?”

Drift’s voice reached me from very far away. My hands had gone cold around the coffee mug. All the warmth in the room had drained out through some hole in the floor, following the bathtub, following everything.

“I have to go.” The words came out thin and airless. I slid off the stool so fast it scraped against the floor, and the sound cracked through my skull. “I have to—my car. My car is at the bar. I need my car. What time—it’s nine-forty, oh god, it’s nine-forty—”

“Hey. Hey, slow down.” Drift rose from his stool, palms out, moving carefully, the same unhurried calm he used behind his counter. “Your car’s fine. Dominic keeps an eye on the lot. Nobody’s going to tow—”

“You don’t understand.” My voice pitched higher. I was already patting my pockets, finding my dead phone, my wallet, no keys… Where were my keys? They were probably in the bedroom, and I needed my shoes. My shoes were in the bedroom too. The hallway seemed a mile long. “I didn’t go home. I never—I’ve never not gone home. He’ll know. He already knows. The cameras will have—he checks them, he checks them from his phone, and I wasn’t there this morning and my car isn’t in the driveway—”

“Phineas.” Drift’s voice stayed level, but something underneath it had gone very still. “Who checks the cameras?”

The question stopped me halfway to the hall. My breath was coming in short, useless sips. I turned and looked at him, this huge gentle man standing in a puddle of morning sunlight with worry written all over his face, and the truth just fell out of me, ugly and plain, the way things fall when your hands are too full of panic to hold anything else.

“Ben. My boyfriend. He hurts me when I break the rules, and not staying out all night is the biggest rule there is.”

Chapter Eleven

Drift

“Hurts you how?” The question came out of me low and even, though everything underneath it had gone molten. My hands stayed flat on the counter because I didn’t trust them anywhere else.

Phineas stood frozen, one hand pressed against his pocket. His breathing had gone quick and shallow, and his eyes darted from me to the door to the window like a man mapping escape routes in a burning building.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s—I shouldn’t have said that. Forget I said that.”

“Phineas.” I kept my voice soft, the same tone I used on skittish strays that wandered behind the café dumpster. “Hurts you how?”

For a long moment, he didn’t move. Then, slowly, with fingers that wouldn’t stop shaking, Phineas reached for the hem of his wrinkled T-shirt.

He lifted it just enough.

Ugly purple bloomed across his ribs, a bruise the size of a fist deepening to near-black at its center, edged in sickly yellow-green where it had started to age. The mark sat over bone, right where a kick would land on a man curled on the floor. My mind supplied the image without permission, and once it arrived, it refused to leave.

I went absolutely still.

Every sound in the kitchen sharpened and then fell away. My own pulse, suddenly deafening, pounding at my temples like something trying to break out. Inside me, my wolf surged up with a snarl so violent it rattled my teeth, hurling itself against the inside of my skin, demanding out, demanding a scent, a direction, a throat.

Kill him. The thought arrived fully formed, cold and clear. Find him and end him.

My knuckles had gone white against the countertop. Heat climbed the back of my neck, and I could taste copper where I’d bitten the inside of my cheek. The bruise was days old. He’d worn it into my café. He’d worn it while folding dough in my kitchen, while laughing at my jokes, while I’d stood two feet away making croissants and lattes like the world was fine.

Phineas dropped the shirt like the fabric burned him. “It looks worse than it is.”

“It looks exactly as bad as it is.” The words came out rough, and I watched him shrink half an inch. Reining myself in took everything I had. My wolf paced hard, hackles raised, and I forced my shoulders down, forced my hands to unclench, forced air through my nose in a slow count.

He needs calm. Be calm. Be a wall he can lean on, not another storm.

“I really have to go.” Phineas edged toward the hallway. “If I get home before he leaves, maybe I can—I’ll say the car broke down. Or that I stayed at a motel because I’d been drinking. That’s responsible, right? He respects responsible. Sometimes. If I frame it right. If I—”

“You’re planning your own defense,” I said quietly. “Like you’re on trial for surviving the night.”

He flinched at that, and I hated myself for it, but I couldn’t let him walk out that door and drive himself back to the man who’d stomped that bruise across his ribs.

“You don’t understand.” His voice cracked down the middle. “If I don’t go back, it’s worse. It’s always worse when I make him wait.”

“Then don’t go back at all.”

“It’s not that simple.”