“Five hundred,” the man breathes, his exhale hot and rancid against my face. “Come on, don’t make this difficult. I’ll fuck you good, I promise. It’ll be like Disneyland for you. Paid vacation, baby.”
His other hand finds my ass, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise, and that’s when I decide to scream. I open my mouth, draw in air?—
The smell hits me first. Wintergreen, sharp and medicinal, cutting through the stench of this man’s body odor and the motel’s mildew. Then comes the sound, wet and crunching.
A fist meeting a face.
The man’s grip on my arm goes slack. He makes a noise that isn’t quite human, something between a gurgle and a wheeze. His weight tilts, and then he’s falling away from me entirely. The thud when he hits the pavement is meaty and final.
“Don’t look down,” Bastian growls, his voice coming from somewhere above where the man used to be standing.
I hear liquid. Dripping. Pooling. The aroma of blood mixes with the wintergreen until I have to breathe through my mouth to keep from gagging.
“Is he?—?”
“Does it matter?”
I don’t answer. In truth, no, it doesn’t matter. Not really. Not in the world Bastian inhabits, the one I’m stupidly choosing to step back into.
Bastian’s hand touches my elbow. It’s gentle and dry, nothing like the other man’s damp, sticky grip. “Room Seven’s this way. You were going the wrong direction.”
I let him guide me, trying not to think about the sound our shoes make as we step around whatever’s left of the man who grabbed me. My foot brushes against something soft that shouldn’t be there, and Bastian steers me away before I can decipher exactly what it might be.
“The desk clerk gave me bad directions,” I mumble, needing to fill the silence with something other than the memory of that wet crunch.
“He’s getting a cut for every girl he sends the wrong way. Room Twelve runs a side business.”
“Oh.”
We walk maybe twenty more steps before Bastian stops. I hear a key in a lock, the click of tumblers turning, then the whoosh of a door opening inward. Bastian starts in, then stops. “You coming?”
I hesitate, which is obviously ridiculous. I’ve come this far; am I really gonna turn back now?
But the threshold feels significant in a way I can’t quite articulate.
Behind me: the motel parking lot, the highway, the apartment, the life I’ve been trying to build from scraps and stubbornness.
Ahead: wintergreen and blood and Bastian fucking Hale.
“It’s alright,” Bastian says. “You don’t have to?—”
“Shut up.” I step inside before I can change my mind. What else am I going to do? Stand in the parking lot next to whatever’s leaking into the pavement cracks?
The door clicks shut behind me. I hear the deadbolt thump into place. The sound feels final, like I’ve just locked myself into something I won’t be able to walk away from. I stand there clutching Excalibur, listening to Bastian breathe somewhere to my left, waiting for him to explain why I shouldn’t turn around and leave right now.
“Thank you,” he says finally, “for coming.”
“Don’t thank me yet. You haven’t heard what I’m going to say.”
I don’t let him speak first. That was one of many decisions I made when I was tossing and turning in my bed last night. I have to get all this out before he gets a word in edgewise. If I let him start talking, there’s no telling what kind of voodoo he’ll enact on my poor, addled brain.
“Here’s how this works,” I begin. “I’ll help you get Sage back. But there are conditions.”
“Eliana—”
“No.” I hold up a hand. “You don’t get to negotiate. You came to me, remember? You slipped that address under my door becauseyouneed something fromme. So you’re going to shut up and listen.”
I can hear the cheap carpet crunching like Styrofoam under his feet. Finally: “I’m listening.”
