Jace hasn’t stopped tapping his fingers against his knees since we pulled out of our lot behind them. He’s jittery, unfocused. Wired in the way he gets when he’s too invested and trying too hard not to show it. It’s grating on my nerves.
“I saw,” I repeat for the third time.
“And that jacket…”
“I saw, Jace.”
He huffs. “You’re being too calm.”
I don’t answer. Not right away. My hands stay steady on the wheel because that’s the only part of me I let show. Everything else is already moving—calculations, contingencies, and threat elevation models firing one after another behind my ribs at a sickening speed.
Ahead of us, Romily’s car turns down a side street toward one of the louder spots on the outskirts of the downtown area. We got lucky when tracking Eris, seeing they were heading in our direction.
She had us nervous for a minute, but I suspected she wouldn’t waste such a dress on yelling at us.
No.
Eris and her best friend are going out tonight, just as she said. They’re heading to the type of bar where noise covers sins, and no one will remember your face.
Eris sits in the passenger seat, her head tipped in a way that tells me she’s laughing at something Romily said. Her profile is backlit by streetlamps. The lipstick she’s wearing is war paint. Her jacket is armor. And she looks…
Dangerous.
Alive.
Unapologetically pissed.
“She still hasn’t messaged,” Jace mutters, scrolling through the app logs. “Nothing since she closed it.”
“She’s angry,” I say by way of explanation, not that he needs the reminder.
Her dress is reminder enough that we fucked up.
“Because of us?”
“Because ofher.”
Just saying it out loud makes something cold twist beneath my sternum. She should never have been that close or even known Eris’s name.
She shouldn’t know anything.
But she does.
And I need to know how.
“I still don’t know how she found her,” Jace states, echoing my thoughts. “She shouldn’t know about Eris. We kept her out of everything.”
“Someone is watching us,” is all I can add.
“Someone is always watching us,” he snaps. “She’s had so many private detectives sit outside the loft, I’ve lost count.”
“Which is why we’re watching Eris now,” I remark, pointing at the black sports car as Romily parks.
Jace goes quiet, glaring out the window as he takes a fortifying breath and releases his frustration.
We pull into a spot a dozen vehicles down, giving the two a wide berth so we don’t look like perverts stalking them in the carpark. Eris and Romily get ahead of us before we follow on foot, blending into the late-night crowd.
The line outside the bar is long, but the doorman waves them in without hesitation.
