“I don’t?—”
“You do.” She cuts me off. “Remember when you met Marcus? Your throat closed. Your body literally told you danger and you just... pushed through it.”
The ring burns against my chest at his name.
And I’m there. Dom’s office. Marcus extending his hand. My throat squeezing shut like invisible fingers wrapped around it. That voice—don’t touch him don’t touch him don’t—and then my professional smile. My hand meeting his anyway. Burying every alarm because anxiety is just anxiety, right?
What if I’d listened? Trusted that first signal and walked out?
Would Dahlia be trying to reach me? Or would she be the last one—the only one—because I’d stopped him first?
“That was just?—”
“Your intuition.” Breadstick aimed at me again. “Which is completely broken. We’re going to fix it. Tonight.”
“How?”
“First, we need to talk about Dahlia.” She leans forward, elbows on the table. “I have thoughts.”
“Tell me all of your thoughts.”
“So.” Her eyes get that sparkle—the one when she’s about to blow my mind. “We know it’s Dahlia’s ring. But think about the timing. Nothing happened until you brought it home. Until I gave you a chain to put it on. Right?”
My hand goes to my chest. The metal hot through my shirt. Always hot now.
I pull it out. Let it dangle between us. The overhead light catches the stone, makes it look like fire.
The ring.
Of course.
“She wasn’t trying to reach me at the office. Or in the alley.” I twist the cold chain between my fingers. “She couldn’t. Not until I took her ring home.”
“Exactly.” Alex practically vibrates. “You carried her anchor into our apartment. Where the veil is already thin because of—” She waves at herself. “—all my witchy shit.”
“So she’s not haunting me. She’s haunting the ring.”
“And you’ve been wearing it like a beacon.” She points at my chest. “No wonder she’s getting louder.”
Oh.
The crawling starts at my tailbone. Vertebra by vertebra. That serpent-spine thing when my body knows something my brain hasn’t processed yet.
I haven’t just been carrying evidence. I’ve been wearing a woman. A dead woman. Her last piece of this world pressed against my heart while I slept and showered and sat in Marcus’s office and?—
I’ve been carrying her everywhere. Into danger. Into the office of the man who killed her.
And she’s been screaming the whole time. A witness trying to testify and I kept calling her testimony noise.
“Oh.” The word comes out wrong. Broken.
“Finally.” Alex’s eye roll could win awards. “How did it take you weeks to figure this out?”
“There was just so much happening.” The ring disappears back under my shirt, burning like a brand. “I didn’t think it could be her. Not once. I thought—I don’t know what I thought. That it was just evidence. A clue. Not... her.”
“I know.” Softer now. “I think she wants to tell us what happened.”
The weight of that sits between us. Heavy as the pasta in my stomach.
