I rolled up on a club and coasted the Ducati into a spot around the back. It was not reserved for me. Ninety percent of the people on this island had no idea who I was. That Jake and I even existed. And I liked that too—I liked it a lot. It allowed me to slip into the crowd seen but notseen, just another soul looking to dance and get high—on the music, on life. On the bundles of powder passed back and forth beneath the sultry lights.
Molly.
Ketamine.
PCP and coke.
None of it was what I wanted, but I moved through the club anyway, soaking up the seductive beats, letting them swallow me up, wishing it was enough.
I could dance with him here.
An errant thought that made me smile. I had pictured Ranger in many realities—too many—but not on a sweaty dance floor, with strangers in his personal space. In a dark corner, maybe, pushed against the wall?—
I collided with someone. A frequent occurrence these days when I found myself in a crowded place, as if my eyes no longer moved fast enough to see everything.
Because you do not care to look.
A truth I could not deny. My brain was not damaged. I was choosing not to use it and I did not know how to stop.
The faceless body moved on. So did I. I trekked every inch of the club that I could without revealing my identity. A dare,perhaps, to anyone watching, friend or enemy. But no one bothered me, and I exited the club without incident.
Another lay close enough that the bass of the music warred with the one I had left, a blur of sound that carried me along the strip and into the next establishment.
A darker place awaited me in every sense, sinister energy tainting the air. It should have clued me into the unwelcome gaze that followed me to the bar, but I had become hooked on not paying attention, and distracted by the sharp pain spidering from my groin to my ribcage, vicious tendrils flaying my nerves.
Vodka.
I gritted my teeth, catching the bartender’s eye, and pointed to the back shelf.
He poured me a measure that did not touch the sides. I signalled for another, shoving my focus to the burn as I swallowed, the fire in my belly. But the relief was short-lived. This pain, literal and otherwise, was stronger, and it was all I could do to stay on my feet.
Find something.
Anything. At this point, it did not matter. A hit, a fight. A woman to fuck.
No.
My body rejected the prospect before my brain caught up, nausea adding to the mess I was already in. I drank more vodka, kill or cure, and eventually, the sickness softened the discomfort grinding my bones to a dull roar.
I did not like this bar. The crowd was older, and it reeked of business not pleasure. Business I should have been aware of. Faces I should have recognised as I did nothing but drink, searching for the oblivion I would not find at the bottom of a vodka bottle, but searching all the same. Always searching.Sinking, as I accepted that I could not drink my way out of this, my tolerance for alcohol too high. I had not been truly drunksince I was a teenager, and whatever else I may have lost, I was still Russian.
The bar grew darker, the music deeper, the beat so low it was as discordant as my thrumming pulse. I needed out. I needed air. But I did not care enough to move. To do anything but stare at a swirling imperfection in the wood beneath my clammy hands.
This is not what you came here for.
Vodka. It was not enough. I needed a stronger hit, and again, my mind derailed, unbidden, to sex, as if something unseen laced the air, dragging my thoughts in a direction I had not turned in months. Longer than that. I had not taken a woman to bed in more than a year. Since before Ranger had found his way to my living room floor, and I had not... anything with a man who was not Jake since someone long dead had put a gun to my sister’s head, metaphorical and literal, and forced me.
I pushed away from the bar, turning slowly—at least, it felt slow to me—to face the heavy crowd that had built behind me while I had drunk vodka and regretted my life choices. Perhaps. This... it did not feel good, but I could not say for certain that staying home would’ve felt better. I could not be sure of anything save the fact that I did not want to behereanymore. In this moment, in this dark and miserable bar. In this strange state of flux that had me believing that even fucking someone could fix it.
The bar exit was twenty feet away through packed bodies. I stepped into the throng, glancing around in a belated attempt to watch my own back, though why I chose to do it now held even less logic than the grind in my hip that was too anarchistic to attach itself to actual movement—to be a pain that made sense.
I do not have a weapon.
The thought penetrated my headspace a split second before a spark in my peripheral woke me up. A shape—a man—blurringtowards me in the crowd, taking advantage of the squash of people to move undetected by anyone who had not spent their entire life evading death.
Anyone who was not me.
The man was fast. Close in the blink of an eye. Hands low, posture subtle, but everything about him screamed danger, and I dialled back into the world in time to catch his wrist as he lunged, breaking it with a sharp twist, thesyringein his fingers falling to the floor.
