I stared at him, pulse ticking up despite myself. “Isthatsupposed to make me feel better?”
“No,” he said. Short. Simple. Sans any explanation.
I laughed—short, sharp, brittle. “So let me get this straight. I can’t go back on air because I might provoke him. But I also can’t go back on air because I’m female and thus not inenoughdanger to matter.”
“Youarein danger,” he corrected. “Just not expendable at the moment.”
That cut deep. Particularly the at the moment. I was already turning that over in my head. I was expendable, at least to Brewster, but only under the right circumstances.
Of course, that begged what were the right circumstances. As cold and clinical an assessment as that was, I swore it grated that the room got hotter.
When I said nothing more, he went back to reading his tablet and sipping his coffee. I studied him, I couldn’t help it. I searched for the chinks in his armor. Despite the fact, he didn’t look up from that screen, I didn’t doubt for an instant he wasn’t aware of me.
Leaning back in my chair, I narrowed my eyes. “You’re afraid.”
His expression didn’t change. “Of rising gas prices? Yes.”
I almost snorted. Almost. “Of losing control,” I countered.
“That too,” he said without hesitation, swiping the screen again. “The difference between us, Mallory, is I’m honest about it.”
The thin air thickened once more, growing denser and more charged. It clung to every single breath and made it hard to inhale. He hadn’t raised his voice once. Hadn’t needed to.
“You want to force his hand,” Brewster went on. “Because waiting makes you think that you’re losing or missing out.” For a moment, I got the sense he was tasting that statement, testing its validity before he nodded. Satisfied, I guessed, that he got it right. “I get that. But if you push now, you don’t become bait. Not really, you just become a statistic. You’re getting a lot of attention, just not from him.”
He paused then and he slanted a look at me.
“Or so we think. He may not like all the attention you’re getting from others. Particularly those questioningyourmorals andyourethics. Maybe he needs to do something to dispute those stories…”
Setting his coffee cup down, he tilted his head to the side and I swore there was a surge between us. A zing that went from his gaze to mine and rippled through my whole body. The connection bounced through me, like I’d licked both the connectors on a battery. The zap and jolt hard to ignore.
“You have a connection with him already,” he continued. “He likes you. We know this. Don’t let him take you for granted.”
The unspokennot yethung off that statement as loudly as the earlieryethad off that one. I hated that he was making sense.
“And if he doesn’t bite?”
Brewster met my eyes. Held them.
“Then we adjust,” he said. The heat in his eyes scorched me. “But we don’t sacrifice you just to see if the monster’s still hungry.”
I looked away first. Not because he’d won—but because some small, treacherous part of me knew he was right.
That scared me more than being wrong ever had.
For a moment, the room wavered. Then I blinked and slammed the shutters closed on that self-pity. No one had time for that.
“Mallory—”
“Don’t,” I cut in, because I could hear the abrupt shift to sympathy in his voice and I didn’t want it.
I reached for my phone and scrolled again, faster this time. My own name trended in small spikes like a heartbeat monitor. A new video appeared: some commentator in a studio breaking down my body language frame by frame.
She pauses here.
She looks off-camera.
She knows she’s being watched.
