“You’re early,” he corrected, prying loose his laptop. “It’s a waste of your morning. And it won’t win you any points. Whitehall doesn’t give out prizes for being first in the door.”
Her eyes darted in his direction. Scrolling through emails, he worked very hard to keep from meeting her gaze. Maybe, he reasoned, if he managed to look convincingly engrossed in his task, she’d lose interest. Instead, her stare lingered. He closed one browser and pulled open another, clicking aimlessly through his inbox. The force of her scrutiny clawed through him.
Finally, she said, “Can I ask you something?”
He deleted a counterfeit invoice from his spam folder. “Is it related to the coursework?”
“No.” Her swinging boot fell still. “Not exactly.”
“Then no,” he said, though he was fiercely intrigued. “I have several things to get through before class starts, and your incessant talking is deeply distracting.”
Softly, he heard her mutter, “I wouldn’t call it incessant.”
He glanced over the top of his laptop. “What?”
“What?”
“Did you say something?”
“No,” she lied, frowning down at him.
“Good.” He let a cold smile creep across his face. “Let’s keep it that way.”
***
The end of the week found him holed up in the student center, his books sprawled across the laminate surface of an empty conference table. Across the sun-drenched hall, Lane was laughing with her friends. Head thrown back. Eyes glittering. Reacting just a beat too late to something the redhead said.
He was, he knew, exactly where he shouldn’t be. Testing himself. Parsing out his limits. He couldn’t help it. The feel of her was an itch. He was torn between wanting to dissect the preternatural ache in his bones and wanting to claw it out of himself. Every time she glanced his way, he considered tearing out of this reality and into another. Shedding her presence like a skin.
Back home, the autopsy report went unread on the kitchen counter. Calls from the Apostle went unanswered. He knew better. He couldn’t afford the distraction. Not with Peretti and Guzman dead. Not with Kostopoulos calling him in a panic in the night.
“I don’t want to go. Do you hear me? I don’t want to do it anymore.”
He knew the risk, and yet the draw of Lane was a visceral, beating thing beneath his bones. He was a paper moth in the dark and she was a light. He knew himself well enough to know that he would continue to crash into her until everything burned.
A book slammed onto the table, and he glanced up to see Eric Hayes taking a seat.
“Does it hurt?” Hayes asked. “Being this stupid?”
“I’m just working on a paper,” Colton objected.
“You’ve been at Howe for four years, and you’ve never once condescended to do your homework in the presence of underclassmen. Not even when youwerean underclassman.” Hayes slung off his backpack and let it crush against the seat next to him. “I don’t want to have to babysit you, man. Don’t make me babysit you.”
Colton pried off his glasses and dropped the round wire frames into the open pages of his textbook. He didn’t have a headache yet, but there was a budding pressure behind his eyes that told him he’d have a hell of a migraine later. “I’m not doing anything wrong.”
“Maybe not yet,” Hayes said, “but you’ve got a look.”
“A look,” Colton echoed flatly.
“A real reckless look.” Hayes cracked the tab on his seltzer and took a sip. “I need your head in the game. Two of our guys have struck out in Chicago. The third is missing in action. If Kostopoulos fails, who’s next? Me? You?”
“It’s not going to be me,” Colton said, because it was true. Colton knew it. Hayes knew it.
“Yeah.” Hayes huffed out a humorless laugh. “Well, I sure as hell don’t want to go. I found a leaked photo of Guzman online this morning. There was literal shit leaking out of his ears.”
“Brain matter,” Colton corrected.
Propping an elbow on the table, Hayes jammed a finger in his face. “The fact that you can say those two words together without flinching is sick. You’re aware of that, right?”
