“Let’s,” she hisses.
“What happens if he forgets to stop, huh? I bet you haven’t even thought about that. If he loses control during a feed, you die.”
“Ease off,Asher.Nothing happened. We were just talking.”
“Oh yeah?” Asher flips the brim of his cap around, driving nearer. “You were just talking?”
She doesn’t trust the look in his eyes. “Yes.”
“While straddling? In a bathtub?”
“God, how oldareyou? We weren’t straddling.”
“Looked like it to me.”
“Get your eyes checked then,” she snaps.
He doesn’t back down. “You ever see one of them rip out someone’s carotid artery? Because I have. It isn’t pretty, and it isn’t quick.”
“Are you trying to intimidate me?”
“I’m trying to wake you up!” His shout cascades along the tile. All the air rushes out of the room. “You’re acting like you’re in control, but you’re as lost to the Gravewood as Camellia.”
Her voice is icy. “I’m not lost.”
“To me, you are.”
He looks immediately regretful, as if he hadn’t meant to say something quite so vulnerable. For several seconds afterward, neither of them can think of a single thing to say. It’s Lys who breaks the silence, a smile creeping in at the corner of his mouth.
“That was thrilling.” He stands against the sink, his eyes gleaming. “For the record, Sunshine, I’m rooting for you.”
Asher’s expression is murderous. “Don’t start.”
“No, I mean it.” Lys’s smile widens, and for a moment he looks truly monstrous. A grinning devil, his stare black all the way through. “It must be hard. You shipped out to basic and spent the next year doing the sorts of things that would break a lesser man’s spirit. I’ll bet some days, the only thing that got you through was the thought of coming home. Am I right?”
“Go to hell,” says Asher.
“Did you think she’d be waiting for you? You did, didn’t you? What a fucking cliché, going after your kid sister’s friend. You must have thought it was a done deal.”
Asher takes a steadying breath, but Lys isn’t done.
“I’ll bet it really pissed you off when you found out she hadn’t waited for you after all.”
The silence blisters. Asher’s eyes jump to Shea’s. Seventeen years of serendipity passes between them. Fletcher’s field in the spring, his face turned to hers. The Thorley kitchen in the dead of night, his fingers grazing hers as he handed her a glass of water. Her foyer in the late fall, mistletoe in her hair and her stomach in knots:You can stay, if you want.
And then, though she doesn’t want to, she thinks of Camellia with her head thrown back beneath a winter sky, catching snowflakes on her tongue:Do you think we’ll be sisters someday?
“I brought food,” Asher says flatly. He’s not looking at her anymore. He’s staring at the floor, the tile webbed in cracks. “I’d eat and get some sleep. We’re back on the road by sunset.”
The door shuts soundlessly behind him. Shea rounds on Lys the moment he’s gone.
“What’s wrong with you? Why would you say that to him?”
“Because it’s true,” he says, digging his thumb into a crack in the tile.
“It’smean.”
He looks right at her, his expression cold. In the bathroom’s sordid dark, he really does look like a wolf—carnivorous and cruel, no light in his eyes. A predator, down to his core. He contemplates her for a long time before speaking.
