“Mr Peterson,” I say, because what else is there to say.
He looks different from the last time I saw him in Coffeelicious. Less controlled. The expensive suit is the same, but something in his face has come loose, that polished certainty cracked down the middle. He looks like a man who has been having a bad week and has decided it is my fault.
“Do you know,” he says, walking towards me with the slow, deliberate pace of someone who has thought about this moment and rehearsed it, “what it’s like? To have people laughing at you? Because of a barista?”
“I imagine it’s unpleasant,” I say. The bag of rubbish is in my hand. It is not a useful weapon, but it is what I have.
“Everyone is mocking me.” His voice has an edge I haven’t heard before, something raw underneath the entitlement. “A man in my position, with my contacts, made to look a fool by someone who makes coffee for a living. Do you have any idea how that feels?”
“I think,” I say carefully, “that you might want to consider whether I’m actually the problem here.”
He stops in front of me. The two men flank him, close enough that the alley suddenly feels considerably smaller than it did thirty seconds ago.
“No,” says Peterson. “I’ve considered it quite thoroughly. You’re the problem.”
The thing is, two weeks ago, this would have worked. Two weeks ago, cornered in an alley by Peterson and two very large men, I would have apologised. I would have folded. I would have given him whatever he wanted just to make the awful feeling stop.
But two weeks ago I hadn’t seen my mother’s withering assessment of my life be decimated over a dinner table by a handsome man possessed by My Lover. I hadn’t faced down Wraith in my own hallway. I hadn’t talked to Felix while his home burned around him, and held myself together by sheer stubbornness.
I am not the same person who apologised to a man for a latte having milk in it.
“I’m not going to apologise,” I say. “I’m not going to post anything on social media. I’m not going to do any of the things you’re about to ask me to do. And I’d like you to leave.”
Peterson stares at me. His jaw does that complicated thing it does. “In my line of work, reputation is everything.”
Then one of the men behind him takes a step forward.
The temperature in the alley drops.
Not subtly. Immediately, definitively, a cold that has nothing to do with November and everything to do with something that has run out of patience.
The shadows at the far end of the alley move.
Hex steps out of them, and he is not the Hex who burns toast or even the princely Hex. He is something older and colder than all of those, the shadows still moving around him, his eyes burning so red they throw light on the alley walls.
He looks at me first. Just for a second. Just to check.
Then he looks at Peterson.
“My love,” he says, and his voice is very calm, the particular calm of something that does not need to raise its voice because nothing within a considerable radius is going to argue with it. “You really do need to stop getting into these predicaments.”
Peterson has gone the colour of old chalk.
“Who…” he starts.
“You threatened Adam,” says Hex, still in that terrible calm voice. “You sent men to his workplace. You cornered My Love in an alley.” He tilts his head. “You’ve been a persistent problem and now you have found the end of my patience.”
“I don’t know what you...”
“I’m not interested,” says Hex, “in what you know.”
What happens next is something I will have to live with for quite some time. Not because it disturbs me, exactly. More because I watch it happen and I feel something that I am fairly sure I should not feel, which is an extremely uncharitable sense of satisfaction.
The two men behind Peterson are simply gone. Between one blink and the next, swallowed by the shadows at the edges of the alley so completely and so silently that the only evidence they were ever there is the fact that Peterson turns around and finds himself alone.
Then Hex looks at Peterson.
And Peterson makes a sound that is not dignified, and runs.
