“The room is yours until you don’t want it anymore.”
She presses my shoulder gently and moves to the door. She pauses with her hand on the knob. “You’ll be okay,” she says.
Then she’s gone. The door clicks shut, and the only sound left is the ceiling fan turning slowly above the painted fish. I am alone.
Then the grief arrives all at once—not waves this time, but a flood. Everything I’ve been holding back since I stepped into that shop crashes through me so hard I have to press both hands against my mouth to keep the sound inside the room.
Then I let go.
I cry the way I haven’t let myself cry since Los Angeles. Loud, full-bodied, the sound breaking against the walls. I cry for the part of me that still wants to believe in Ace, Luca, and North so badly it hurts to sit still with.
My body is screaming for three men who may have done the unforgivable, and it doesn’t care what I think it should want. It only demands them, and I sob until there’s nothing left to come up, and then I sob some more because my body has always been more generous with grief than with resolution.
When I finally stand, my legs barely hold me. I peel off my ruined clothes in the tiled chamber, drop them in the cloth basket, and step into the shower. The water comes on warm atexactly the right pressure, and I brace both hands against the stone wall and let my forehead fall between them.
The heat wave builds again almost immediately. I slip one hand between my thighs because my body is leaving me no other choice, and I come, fast and sharp and joyless, against the wall of the shower.
It feels nothing like what I need, and I end up sliding down the wall until I’m sitting on the warm tile with the water running over me. I fold my arms around my knees and whisper to the drain, “How am I supposed to do this without them when the agony inside me is a longing for them?”
Underneath the heat and the grief and the wanting, a colder pain threads through everything—the possibility that they hurt that girl. That the men my body is screaming for are men I may not ever return to.
I press my face into my knees, let the shower run over me, and wait for the suppressants. The only thing my body produces, over and over, steady as a heartbeat, is their names.
24
ACE
What the fuck is going on?
I’m out of the truck and crossing the parking area at a dead run, my phone still clutched in my hand, her last message sitting on the screen in letters that aren’t telling me nearly enough.
I’ll be okay. Night.
Four fucking words from a woman who just earlier was kissing me in the truck as though she were trying to crawl into my skin.
It’s the kind of sentence a person sends when they’re categoricallynotokay. I reach the gaming shop and slam both palms against the glass door. “Adelaide.”
The door doesn’t move, its windows blacked out from the inside, but where there’d been warm amber light bleeding around the edges when I dropped her off, there’s now nothing. The whole place has gone dark.
I hammer my fist against the door. “Adelaide!”
Nothing. The shop has been shut down, and she’s not inside.
“Fuck.”
I step back and stare up at the sign, breathing hard, my heart slamming against my ribs. No car in the parking area except mine, so I call her again.
Straight to voicemail. She turned her phone off, and something cold crawls up my spine and sinks its teeth into the base of my skull.
“Adelaide, baby, pick up,” I’m saying out loud to nobody, pacing the sidewalk in front of the shop, wired, rattled, my hands shaking. “Come on. Come on.”
I hit redial. Straight to voicemail again.
“Shit.”
I go around to the back. The rear is dim and smells like a dumpster. There’s a single staff door marked for the gaming store, so I try the handle. It’s locked. I hammer my fist against it so hard the metal rings and pain shoots up my wrist.
“Adelaide, are you in there?” Silence. A distant dog barking. A car somewhere two streets over.
