Fuck it.
He reached over and took Dara’s hand, curling his fingers around Dara’s palm and squeezing once. And Dara ...
Dara didn’t pull away.
Noam’s heart was alive in his chest, wild and beating its way up into his throat. He shifted their hands onto the center console, wrist bumping against the grip of the Beretta, some part of him half expecting Dara to disentangle their fingers the moment he had a chance. But he didn’t. He stayed there, his palm warm against Noam’s skin, even if he kept his face turned away toward the window.
And Noam kept the stoplights turning green, kept them moving through the neon blur of Durham past midnight. He didn’t track their path, just took them on loops through quiet residential neighborhoods, then speeding down Broad Street and turning up Gregson on the return, passing through small pools of yellow lamplight as his pulse finally slowed in his temples.
The digital clock on the dashboard ticked a minute closer to one a.m. Noam rubbed his thumb against the back of Dara’s hand and finally turned the car onto Roxboro, heading back to Dara’s shitty studio apartment with the lights of the government complex at their backs.
“Don’t leave the apartment again,” Noam said, hanging out the driver’s-side window as Dara stepped up onto the sidewalk outside Leo’s bar. “Dara. I mean it. Please ... for me. Don’t risk it.”
Dara turned to look at him. In his dark coat he looked like a smudge of coal against the ice. “Don’t kill the Texan.”
Noam’s mouth tightened, but he said nothing.
A soft laugh escaped Dara’s throat, and he shook his head before traipsing up the short steps to his apartment. Noam stayed until the door shut behind him, and after, too, staring at the building that had swallowed Dara up.
Then he spread his technopathy throughout the city like a web, into radio signals, catching the Texan’s phone signal as it pinged off the nearest tower.
He tracked the man to a seedy neighborhood adjacent to downtown, waited for him in a narrow alley and stayed quiet till the Texan went past. Noam smelled liquor on the man’s skin as he came up behind him—the Texan had gone to a bar instead of straight back to his hotel. Foolish. Cocky.
The man had just started to twist around when Noam aimed the silenced end of the Beretta at the side of his head and pulled the trigger.
At least this time, Noam didn’t have to see the look on his face.
He kept his gaze tilted away as he crouched down on the street, digging the Texan’s burner and personal phones out of his pocket. Just for show, Noam took his wallet too.
He left the Texan’s body on the ground, bleeding into the gutter, and tried to tell himself for the hundredth time that what Dara said wasn’t true. Noam wasn’t like Lehrer.
But he had to pretend he was, just a little while longer.
CHAPTERTWENTY
DARA
Dara had thought Noam would get the message after last night—and yet he turned up outside Dara’s apartment the very next afternoon all the same, wrapped up in a heavy coat he wouldn’t have been able to afford a year ago and knocking relentlessly on Dara’s front door.
“What?” Dara snapped as he finally flung the door open after Noam had been banging away so long Dara had started imagining all the creative ways he could chop both Noam’s hands off without magic.
“Are you going to invite me in?”
“I don’t know—did you murder someone in cold blood last night?”
Noam made a scoffing sound in the back of his throat and said, “Says the guy who killed six people breaking me out of jail.”
“I wasfevermad.”
“Oh, so you wouldn’t have done it otherwise?”
Noam had one of those infuriating looks on his face, tilting dangerously close to smug. Dara hated him a little for being right. Dara still remembered how easy it had been to kill them—even Sacha.
Sacha, who offered Dara purpose when he’d been ready to put an end to things. Sacha, who, despite knowing about Lehrer—Dara had read his mind; DaraknewSacha knew—had left him in Lehrer’s care. Because it was convenient. Because Dara was more useful in Lehrer’s orbit than he was safe.
Those weren’t the only men Dara had killed. There was Gordon Ames, of course. He didn’t like to think about the others. Those memories were shrouded in shadow, thrust into the furthest corners of Dara’s mind along with all the other terrible things Lehrer had made him do.
Dara stepped aside instead of answering, letting Noam move past him into the cramped space of Dara’s apartment. And even though Dara knew Noam had grown up places like this, he didn’t seem like he fit there anymore. Not with that sharply tailored shirt slanting in toward his narrow hips, not with that elegant wool coat he tossed over the back of Dara’s rickety chair.
