Troy lifted his head and looked at me with eyes that were clear despite the tears. “I told you. I'm not going anywhere. You're stuck with me.”
“Good.” I kissed his forehead. “Because I don't know how to do this without you anymore.”
“You don't have to.” He settled back against my chest. “We're doing it together. All of it. The messy, complicated, probably-going-to-fuck-us-up-eventually version of this.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “We are.”
We lay there until the floor got uncomfortable, until our bodies started protesting the position. Then we got up slowly and cleaned ourselves off as best we could, got dressed in silence that felt companionable instead of heavy.
Troy looked at my right hand without touching it. His jaw was tight. “Ice it tonight. Properly.”
“I will.”
“And tomorrow you tell Mara.”
“Troy—”
“You tell Mara, Declan.” His eyes met mine and they were serious in the way that meant the conversation was already over. “She needs to know what she's working with going into the fight. You can't keep that from her.”
He was right. I hated that he was right.
“Okay,” I said.
He held my gaze for another beat, making sure it had landed. Then something in his face softened fractionally. He reached out and touched my jaw with the backs of his fingers, light and brief.
“Come on,” he said. “Let's go home.”
I followed him toward the door and let him flip the lights off behind us, and felt the particular weight of the gym going dark, the smell of leather and sweat and blood lingering in the air.
Outside, the snow had stopped. The street was quiet and cold and ours.
We walked home close enough that our shoulders touched.
TWENTY-THREE
SAY YES TO ME
TROY
The coffee shop was too warm and too crowded for the conversation we were supposed to be having, but Luka had insisted on meeting here instead of the house. He'd said we both needed to get out, needed to stop treating Declan's place like a bunker and remember what normal looked like.
I wasn't sure I remembered what normal looked like anymore.
I'd picked the corner booth near the back wall, close enough to the door that I could watch who came in without being obvious about it. Old habit. The window beside me ran with condensation from the heat pressing outward against the cold, and the street beyond the glass looked gray and slow, slush piled against the curbs from a snowfall two days ago that nobody hadgotten around to clearing. People moved past bundled in coats and scarves like the city wasn't rotting underneath them.
Must be nice.
I'd been nursing the same black coffee for twenty minutes while it went cold. The shop smelled like dark roast and steamed milk and the particular brand of artificial warmth that came from too many bodies packed into too small a space. Music played low overhead, acoustic and forgettable. The ambient noise was enough cover that nobody nearby could pick up what we were saying without actively trying, which was probably why Luka had chosen this place to begin with.
He'd arrived exactly on time. Ordered an Americano at the counter, collected it without ceremony, settled across from me with his tablet open and his coat still half on like he might need to leave fast. We'd been here fifteen minutes already and he'd spent most of them moving through whatever he had on his screen while I sat there turning my cup in slow circles on the table and trying not to look like I was waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“Still nothing?” he asked, eyes still on the tablet.
“Nothing.” I set my cup down harder than I meant to. “No pings on his phone. No credit card activity. No sightings anywhere in the network. It's like he dropped off the face of the earth.”
“He didn't drop anywhere.” Luka scrolled past whatever he was reading. “He's just better at staying hidden than we anticipated. He knows we've made him. So he's gone quiet and he's waiting until he decides what move comes next.”
“And in the meantime we just sit here while he plans whatever the fuck he wants.”
