I can’t do that. I can’t fucking lie to her.
“Reth, are you there?”
My heart constricts, and I press my palm against my eye. “Yeah…uhm…” I can’t do this. “Mary, I’m sorry…someone’s calling me about the, uhm, the piece I bought. I, ah—” Shit, I have to say it. I don’t have a choice. “I’m…” I swallow hard, a tear tracking down my face. “I’m happy for you.”
“Thank you, Reth. I miss you. You should come home soon.”
“Yeah.” I clear my throat. “Miss you too.” And then I hang up.
I don’t breathe for a long time, don’t even move. I’m trying to form a single coherent thought. Survival lesson number two, filedown each second’s serrated edge until you can hold it without bleeding out completely.
I hunch there, eyes jammed shut, hands between my knees like something folded in prayer. A child is now involved, which means the leash around my neck just grew teeth.
“Fuck!” I scream at the top of my lungs, the sound bouncing like a shot bird left to flutter and die.
A bunch of teenagers stumble past the alley, laughing too loud, their Halloween costumes a chaotic blur under the streetlights. A zombie football player with shoulder pads smeared in green makeup. A couple of witches, too, in black lace and pointed hats. Their voices echo off the brick walls, carefree and drunk on cheap liquor and the thrill of the night, completely oblivious to how many bodies this alley swallowed tonight.
I wipe at my face, over my scar, white paint smeared on my fingers. At least I fit in tonight. I could become a part of the crowd, and no one would stare at my face and feel pity. It’s the one night in the year where my painted, scarred face is a party trick.
With minimal effort, I take another line off the back of my hand, and another, letting the chemical heat cut through the aftershocks until everything that happened tonight becomes a swirl of chaos in the distance.
The city breathes in flashes and sirens and the sticky, sugar-burnt stench of Halloween as I stumble through the streets, a thousand masked faces bleeding together in a river that carries me forward, mind numb, body flying on autopilot.
The crowd swallows me whole. Costumes and noise and the chaos of a city letting itself be something other than itself for onenight. Music bleeding out of every bar. Someone in an inflatable dinosaur suit. A group dressed as playing cards, drunk, taking up the whole pavement. The world is loud and luminous and performing as I move through the center of it like I always do—without touching it, without being touched by it, a dark current running through something that doesn’t know I’m there.
The cocaine saysyou’re fine.The thing underneath the cocaine saysshe had a bag of trash.
I keep moving.
I’m good at moving. Thirteen years of practice, moving because standing still means your sins will catch up to you, and once they do, it unleashes everything you ever tried to board up and chain down.
I have no idea where I’m going or how much time passes until the cocaine thins slightly at the corners and I feel the edges beginning to blur back toward something less manageable.
The crowd thickens where the street widens into a small plaza, some kind of outdoor Halloween event, music and stalls and costumed bodies packed close. I have to slow to try to dig out my metal box, shouldering through costumes rather than around. Bodies crush against me from every direction, a cacophony of drunken voices and music, and the cocaine is thinning faster now. Underneath it, she’s still pregnant, a son is still waiting for his mom, and the mom’s still pleading before that terrible, automatic loosening of hands that no longer?—
Something hits my shoulder. Hard. A collision, and a laugh erupts immediately after, bright, unguarded, reckless. It slices through the cocaine fog like a razor dipped in sunlight, carvingstraight into the hollow place behind my ribs where nothing has ever stuck before.
I stagger half a step, muscle memory already snapping my hand toward the karambit tucked at my hip, fingers curling around the handle on pure instinct—ready to gut whatever threat this is.
Then I see her.
This beautiful, fucking ruin of a woman.
She’s a 1950s pin-up doll gone feral, red lips painted like sin itself, victory rolls gleaming like polished obsidian under the string lights. The red-and-white polka-dot dress clings to every lethal curve, the sweetheart neckline plunging low enough to make my throat close despite the high clawing at the edges. Red heels. Red nails. A red satin bow tied at her throat like she’s gift-wrapped herself for the night.
Her small, red patent leather purse has slipped from her fingers and cracked open on the pavement. Heart-shaped lollipops spill out in a violent pink scatter across the concrete—candy confetti from a crime scene—and she’s still laughing, head thrown back, throat exposed. I don’t know if it’s the cocaine, the crowds, the adrenaline, but the sound has color and flavor, and I want it inside me instantly, like a hit I can’t chase fast enough.
“Oh my God, I’m so sorry,” she starts, already bending to pick up her bag. “Completely my fault.”
I’m fucking stone as I watch her scoop up the lollipops, but they’ve all been stepped on, cracked and broken, except for?—
“Oh, look. One survived.” She takes it between her fingers, straightens, and she has the biggest smile on her face as if she just found a diamond in a mine collapse. When she finally looksat me, our eyes lock. She doesn’t blink. Doesn’t flinch. She holds my stare a heartbeat too long, like she’s already peeled back every layer of armor I’ve ever worn and decided she likes the rot underneath.
The world narrows to the green of her eyes and the slow, knowing curve of her mouth.
“Here.” She presses the heart-shaped lollipop into my palm, fingers brushing mine. Electric. “You look like you could use something sweet.”
I stare at the candy. Pink. Ridiculous. “Heart-shaped lollipops?”
