“Mm.” Shiloh’s gaze drags over my face. “You’re on edge. You didn’t eat lunch, you had four cups of coffee, and I don’t think you’re sleeping, Yank.”
“I slept.”
He gives me a look like he knows better. Like he knows exactly where I slept and how well. I spent most of last night sitting on the swing on their back porch, listening to the cicadas. It was an unusually warm autumn, and there was a rare group of stragglers.
I haven’t heard them since I was a child.
“Why don’t you tell me why you want to hire a contract killer?” he asks, voice soft.
“I can’t tell you that. You don’t need to know anything more than what I’ve told you,” I bite out.
“Can’t or won’t?” he says.
I slide around him, keeping my smile for the table that’s waving like I owe them a kidney. “One’s as good as the other. Move, Shiloh.”
His hand catches my elbow, light but unyielding. “Answer me.”
I swallow. My eyes flick toward Ever behind the bar, where he’s watching and pretending he isn’t. I step back. “I have a table I need to take care of.”
“You’re done when I say you’re done,” he says, and I hate that it’s true. Here, time belongs to them.
I lean in, close enough that my voice won’t carry. “Fine. You want the truth?”
His eyes hold mine. “That’s all I’ve been asking for.”
“The truth is, I don’t know who I can trust,” I say. “I don’t know if I can trust you, or Ever, or anyone else in this city. So that’s why I’m not going to give you all my truths. Not just yet.”
Something in his expression shifts.
“But you think you can trust a contract killer,” he murmurs.
My breath catches. Shiloh’s gaze flicks to Ever, and it’s fast—so fast a normal person wouldn’t clock it. I do.
Awareness passes between them, electric.
“I think I can pay one,” I say finally. “And if I can pay him, I don’t need to trust him.”
I turn away before my facetells anything more I’m unprepared to part with and walk straight to my table with my heart in my throat.
* * *
Shiloh’s probing gives me a brief flare of hope, but they both ignore me so deliberately for the rest of the evening, I decide nothing has changed.
And nothing will change. I’m going to have to find Midnight some other way.
Near closing, the crowd has thinned enough that the room breathes differently. The laughter is looser. The floor stickier. The air thicker.
Sonny hands me a pair of bulging trash bags with a grin. I take one in each hand, staggering under their weight.
“Your turn.”
“Your glee is malicious and unwelcome after the night we had,” I mutter.
“Nah, just rotation. Fair is fair,” she says. “Off you go.”
I glance toward the back hallway, steeped in shadow, and a cold ribbon slides down my spine. Unbidden, the memory of footsteps on a staircase surges, then the sound of fists against flesh.
I push it down and start dragging the bags toward the rear, shoulders tight and jaw clenched. I refuseto look over my shoulder even though my skin begs me to do otherwise.
