“So this will be easy,” she clarified.
He blinked, but she didn’t feel like explaining further. Instead, she looked back out toward the living room, where shards of glass littered the floor, then at Winter again. Through the lifting fog in her mind, she recalled the panicked look she’d seen on his face right before she’d touched her lips to her glass. The memory of him starting to say something to her.Don’t—!
“Winter,” she said carefully, “you were going to warn me before I sipped from that drink, weren’t you?”
Winter stared at her, stricken. Then nodded.
“Why?” she asked. “How did you know?”
He didn’t answer. His face turned toward the door. Sydney found her mind revving back up as she studied his body language, the stiffness of his posture, the way he leaned unconsciously in the direction where Claire and his friends had left. She waited patiently for him to look back at her.
When he finally did, his expression seemed haunted. “Leo whispered something to me right before he stepped out.”
“And what did he say?”
Winter met her eyes. “Don’t touch the drinks.”
She was silent for a long moment. Her mind spun. Nothing about Leo had ever turned up in Panacea’s research about him—he had never been anything but a loyal friend and colleague to Winter. He had no ties to Eli Morrison.
But this was unmistakable.
“I watched the others drink without any issues,” she replied slowly, turning back to him. “Leo prepared all those glasses. He had to have known which to set in front of me. In front ofyou.”
Winter’s eyes had constricted now. “No.”
“He did,” she replied gently. She fixed him with a steady gaze. “Winter, Leo tried to poison us.”
25
Friends and Enemies
It made no sense.
Leo had been with him since nearly the beginning of Winter’s career. He had been on every tour, had teased and taunted him mercilessly, had attempted to teach him how to cook a dozen times. He had listened quietly whenever Winter was worn down from stress or exhaustion, had comforted him through a dozen heartbreaks, cheered him alongside Dameon as life pushed them higher.
Leo had been there for him for so long. It was impossible.
And yet he found himself staring down at the broken glass on the floor, the whiskey still spilled against the wood.
“This is XC,” Sydney said, standing up from where she was running a test on the lip of the glass. “A new nerve agent.”
She still looked unsteady, her movements a little slower than they should be, but her speech and thoughts seemed to be back to normal. Better than how she’d been just half an hour earlier, at least, when she was gasping in the pool. When she was kissing him in desperation, and he was doing the same in turn.
Now he found himself looking at her, his mind clouded with uncertainty. What if Claire had been in on it? What about Dameon?
Suddenly, everyone he’d ever known seemed like shadow figures in his head, walking through this city of secrets. He didn’t know whichdirection to turn, whom he could call. There was no one he could think of in this moment that he could talk to.
There was no one he could trust.
He thought of Penelope, of the distant look she got in her eyes when he asked her how she coped whenever she felt lonely.
“There’s an explanation for everything,” Sydney said in the silence. “You just have to trust your instincts.”
There was still a fog in her eyes and, framed by those long brown lashes, it made her look a little lost. But otherwise she seemed alert again, that slight furrow returning to her brow and a faint scowl touching the edges of her lips. She was wearing his oversized sweater, and he couldn’t help but notice the way it exposed the creamy skin of her left shoulder. There was a birthmark there, the little dark smudge he’d kissed earlier.
He could still feel a faint tingle on his lips.
She shifted and spoke again. “Leo could have been bribed.”
