Because she knows what she’s getting involved with.
She shifts slightly, her fingers brushing over my forearm like she’s checking that I’m still here.
Silly Liv, there’s nowhere I’d rather be.
I tighten my hold without thinking.
She huffs out a light laugh. “You didn’t disappear into the night like a cliché?”
There’s just enough humor in her voice to tell me she doesn’t mean it, and that it would have hurt more than she would have admitted.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I say.
She goes still for a second like she’s trying to figure out if I mean it. But then she relaxes again.
“Good,” she murmurs.
Silence settles in the room again. The bed is soft and warm beneath us like it’s threatening to suck us both back to sleep.
This feels dangerous but in the way I’m used to. I stare at the ceiling, tracing the faint cracks in the paint like I can map them out and figure out how to handle this.
It doesn’t work. Unsurprisingly, the ceiling doesn’t have any answers.
“You’re thinking too loud.” Her voice is softer now.
I huff out a quiet breath. “Didn’t realize I was making noise.”
“You’re not,” she says. “But I can feel it.”
Of course she can.
I don’t respond right away because I don’t know how to. I don’t know what to say to that.
She shifts in my arms slightly, just enough to look up at me. “Talk to me,” she insists.
There’s no pressure in it, no demand. Which somehow makes it harder.
I study her for a second. Her hair’s a mess, her lips still a little swollen. There’s a mark near her collarbone I definitely put there, and that I’m proud of because the sight of it does something dangerous in my chest and mind that I have to ignore right now or risk getting hard again.
This isn’t about that. “Last night changed things,” I affirm finally.
Her gaze refines slightly. “Yeah,” she agrees.
“That wasn’t just another victim,” I say, steering the topic.
“No,” she laments quietly. “It wasn’t.”
I exhale slowly. “It’s organized,” I continue. “Structured. That drug…”
“Succinylcholine,” she supplies.
I nod. “That’s not something you stumble into,” I say. “That’s access to medical suppliers through a medical professional. It’s knowledge and planning.”
Her expression tightens slightly. “They’re controlling everything,” she says. “Not just the victims. The experience.”
That word lands just as heavily as it should.
“Yeah.”
