"You're shaking."
I looked at my hands. He was right. "I don't know why."
"It's probably the memories settling." He pulled me against his chest, and I let him hold me. "Your brain is still healing from what Gabriel did. Flashbacks are normal. It doesn't mean anything's wrong."
Normal. Healing. Nothing wrong.The words were a script I'd memorized, a litany I repeated to myself on the bad days.
"I should get going," I said. "Matt will be waiting."
"I'll drive you."
"You don't have to—"
"I want to." He kissed my forehead. "Humor me."
Matt's bar was called The Lost Hours, and it occupied the ground floor of a building that had been a speakeasy during Prohibition. The original brick walls still showed through the plaster in places, and the basement—mybasement, the one Matt had let me convert—connected to the old bootlegging tunnels that ran beneath the city like secret veins.
I loved this place. Loved the smell of old wood and older whiskey, loved the way the regulars nodded when Icame in, loved the sense of purpose that came with every shift. Before Nathan, before the hunting, before I'd remembered how to be human again, this bar had been my first anchor. Matt had given me a job when I'd had no references and a fake name. He'd let me use his basement for things that most bosses would have called the police about.
"Morning, sunshine." Matt was already behind the bar, taking inventory with the same methodical precision he brought to everything. He was fifty-three, built like a retired boxer, with hands that could crack walnuts and eyes that had seen too much. "Coffee's fresh."
"You're a saint." I poured myself a cup, adding the exact amount of cream Nathan had taught me to like. "What's the count looking like?"
"Short on the rye, overstocked on the gin. Someone ordered wrong last month."
"That was me."
"I know." He gave me a look that was half exasperation, half affection. "I'm just giving you shit. You've been distracted lately."
"Happy," I corrected. "There's a difference."
"Is there?" He set down his clipboard. "You've got that look. The one you had when you first started here, like you were waiting for the other shoe to drop."
"I don't know what you mean."
"I mean you're still sleeping with a knife under your pillow."
I didn't deny it. "Old habits."
"Old habits don't make you flinch when someone says your name." He leaned against the bar, studying me with those sharp eyes. "Something's eating at you. You want to talk about it, or you want to count bottles in silence?"
"Bottles."
"Fair enough."
We worked through the morning inventory together, the comfortable silence broken only by the clink of glass and the scratch of Matt's pencil. He'd been in the military once—Special Forces, though he never talked about it—and then he'd done something else, something that had left him with scars he didn't explain and a tolerance for violence that had made him my first real ally.
I'd asked him once, early on, why he didn't turn me in. Why he let me use his basement for things that would have sent most people running for the police.
"I've seen what monsters look like," he'd said. "You're not one. You're just someone who learned to fight back."
I'd cried after that conversation. The first real tears I'd shed since Gabriel had abandoned me, and the first time I'd understood that kindness didn't have to come with a price tag.
"You're doing it again," Matt said.
"Doing what?"
"Going somewhere else in your head." He set down a bottle of bourbon with a decisive thunk. "That's the third time this morning. You want to tell me what's really going on?"
