The Japanese restaurant fades away.
Tristan: You get that from a contact in London?
Ciaran O’Connell: No fuck face. I picked up the phone and called my dad. It’s not hard to find your new client, considering she’s Ren Callahan’s best friend.
“Who’s that?” Ren asks.
“No one.” I shove my phone back into my pocket. Since when does Ciaran ever call his dad? I glance up and make accidental eye contact with Hadrian Hallow.
He keeps ahold of my gaze, and I watch his lips move as he continues to speak to Isolde. She’s hardly moved all night. If she’s good friends with him, then why are her muscles so tense? Her movements are robotic, stiff, and short as she eats.
After working out at Leon’s, Isolde changed back into her sweatpants, her scar hidden.
But the scar wasn’t out of sight, out of mind for me. All day, the pit in my stomach has gnawed at me.
I’ve never felt this sensation before. I’m not, as most people assume, some unfeeling asshole. I understand pricks of nerves. Guilt consumes me when I think of all the ways I’ve disappointed my father.
This particular sensation is different. Isolde is annoying. She talks about random things. Even when she came across me as the Ghost, she’d try to strike up a conversation, never taking the hint. But that’s Isolde. She’ll look at a guy wearing a neon vigilante mask, with a gun drawn and six motherfuckers dead on the ground, and start talking about guns.
Isolde plays with her food while Hadrian continues to speak. Surely, if they’re good friends, she wouldn’t look so fucking miserable.
Try me, I silently tell Hadrian. I’d love an excuse to punch his fucking face. And if he says one single thing to upset Isolde further, the odds aren’t on his side.
CHAPTER 8
Isolde
“He takes his job seriously, doesn’t he?”
I don’t have to look over my shoulder to know who he’s talking about. I’ve felt Tristan’s eyes on me since I sat down in the booth.
Hadrian had already arrived, taking over a booth up front, in an area of the restaurant where I never sit.
“What’s going on?” I asked him when I arrived.
Hadrian stopped typing out emails, slipping his phone back into his inner jacket pocket. “Where would you like to start?”
People accuse Tristan of being grumpy, but he’s got nothing on the cold steely nature of Hadrian Hallow.
“This is the guy?” I had asked my sister, the first time I ever met him.
It’d been her third and final year at Oxford and we’d gone to a pub nearby. Crowded and hot, the place did little to lighten my mood after struggling to get to Oxford thanks to various rail strikes. I’d have preferred a takeaway and movie, but Sammie had pleaded for me to go out.
“He’s not the one,” she told me point blank. “But he’s hot and misunderstood and I think you’ll like him.”
I’d taken one look at the git and snorted. How the fuck did my sister think I’d get on with this guy?
He is the complete opposite of the Matheson’s.
He has a trust fund. Everyone correctly assumed he’d graduate from Oxford.
Growing up, the electricity at home would shut off on a monthly basis. People thought of my sister as the girl who had achieved something great because Oxford let her join their ranks.
Sammie was golden.
She had the same blonde hair and blue eyes as I do, but they sparkled. People mistake my blank face for stupid or angry all the time. Sammie, on the other hand, walked in a cloud of merriment.
She was taller than me, despite being younger, and her muscles lithe. She could wear anything and everything and attract attention.
