The man nodded. Frantic. Then his hands went to work, clicking, typing. “Do you have a brother?” he asked, trying to sound casual but failing entirely.
“No.”
The man’s mouth twitched, and for the tiniest moment, a spark of deep violet lit the blacks of his eyes, eerily similar to the strange bursts of fancy that sometimes took over Sean’s mind. He shook himself, and when he looked again, no such purple existed. Trick of the light.
After a few more minutes, the man slid Sean’s ID and two key cards toward him. “Twenty-third floor. Please enjoy your stay at the MGM Grand.”
Sean swiped them off the counter and retreated at once.
“That guy was weird,” he said to Cole when they were a safe distance from the reception desks.
“I have a feeling he won’t be the only weirdo we encounter in this city,” his cousin replied in his usual dry tone. “Remind me again why we came to Las Vegas?”
“Because this is something normal people do on their twenty-first birthday.”
Cole gave him a half smile. “Yeah, butthis?”
They paused at the edge of the casino, where bells clanged and lights flashed and even the carpet seemed to scream at the top of its lungs. A vague sense of something roused inside Sean’s chest, something that reminded him of those seconds before he broke the surface of the lake near his home after diving as deep as he could reach. Something like suffocation. Overwhelming. Crushing.
Cole gazed skeptically at the sight before him. “This doesn’t seem like our scene.”
“How would we know what our scene is when we’ve been cooped up in that unchanging town for two decades?”
He sighed. “Listen, you know I’d follow you to the ends of the earth, but this seems like one of your impulse ideas that should have been thwarted.”
Sean scratched his neck, scared his cousin was right. “Then why didn’t you thwart me?”
“You were pretty mad.”
Pretty madwas a mild way to describe that fit of rage. Sean had asked those same questions of Blaire before, of course, and always received vague answers that satisfied none of his curiosity. He’d never gone off the rails like this.
Sean eyed a few strangers who stared into his face far longer than was polite. “Let’s just get to the room.”
They followed the signs to the elevator, then locked themselves inside their hotel room. The space was overly air-conditioned and smelled faintly of harsh cleaning products. The windows took up nearly the entire opposite wall, blocked bycurtains, but Cole pushed them open to reveal the New York-New York and the Park MGM hotels, gleaming in the desert night.
“What now?” he asked.
Sean shrugged. “Now we…drink?”
Cole took that suggestion and ran with it, heading straight to the minibar. He threw a tiny blue bottle toward Sean and kept a frosted white bottle for himself.
Sean peered down at the label: Skyy Vodka. It was almost cute, it was so tiny.
Didn’t taste cute though.
Tasted like astringent water that burned all the way down.
“Ugh.” Cole glared at his bottle. “I’d take Mom’s too-sweet wine over this any day.”
“To be fair,” Sean said after finishing his bottle and grabbing another, “most people mix it.”
Cole set his bottle aside. “Can I ask a question?”
Sean lifted a brow at him.
“What do you think it is, really? I mean…what the hell would need this much secrecy?”
His stomach fluttered with nervous energy.
