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Jess reached for her phone. “I need to ask Soren.”
Her hand went still on the phone.
“No!” I said. “Remember our pact. We agreed we don’t share anything with them. We need to figure this out on our own.”
Jess looked around the table, tugging at her cardigan sleeve. “Okay,” she said at last. We all exhaled at once.
“This is so typical. Of course the one good guy I meet comes with rotting flesh and eels attached,” Callie said. “Of course he works for a death cult.”
“But what is it? That thing we all dreamed about?”
“Whatever it is, it’s evil,” I said.
We talked for another thirty minutes about the horror of it. By the end of it, I was desperate to explain what I knew. But I held my tongue. I needed to know, before I said a word about it, that each one of them could keep a secret from the man who’d enamored her. A secret our lives depended on.
Priya was shaking her head. “I can’t believe I thought for like, four whole days, that this wasn’t a cult. Of course it’s a cult. We all knew it was as soon as Aurora started getting weird.”
Callie’s face cracked, and it did the same thing to me that it had when she cried in the jeep. It hollowed me in one whole swoop. A tear slipped down her face, then another, then a deluge. Jess held her quietly. Priya looked truly, deeply pissed. She had been staring at the table. Her hand on her glass, she looked up.
“What the hell are we going to do? This is legitimately terrifying. I have to work with this guy.”
“We’re going to act like everything’s fine,” I said, placing my palm flat on the table. “And we’re going to clock everything they do and everything they say, and for once, we’re going to be honest with ourselves about these men we’re dating. And then we’re going to figure out how we get out of this. Whatever you do, don’t sign up for another retreat. I read that groups like this will send all kinds of bad juju your way to manipulate you.”
That destroyed Callie all over again.
“But I love him,” she shook out. “How the hell do I do that?”
“The way you managed to do everything else that was difficult, Callie,” I said. “By feeling it and doing it anyway. By loving him with your eyes open, even when you want to snap them shut.”
She sniffed and shook. “I hate this,” she snapped. “I hate this so much.”
I tried to imagine how I’d feel if I had to do the same thing with Damian. It made my throat catch.
“Promise me you’re not going to cave and do something stupid, just for a hot guy with abs,” I said to Callie and Priya.
It took them a moment to speak, like saying it crossed a line they couldn’t walk back from.
“I promise.”
“I promise.”
“Jess?”
She looked at me, her hand still worrying over the cuff of her cardigan. “I promise.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Three weeks went by pretending everything was normal. Vivienne planned her party. I folded, fetched, invoiced, and finished two more modules of the certificate, studying until the small hours by the glow of my desk lamp. Damian and I went on dates the coven scheduled and continued our covert, coded conversations, one of them conducted entirely in captions under photographs of baked goods. The salt in my window jars got refreshed on Sundays.
And out there in the tender dark, the men worked. Adrian’s voice notes grew longer. Jess’s lease stayed unsigned by Soren and somehow always almost signed. Callie started taking trazodone to sleep through the night. Priya stopped asking layered questions in the chat, which was the most unsettling thing of all.
There were no more phone calls from Aurora, no little gifts left on my kitchen table. Three whole weeks of nothing, which I never once mistook for peace.
Then, on a Saturday morning in June, I slept late, my body finally succumbing to exhaustion.
I drank coffee in the kitchen in my bathrobe, sunlight strobing the floor and table when it escaped patches of cloud. The morning felt like a sunny little lull. I put too much butter on a piece of toast and sank my teeth into it. The kitchen was warm enough that my bare feet didn’t feel cold.
Until my doorbell rang.
