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I hadn't meant to sleep at all. I'd meant to lie down in my clothes and stare at the ceiling as I planned for Thursday. Instead I went out like light and surfaced in the dark of a strange room with a stripe of parking-lot light laid across the wall and a semi idling somewhere out past the door.

I hadn't moved an inch. Neither had River.

Here I was, sprawled on top of a fallen angel in the dark, understanding exactly what I had done.

I have spent my whole life making myself difficult to love. Nobody ever says that out loud about themselves, and Hecate knows I've never once said it either. But at three in the morning with nothing else to do on the floor of a dingy motel there's no one left to lie to. The attitude. The temper. Years of putting grown males face down on a mat twice a week so the whole coven would know what I was before they got close enough to find out what I wasn't.

Ace wanted more than a night and I disappeared on him without a word. Davon said one stupid thing about registering as human and I ended four years over it inside a minute. I told myself it was pride, and it wasn't. It was housekeeping at its finest.

Because if I get there first, it doesn't count as being left.

That's the whole thing. That's twenty-six years of it. Get the knife in your own hand before anybody else gets the chance. Then you never have to lie awake at three in the morning wondering when they'll shove it in your back.

Except here I was. Three in the morning. Wondering when River would do it.

He was cold under my cheek and getting colder still. Nobody in any realm could tell me how long he had or what he'd be when the rest of it went. And I had gone and put myself in a situation that had no good outcome. However this ended, it would end badly.

Lesson number twenty-seven. You can spend twenty-six years building a wall you'll break down yourself in about four seconds. And nobody will even applaud you for it.

I listened to him breathe for a while. The most important thing was that he was still breathing, which I choose to find reassuring.

Then I got up and sat on the edge of the bathtub in the dark with the door open so I could still see his form on the floor. I dug my phone out and looked at it. Alex Greywood had made me promise to call. It was three in the morning and he would answer on the second ring and ask me what was wrong the moment he heard my voice.

I didn't call.

I sat there in a motel bathroom in a town I never learned the name of, with my feet clean for the first time in twenty-four hours and my chest full of a feeling that was enormous and terrifying and new.

Above me on the mirror, where the steam had ghosted it back for the second time that night, somebody else's heart was blinking at me.

Chapter Ten

I got maybe two hours of sleep and woke at seven with the taste of pennies in my mouth and a male-shaped absence on the other bed.

There was a note on the pillow. I'll bring coffee. Back in twenty. No signature, because who else was it going to be, and no kisses, because we are not those people. Plus, I would have set the note on fire if he did that.

I lay there a while with my arm over my eyes and did the same thing every fool does. I played it back. All of it, in order, in high definition. Then out of order. Back and forward. Then the parts I liked best, twice. By the end of it I was hyperventilating and about to self-combust from sexual frustration.

At that point I got up, because Thursday was coming and my grandmother had the stupid book that started all of it.

The shower had two settings, boiling hot like the pits of Hell and freezing cold like the Arctic. Or River as of late. I took the scalding one and stood under it until the mirror fogged and the heart came back up on the glass. I didn't mind it this time. It was starting to feel less like somebody else's scribble and more like a roommate.

My feet hurt but in a clean way. That's the only description I've got for it. The kind of hurt that's healing instead of being infected, which, if you've spent enough time injured, is practically a spa day.

Amber had packed jeans, two shirts, a hoodie that smelled like her kitchen, and a pair of sneakers half a size too big that belonged, judging by the state of the laces, to Stella. She'd also packed a hairbrush, a tube of antiseptic, a bar of chocolate, and, because Amber Greywood has a sense of humor nobody ever talks about, the tiny bottle of pink nail polish I'd left in her bathroom back in October.

I painted one toenail. It seemed important at the time.

Then I put Stella's sneakers on. My one surviving oxblood boot went into the bag too, because I refused to discuss it with anybody, and I went out into the parking lot to find my coffee. And a fallen angel, in that order.

The morning had come up gray and rinsed after rain that must have fallen while I slept. The parking lot was wet and shining with a few puddles sprinkled on the cracked pavement. The semi had gone and left a dry rectangle where it had stood all night, which for reasons I can't explain I found unbearably sad. Four of the six cars were gone. Somebody's kid had drawn a face in the road grime on the back window of one that was left, and the truck stop across the way was doing brisk business. Beyond all of it Ohio went on being flat and brown in every direction at once.

The Dairy Queen wasn't open yet. The truck stop was.

River was at the counter with two coffees and his back to the room, and I watched him for a second. I mean, I kissed the guy. I had every right to stare at him like a creep, didn't I?

Which is probably why it took me three whole seconds to notice the male in the corner booth by the window.

He was already looking at me. Had been, I'd bet, since before the door finished swinging shut behind me.