Chapter 4

Piper's POV

On the second trip down I was already sweating through the back of my shirt, and my hair had come loose from the pins, and I could feel the wet patch spreading between my shoulder blades like a stain I'd have to explain.

Roni's voice came through the earbud so clear she could have been walking beside me. "Ask him about coffee. Neutral. Boring. Nothing weird."

I hitched the box of books higher against my chest and looked at the back of his head. "I work at the Black Coffee and Pie. The diner on the corner of Main. The sign's faded, you can't miss it." My breath came out in pieces. "If you drink coffee, I mean. You should go. Their black coffee is —" Don't say it. Do not say it. "— it's black."

Black. The coffee is black. I've been alive twenty-four years and that's what my mouth did with the opportunity.

He set the tailgate down. "...Black," he said.

"Yeah." I was committed now. "The kind of black where you drink it and feel like you could carry the whole day afterward."

He picked up two boxes and stacked them, and somewhere under his breath came a small sound. Almost nothing. A hum. It could have been a laugh and it could have been him clearing his throat, and I decided to file it as a laugh because otherwise I'd have to think about what I sounded like.

At least that wasn't a disaster. At least it was only a small one.

The third trip was where I broke.

My legs started shaking on the second floor landing. The box slid down my front and I had to hoist it back up with my knee, and then it slid again, and by the top of the stairs I was carrying it on my stomach, tipped back like I was eight months pregnant, taking one step at a time and breathing like a horse.

He stopped ahead of me. Turned around. Looked at me for a second and a half, and then his hand came out and he took the box off me like it weighed nothing, and kept going.

"I can —"

"You sound like you just ran the eight hundred."

"I'm not in shape," I said, to his back.

"I noticed."

I had a whole answer ready. Something about how I was busy, how walking to work counted, how the cold weather made my lungs small. I let it go. My ribs hurt too much to argue.

Inside 2A I put the box down where the light came in from the window, and when I straightened up I saw the other box. The one already open, shoved against the wall with the flaps folded back. Cameras. Little black domes and cylinders, cables coiled and tied off, three rectangular boxes with no labels, a plastic bag of screws and brackets.

Veterans don't buy that many cameras. Landlords buy that many cameras.

I looked up.

He was in the doorway with a box still in his arms, and his eyes were on the open box and then, slowly, on me. His face hadn't changed at all. Nothing moved in it. But I could feel the room get smaller, the way a room does when someone shuts a window and the air has nowhere to go.

I turned my head away so fast my neck popped. "Where do you want this one?"

"That side."

I went to move another box and I did not look at the stack beside the door. That was my mistake. The stack had gotten taller and the top one had gotten pushed too far, and I heard it go before I saw it. A dry rasp of cardboard, and then the whole thing coming off the pile above my head.

I got my arms up over my face and shut my eyes and did that stupid, small, useless thing where you make yourself as narrow as possible.

Then nothing hit me.

I opened my eyes.

He was standing in front of me with one hand flat under the bottom of the box. Books. Full of books, hardcovers, the kind of weight that made my arms hurt just looking at it. The stack of boxes had been between us, and a chair with its legs up, and three steps of floor. I hadn't heard him move. I hadn't heard anything at all.

And in the second before he set it down, I saw something happen to his eyes. A flash in them. Quick, front to back, like a light going out under a gust of wind.

"Thank you," I said. "How did you —"

"Easy enough." He put the box down and turned away.

"Praise him," Roni hissed in my ear. "Strength. Speed. Do it now."

"You were so fast," I said. "Just now. And the box is heavy — how is your arm not dead?"

Something went through his face and was gone. He stepped back, half a pace, and it put the doorway behind him. "I kept up with training after I got out. That's all it is."

That's a script. That's the same voice he used about the military.

"Touch him," Roni said. "His arm. He's got arms like a loading dock, and you're telling me you're going to stand there and compliment his personality? Go."

I hesitated. He'd stepped back. He'd stepped back on purpose.

But my body didn't care about that, apparently, because my hand was already out, and my fingers landed on his forearm through the sleeve of his shirt and stayed there.

It was like putting my hand on a warm pipe. Hard underneath, the muscle going tight when I touched it, hot through the cotton, and I could feel the shape of it against my palm all the way to the bone.

My breathing changed and I couldn't stop it. "You must have put a lot of work into keeping this up."

He moved like I'd put a cigarette out on him.

The problem was, he broke the contact by going backwards, and he took my support with him. My other foot was behind me and my center had already gone, and I pitched forward with both hands out, grabbing at air.

My right hand found fabric.

Not his sleeve. Lower. Belt height, the front of his jeans, and my fingers closed on it and held, because I was falling and holding was the only thing keeping me off the floor.

It wasn't flat fabric. There was something under it. Something soft that gave under my hand, and then didn't, and then wasn't soft at all, filling out against my palm so fast it was like a muscle flexing, heat coming through the denim like I'd pressed my hand to a stove.

And then I squeezed. Twice. Before anything in my head caught up with anything in my hand.

That's his cock. I'm holding his cock in the middle of his empty apartment and I squeezed it.

I let go like it was on fire and dropped, and the floor came up and knocked the air out of me, and I sat there with my legs folded and my palms flat on the boards.

"Piper?" Roni's voice went off in my ear, loud and shrill. "Piper, what was that sound? What happened? Say something —"

His head turned. His eyes came down and stopped at my ear, at the little black bud sitting in it, and stayed there long enough that I felt it.

Oh no. Oh no no no.

His face closed off. "Who sent you?"

"...What?"

"Who do you work for."

"I fell over," I said. "I fell over, I didn't — my hand just —"

"Answer me." His voice had dropped and lost all the morning out of it. "Is it the pack? The hunters? The cold ones?"

I sat there with my mouth open.

The pack. The hunters. The cold ones. Is he — is that from a book? Is he making some kind of point?

"I don't know what you're talking about."

He came down at me. There was no windup to it, no shuffle — one moment he was standing and the next his knee was on my thigh and both my wrists were somewhere above my head in one of his hands, pinned flat to the floor, my shoulders pulled up against my ears.

I tried to move. My hips went nowhere. His knee didn't even lean hard. He just had me.

"You've been talking to whoever's in that earpiece the whole time you've been in my home," he said. "Who sent you?"