CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Myra
What little sleep I’d gotten that night had come to an abrupt end after whatever the fuck that was with the crone, so by the time Curtis dragged my ass to The Riff Raff, I was in rough shape. It took about five seconds for everyone to notice.
“Jesus, Myra,” Sasha shouted as I walked over to the bar, “you look like absolute shit!”
“An accurate depiction of how I feel, I’m afraid.”
“Well, you definitely nailed it, that’s for sure.”
Laney, by far the more tactful of the two, put down the glass she was drying on the counter and walked over to me with a look of concern furrowing her brows. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Did you not get any sleep last night?”
“Nope. I mean, not the restful kind, anyway.”
She considered me for a moment while Sasha muttered something under her breath about having to do everything herself around here. “Bad dreams?”
I hesitated. “Something like that.”
“Maybe Sasha could make you a tonic to help.”
“Sasha could if she wasn’t busy actually getting shit done,” her counterpart tossed over her shoulder as she hauled a crate of glassware out from the kitchen.
“C’mon, Sash… Myra needs our help.”
The feisty witch set the crate down, the tinkling of glasses echoing through the otherwise quiet room. “Fine,” she said as a wry smile overtook her irritated expression. “You need a nightmare tonic?”
“Something like that. Can it get rid of crazy old crones lurking in the shadowy corners of my room and injecting cryptic warnings into my nightmares? If yes, I’ll pay whatever you want.”
“That seems oddly specific, but okaaaay… wait! Was it the one you asked me about the other night?”
I nodded.
“What crazy old crone?” Laney asked as concern pulled at the corners of her eyes. “Who is she, and what is she warning you about?”
Her worried expression combined with Sasha’s quirked brow made me actually want to tell them the truth, not that I really knew what that was.
But telling them that my crazy ex who had betrayed me with his batshit girlfriend tried to kill me—again—in my dream before Yael nearly drowned me didn’t seem like a viable strategy, especially if it backed me into a corner about admitting my plan to return to the Deep.
Tiptoeing around that would be challenging at best, so I decided to take the path of least resistance.
I lied.
“I think it was maybe about Yael, but who knows?”
“Are you saying this old hag broke into your apartment—and your dream—just to be creepy and foreboding about your boyfriend?” Sasha asked.
Not knowing what to say, I merely shrugged in response.
The witch fisted her hands on her hips and impaled me with a disapproving look.
“Did you do drugs again? Because that sounds like one helluva trip you were on.”
“I wish I’d been high. It might have improved the situation—”
“Nothing about that even makes sense.”
“I’m aware of that, Sasha. That’s the whole problem. It’s like she’s trying to tell me something without actually telling me anything at all.”
“That takes talent.”
“Are you going to talk to Yael about it?” Laney asked earnestly.
“Um, absolutely not,” I said as I grabbed a glass and poured myself a shift beer, “and neither are you two.”
“But maybe—”
“No, Laney. Just no. Nothing good could come of bringing such a bizarre situation to him, so drop it. Don’t make me regret telling you about this.”
“We won’t say anything,” she replied as she held up her hands in surrender. “It’s just that maaaaybe it would actually be helpful.”
“And maaaaybe it would be a big fucking disaster that I don’t need in my life at the moment.”
“I vote the latter,” Sasha deadpanned.
“See? Even Sasha agrees with me, and that never happens.”
Laney opened her mouth to argue, then slammed it shut, opting to worry her lip with her teeth as she decided what she should say—or if she should say anything at all. Before she could, Curtis pushed through the double doors to find the three of us staring at one another in silence.
“Do I want to know what’s going on out here?”
“No—”
“Myra had a creepy old witch-hag-type person break into her apartment last night to warn her about Yael while she slept,” Sasha blurted out with the tact of a drunken ogre, “or at least that’s what we think.”
The new kid couldn’t have looked more sorry for asking if he’d tried. “Okaaaay—”
“I don’t think it’s about Yael, though,” Laney said in defense of the absent fae.
“Who else could it be? I mean, how many people is Myra even close enough with to bother warning her about? It can’t be about Ravi because he’s basically a saint, and this guy isn’t a threat to her,” she said, jerking her thumb at Curtis, “so we know it’s not him.
And Laney and I might talk shit behind your back sometimes when your bitch mode hits eleven, but that’s the extent of our betrayal. ”
“Good to know.”
“Could it be about someone from before you came here?” she asked, using a surprisingly soft tone, as though she knew she might be treading on dangerous ground. “An ex, maybe?”
“You mean the ex who lives in the Deep and never breaches the waterline? The one who groomed me for years just so he could use me, then betray me and get me exiled from the sea?” I said, letting the anger I felt bubble up to the surface, as it always did where Finn was concerned.
They looked on in horror as I finally shared a shred of the truth about what had led to my arrival in the Playground.
“You mean that ex? No, Sasha, I don’t think she was warning me about him, because I am now well aware of who and what he is—and what he’s capable of.
” The trio stood in silence as they stared at me with pity in their eyes, which somehow made the whole interaction that much worse.
“Here’s the reality of the situation; none of us have known Yael long enough to really know who he is or what kind of sordid history he has, and maybe that’s what she was trying to tell me about,” I said, desperate to shift the conversation away from my own past.
“It might be worth doing a little digging to find out,” Curtis said, pulling me from my unraveling thoughts. “I know a guy who could look into it for you if you wanted.”
“You ‘know a guy’?” I replied, hoping to deflect my way out of the conversation altogether.
“I think that’s taking this a little too far.
I can look into him on my own if I need to.
Maybe I misinterpreted what she was trying to tell me in the least forthcoming way possible, or maybe the crone is just a crazy old bitch saying crazy old things, and we’ve spent more time thinking about it than we ever should have.
” I grabbed my apron off the counter and tied it around my waist. “We’ve only got twenty minutes before we open, and I need to get some shit done. ”
As I turned to walk away, I heard the front door open.
“Well, speak of the devil,” Sasha said with a note of mischief in her tone. “We were just talking about you, Yael.”
Shit.
“Were you, now?” he replied with a smile. “Do I want to know why?”
“Not really,” I bit out as I cut across the room to intercept him.
“Some crusty old crone was in Myra’s room last night giving her the heebie-jeebies while she slept,” Sasha continued, undaunted by my response, “and we were trying to decipher her warning.”
Yael turned that award-winning smile of his toward me, but I could see right through the mask to the concern lurking behind it. “And what was the consensus?” The girls and Curtis looked at each other in silence for a moment before anyone uttered a word.
“We can talk about it later,” I said, pulling him toward the front door.
“Sounds like something we should sort out now.” I shot him a sideward look that begged him to drop it as I opened the door to shove him through, but he lingered there, unfazed by my not-so-subtle evasive maneuvers.
To avoid being overheard, he ducked his head down by my ear and whispered softly, his light breath tickling my neck.
“Would this be the same crone I watched you have a one-sided argument with the other night?”
“One and the same,” I said with a sigh, knowing there was no way to derail our conversation.
“What did she warn you about?” When I didn’t reply right away, he pulled away just enough to look me in the eyes.
“Should I be worried?” His face was so close to mine when his hand cupped my cheek; I opened my mouth to respond, but whatever I’d been about to say disappeared from my mind altogether as he drew his thumb gently across my lips.
Instead, I just stared at him with wide eyes and my breath caught in my throat as he leaned in closer still.
His fierce green gaze drifted to my parted lips. “Love…?”
“No,” I whispered, swallowing hard. My heart thundered against my chest the longer he looked at me like that—like there was nothing more important in the world. “But I think I should be.”
Standing together in the doorway of The Riff Raff, time froze.
An inconceivable moment passed between us that left me feeling helpless in a new way—one equally disarming but far more welcome—because the longer Yael stared at me, those penetrating eyes of his searching my expression for something I feared he just might find, the more my defenses weakened, waned, then walked right out the door I was holding.
And it seemed like maybe his had, too.
“What should we do?” he asked as his hand slipped down my neck.
“Because you know I can’t let anything happen to you…
” His thumb brushed over the hollow of my throat where my pulse thrummed just below the surface.
I watched his eyes, expecting a quirked brow or look of mischief to flash in their depths, but his gaze never faltered.
If anything, it seemed to darken as his face drifted closer to mine.
“Your heart is racing, little mermaid. Are you afraid of something? Of someone?”
Yes.
“No.”