Chapter 19 Assault And Kidnapping #2
"I went by the apartment this morning." His voice has shifted—Danny's serious register, the one underneath the barman's even warmth. "The door was open."
"I know about the apartment."
"Mila—"
"I'm okay. I'm somewhere safe. I'll explain properly soon, but I needed you to know I'm not in a ditch somewhere."
"You'd better come see me."
"I will. Tonight, if I can."
"The shift—take the night. I'll manage."
"Danny—"
"Take the night, Mila." Firm, warm, the specific combination that is Danny at his most parental, which he would absolutely deny. "You can owe me a coffee."
He hangs up before we can argue.
The room has the particular quality of a space being occupied by people who are not yet doing anything productive but are preparing to—the energy of a morning that hasn't fully established itself, the day holding its shape while the people in it find their footing.
Finn has reclaimed his position on the bed, sitting up now with his hair doing things that require absolutely no effort to look good, which is deeply unfair. Rowan has not moved.
I hand Declan his phone back.
He takes it, and for a moment we're both just—sitting in the same bed in a hotel room in Oakridge Hollow at three in the afternoon, the storm finally quieted outside from what I can tell through the thin lines at the curtain's edge, ten hours of sleep between me and the worst night my life has produced in recent memory.
He's real.
That's the thing I keep landing on. After twenty-four hours of telling myself to stop thinking about a man whose name I didn't have and whose face I'd never properly seen, the actual person is sitting eighteen inches away from me, and the scent is exactly what I remembered, and the grey-green eyes are doing the same thing they did in the courtyard—reading, patient, giving me whatever time I need to locate the next sentence.
I danced with this man.
"You're the one from the masquerade," I say.
"Yes."
"And Rowan found me on the road last night."
"Yes."
"And Finn—" I look at Finn, who is watching this exchange with the expression of someone at a very good show, "—was at Clancy's."
"Also, yes," Finn confirms.
I look at the ceiling for a moment, taking stock of the geometry of the last twenty-four hours.
Three men. Three separate encounters—a ball, a bar, a road in the rain—that I had no idea were connected until this moment in a hotel bed in the mid-afternoon with all three of them present and accounted for in approximately six square feet of shared space.
"The universe," I say, to nobody specific, "has a very particular sense of humor."
"That's one word for it," Finn says.
Declan says nothing, which I am starting to understand is his version of agreeing with something.
Rowan, without opening his eyes, says: "Coffee."
Finn points at him.
"See? That's the first word he's voluntarily said in eight hours. This is progress."
"It's a request," Rowan says. "Not progress."
"To me, it's progress."
"Get the coffee, Finn."
Finn sighs with the long-suffering quality of a man who has lost this particular category of argument many times and has stopped expecting different outcomes.
He unfolds himself from the bed with the easy, unhurried movement of a large man entirely comfortable in his own body and heads for the room's coffee maker, the bourbon-and-orange scent of him moving through the space.
Declan glances at me.
"Sorry about the bed situation," I say. "The sleepwalking was—I genuinely didn't intend to—"
"You needed somewhere to sleep."
"Still. Ending up on top of a stranger is not generally how I—"
"Technically we're not strangers."
He says it plainly, not with weight, not with the intention of landing something. Just—an observation. A correction. The grey-green eyes on mine for a moment before he looks away toward the window, where the light at the curtain's edge is doing its best.
He's right, technically.
We danced for an hour and kissed in a courtyard and he carried me when I was asleepon the floor of a ransacked apartment.
We have considerably more history than the word stranger covers, none of it arrived in a normal order, and I'm sitting in his pajamas—or someone's pajamas—in his hotel bed at three in the afternoon the day after the worst night of recent memory, and the specific quality of the air in the room is not uncomfortable.
That's the strangest part.
It should be uncomfortable. Three unknown men.
One night. Every sensible alarm my brain has spent the last fourteen months carefully calibrating should be going off.
Instead the cedarwood-and-whiskey scent is doing that thing it did in the courtyard—settling everything down, recalibrating the internal noise, producing the specific reassurance of something that doesn't need to be explained.
The coffee maker begins its work.
Finn turns from it, leaning against the counter in the small kitchenette, watching the three of us in the bed with the contented expression of a man who is exactly where he expected to end up this morning and is fine with it.
"So," he says.
"Don't," Declan says.
"I was going to say good morning."
"You were going to say something with considerably more content than that."
"I was going to work up to the content."
Rowan says, eyes still closed: "Wake me when the coffee's done, and there's a plan."
Declan looks at me.
"There are some things we need to talk through," he says. "About last night. About what comes next." He pauses, which with him is never filler—always deliberate, always the space before something that's been considered. "Come to the living room. We'll eat something first."
I look at him.
At the grey-green eyes that I've been dreaming about for twenty-four hours, now in the same room, in daylight, watching me with the patient directness of a man who has made decisions and is going to present them without drama.
Finn is already heading for the door to what I assume is a suite's living area, the coffee starting to fill the room with that sharp, grounds-forward scent of a hotel machine doing its best. Rowan still hasn't moved.
"Come on," Declan says. "Let's move to the living room and talk things out while we have something to eat."