“Drink.” He sits beside me and presses the bottle into my hands. “You’ll thank me in the morning.”
“I’ll never thank you.”
“Okay.”
“Stop saying ‘okay.’”
“Okay.”
Maddening, infuriating, asshole. He stares until I take the water and start drinking.
“Good girl.”
Shit. Shit, shit, shit. I was not prepared for what those words from his lips would do to me. I drink more and look anywhere but at him.
He leaves again, and I’m too fucking tired to care if he’s raiding my pantry or stealing my leftovers, so I lie back down. After a short while, I hear him cleaning up the glass.
This is how I know I’m fucking drunk off my ass. In this weird drunk reality, Lucius Vinemont is in my apartment. He’s not trying to kill me. In fact, he’s doctoring my foot, making sure I hydrate, and cleaning up my mess. Yep, in real life, I’m probably passed out on the bathroom floor in a pool of my own vomit.
“Go back to sleep.”
“Whoa, where’d you come from?” I look up to find him leaning on my bedroom door frame.
“Been here for two hours now, Evie. You’ve been snoring for the past hour of it. Then you stopped. What woke you? A dream?”
What? “I don’t snore.”
“Okay.”
“Shut up.” I turn my head to the side and close my eyes.
“Evie.” Lucius’s voice. That mix of silken and deadly and deep.
“What?” I keep my eyes shut tight as my head starts to pound.
“Sun’s up. Your hangover cocktail is beside you. Try not to get into any more trouble, would you darlin’? And lockup when I leave.” Footsteps recede, and then I hear my front door close.
I crack my eyes open and quickly shut them again. Did … Did Lucius spend the night in my apartment? Holy shit. I press my palms to my forehead and groan as I remember bits and pieces of last night. I made mistake after mistake, the biggest one being that I let Lucius in. What was I thinking?
My foot aches dully, but my head is worse. I take a peek at my nightstand and find a neat line of pills and a glass with some sort of concoction in it. Trusting it seems unwise of me. Then again, Lucius was here all night and didn’t so much as touch me after I got into bed.
In fact … I slept better than I have in a long time. But that must’ve just been the booze. Had to be. Like Lucius said, I’m a lightweight.
I roll over and grab the pills, pop them into my mouth, then drink them down. When I lie back, the room swims for a second, then settles down. It takes a while, but my thoughts finally start to coalesce into some semblance of sense. And then it hits me all over again—the party is tonight.
Screaming and crying aren’t going to stop it from happening. Nothing will. I sit up and breathe through a few pounding aches in my skull that fade slowly.
I still can’t believe Lucius was here all night. What did he do? Sleep? I stand up, his tie still wrapped tightly around my injured foot, and walk into the living room. The couch doesn’t look particularly rumpled. No, he didn’t sleep.
Turning back around, I walk into my bedroom and stop. My heart does a stutter step, and I blink hard to make sure I’m seeing clearly. I am. I rush to my dresser and pull open the top drawer.
The black envelope is there, in the same place I’d left it. But I know. I know he searched through my things and found it. Maybe that’s the reason he came here all along. He just got lucky that I was drunk enough to let him in without a fight. God, I’m making the same mistakes. That foolish little girl inside me is still pushing me in the wrong direction.
I back away and sit on my bed as the early rays of sunlight fight their way through my blinds.
My gaze travels back to my dresser, to that infernal invitation written in perfect calligraphy. He’s seen the black paper, read it all.
He knows. He knows and left me alive. The silly little girl tries to tell me that Lucius doesn’t want to harm me. That Lucius must know that I want no part of the Acquisition.
Maybe that’s true, but I still can’t trust him. And now, on top of everything, I have to wonder what Lucius is going to do with that information.
Knowing him, this party will turn into a massacre, a bloodletting at the very least. Even with that knowledge, I can’t back out. Not if I want to live. I could warn them, let them know that the event is compromised. But that would lead to more questions, and eventually to Lucius. I have zero doubts they’d snuff me out with prejudice if they even suspected I’d somehow leaked it to a Vinemont. And on top of that … I don’t want to alert them. They are evil people who will stop at nothing to enforce their will on the world. I’ll never help them. Not willingly.