In the back of his mind, as the parlor and its crowd of people seemed to retreat even further from his senses, he wondered if he’d had a psychotic breakdown. Maybe none of this was real? What if he were actually alone in this room and his brain had just sketched these people in from memory, figments of a hallucination that was even more frightening because none of it was under his control: He couldn’t stop this female from talking, and he couldn’t make them all leave rightthisminute—
Oh, God, now his mouth was moving again. What was he saying?
It must have been “appropriate” because she reached out and gave his forearm a squeeze before taking her leave. There was no time to catch his breath. A male stepped up and offered his hand for a shake—and Boone was amazed that he could actually clasp that palm.
Considering the pair of them were standing seven thousand feet away from each other.
Cartoon characters. Everyone around him was not just twodimensional; they were drawn rather than photographed, outlined in a simple fashion and filled in with primary colors so as to appeal to a young’s undiscriminating eye. They had no scents, no perfume or cologne, and their choice of cocktail, of wine, of seltzer . . . of caviar or canapé . . . of cigar or cigarette . . . was like a whisper at a concert, something that barely carried over the din from the main stage.
Beneath his suit, he perspired under his arms, and the collar and tie that had fit him just fine up on the second floor, before things had gotten underway, became now tight as a piano wire in a murderer’s hand.
He couldn’t breathe.
“—yes, but of course,” he heard himself say. Because you could use that phrase as a response to almost anything in the glymera.
Do you miss your father? Yes, but of course.
Are you keeping this house? Yes, but of course.
Is the will settled yet? Yes, but of course.
Whether he was answering truthfully didn’t matter. In fact, he could barely tell who he was speaking with, much less what they were inquiring of him—and that included when what appeared to be his fellow trainees and the Brothers and the other fighters came over to pay their respects and say goodbye.
As they left, he knew he couldn’t stand this one more goddamn minute—
“Boone. Look at me.”
He blinked . . . and finally saw someone properly. Rochelle was standing in front of him, and she was tugging at his sleeve with her gloved hand as if she had been attempting to get his attention for a moment.
Focusing on her face, he heard himself say, “I need to get these people out of the house.”
Rochelle removed her dark sunglasses. Her eyes were bloodshot from crying, and he was touched that she cared so much about his father’s passing.
“Come with me,” she said. “You need a break from all this.”
She grabbed onto his suit’s sleeve and pulled him through the thinning crowd. As they left, everyone stared at them—yes, but of course—because of their history. And if he’d been in his right mind, he would have told his friend not to expose herself to the gossip.
Especially given that she led him right into the males’ room out in the foyer.
Unchaperoned.
Rochelle shut them both in the onyx expanse and eased him down into the leather settee by the marble hand sink. Putting her Longchamp bag aside, she pulled a monogrammed towel from a hanging rod and waved it in front of his face, the breeze she created cooling his flushed cheeks.
Absently, he noted that Rochelle had no mascara on and her eye shadow was smudged.
You are so kind, he thought.
“Do you want to loosen your tie?” she asked him.
“It’s not appropriate,” he mumbled. “We come out of this bathroom with my tie off? They’ll assume we had sex.”
Shit, that was blunt.
“Sorry,” he said. “I don’t mean to be crude.”
“Well, I don’t care what they think,” Rochelle said sharply. “And if you do, you can always re-knot it.”
Boone shook his head, even though he didn’t know what exactly he was responding to. He didn’t know anything. The good news, however, was that he gradually came to feel like Rochelle was actually standing in front of him. And soon on the heels of that revelation, he started to feel his feet and legs again: The numbness that had taken him over receded from the bottom