imagine the ideas whirling through his head.
“Keep telling yourself that.” The edges of his amusement frayed. “Do you regret any of it?”
“You mean the bargain that brought me here?” The Faraday loomed, and I cut between buildings to avoid the front entrance. “Ford is a good man. He deserved a second chance more than I did.” I suspected he meant the Midas situation too, but I played dumb. It wasn’t hard. “The coven has to be taken out, so I’m good with that too. Hunting them down would have landed on my plate eventually.” I shrugged. “I don’t see how I could have done anything differently and been able to live with myself.”
The matter of the hearts, however, worried me. There had to be a workaround that didn’t involve giving Natisha access to so much power, but I could afford to let that be Future Hadley’s problem. Right now, I had one heart to my name. Until I had the other six, I had time to figure out how I was going to pay the debt without dooming the city to a worse fate down the line.
“Night, kid.”
I waved him off and climbed the fire escape up to my old apartment. I didn’t feel like going in, so I sat on the metal grate, propped my elbows on the railing, placed my chin in my hands, and swung my legs.
The Faraday had hired an all-witch construction crew to make the place habitable again, but it took time to gut even a small box. Plus, the hall was wrecked, and my closest neighbors’ apartments had been emptied for the foreseeable future. I didn’t mind giving their spaces preferential treatment over mine since I was the bomb’s target, not them, but that also extended to dibs on the vacant apartments.
I had nowhere to go but up—to the penthouse—but it reflected Linus’s tastes, not mine. That was easily rectified, I knew, but I wasn’t in the mood. Besides, I was more comfortable down here. Moving on felt too much like giving up, and I had to hold on to something real, something Hadley, even if it was a charred shoebox of an apartment.
The clang of footsteps on the ladder below me was an unwelcome announcement company was coming for a visit. I could guess who it was and what she wanted from me, and the necessity of it made me tired down to my bones. It was getting harder and harder to frame answers in a way that didn’t come out sounding like I was blowing her off every night. I didn’t care about building a new empire when I was sitting in the smoking ashes of the old one.
That whole range of emotion had been erased from my hard drive, and I wasn’t sure how to reboot or if I even wanted to, honestly.
“Can we do this another time?” I was awful for treating her like a virulent plague to avoid at all costs, but I was fresh out of motivation. For pretty much everything. “I can pretend I listened to your spiel, and you can leave with a sense of accomplishment as you go about your night.”
“You don’t want to hear what I have to say?”
Every muscle in my body locked down tighter than Fort Knox. Had I moved, or even breathed, I might have broken bones. “I thought you were someone else.”
“Remy,” Midas guessed. “I’ve noticed you holding meetings out here.”
“The bathtub is too small for two people, and I’m guessing bathing with your employee is frowned upon in any case.” I kept watch on the horizon. That’s how I knew I hadn’t curled into a ball and started sobbing or crumpled into a boneless heap that sobbed or flung myself over the edge while sobbing. I was definitely picking up on a theme here, a wet one. “Are you here to tell me to stay off the fire escape?”
The first conversation we had alone happened up the alley, and it involved him warning me off using the fire escape as my own private entrance. How very circle of life that he was here again to issue the same warning in what might be our last.
“No.”
“Oh.”
The horizon didn’t budge, and I felt good about that. I was holding steady, and that was a relief.
“I have a problem.”
The response popped out of my mouth without consulting my brain. “I’ll help however I can.”
Damn it.
That was not what I meant to say. I was acting like a puppy who enjoyed being kicked