crazy reason, I decide to say something about it.
I turn to him, my arms crossed over my chest. "Are you always this much of a dick?"
Instantly, I regret saying anything. He shoots me a fiery gaze, embers burning behind his dark eyes. He's mad, but even an angry expression on his face is a thing of beauty. His lips are thick and full, his nose straight, his thick hair tousled and perfect atop his head.
"Are you always this much of a sweetheart?"
My cheeks burn bright red. "They're just trying to help."
"They're pigs."
"What did they do to you?" I ask him. I've never been impressed by people who talk bad about cops. Before that awful night when my father was killed, he was a policeman. And I saw how much he helped people.
Havok runs a hand through his hair, brushing it off his forehead and behind an ear. A dark expression clouds his face. "Back in Moscow, my father was murdered with a knife. The police were paid off. They did nothing."
I'm taken aback by the first meaningful thing that Havok has ever said to me. My instinct is to lecture him about how not all police are bad, and tell him about my own father, but I decide against it.
"I'm sorry," I say instead.
He turns away from me and crosses his arms, staring off into the distance as the police and the HazMat team buzz around us in the club. A couple guys in space suits spread a dusty white powder on the floor where the bloodstains have sunk into the carpet, and a chemical smell fills the room.
"I need to get away from this," says Havok with disgust. The man obviously hates cops, and nothing I say is going to change it. He steps away from me, toward the bar. It's far from an invitation for me to join, but for some reason I follow him anyway.
He goes behind the bar and pours himself a tonic water. He doesn't offer me a drink, and he doesn't make eye contact with me. I sit down at a bar stool anyway. I feel like I've offended him, and I want to smooth things over.
Or maybe I just want to spend more time looking at him up close. He captivates me like a movie star.
Havok slices a lime with a sharp, small knife and places a sliver on the rim of his glass. Then he starts to drink it, without adding any liquor.
"Don't you want some gin in that?" I say.
"I don't drink."
I'm quiet for a minute. I never expected that.
"I'm sorry about your father," I say over the bar counter.
"I heard you the first time." He looks right past me, watching the investigation unfold.
Damn. It's the first real conversation I've had with him, and I'm already fucking it up.
"My dad was a police officer," I say. "He died when I was in college. In a car crash. My mother died of cancer when I was two."
Havok looks at me briefly, then stares into his drink. "You have my sympathies."
I feel my eyes moisten, and I stare at my reflection in the mirror behind the rows of liquor bottles. "If that all hadn't happened, I'd probably be in a medical residency program by now." And not hooked on these fucking pills, in a dead-end relationship with an abuser. But I don't say that part.
Havok leans back against the rear counter and takes a swig of his tonic water. He doesn't reply.
"I don't know why I'm telling you this," I say, looking at my nails. I scratch at one of my cuticles and try to scrape off a fleck of old nail polish. But inside, I do know. I'm telling him because I have no one else to tell. No friends who'll understand me. And I sure can't tell Brock. He'd just use it as another weapon to tear me down.
And… because I feel this insane attraction to Havok, and a compulsion to get as close to him as I can.
Finally, Havok speaks. "We are all... damaged in our own ways," he says to me. He's not very good at consoling people. Then he turns his glass bottom-up and finishes the drink. He drops it in a bin of dirty dishes, and then ducks out of the bar area.
As he passes by me, he stops and lowers his voice. "Penny," he says, "Stay far away from me. I'm not safe." Then he walks away.
Around me, the noise of the crime scene investigators and