It wavered in the air until he realized I wasn’t going to shake it. He dropped it to his side.
“Alonso, aren’t we keeping you from something?”
Alonso faltered and then shrugged. “I’m observing patient Dmitrova. It’s all part of the job.” He grinned and wiggled his eyebrows at Katarina.
She smiled at him, a small, trusting smile. No one had ever smiled at me that way.
“Well, I’m here now, so you can move along,” I found myself saying.
Alonso shrugged. “I’m on a break, and there’s no one else I’drather hang out with here at Hallow. Me and Katarina, we’re tight. Maybe she’ll tell you in therapy.” He chuckled at his own words and peeked back at Katarina.
“You should go,” Katarina said, still maintaining eye contact with me but speaking to Alonso. She was growing more and more nervous as my expression darkened.
“What? Really? But I didn’t even have a chance to tell you how my date with Lael went the other night,” Alonso said, his tone playful.
Katarina’s eyebrows rose, and she seemed wistful for a second. “Was the dinner place good? I’m so jealous.”
“I’ll take you when you get out,” Alonso promised, stretching his goodbye to the point where I started to imagine stapling his hand to the desk to make him understand that he wasn’t wanted.
Alonso ambled off, pissing me off with his slow, deliberate steps. The fucker was going to pay for that.
Katarina sighed loudly. “Must be nice.”
“To date Alonso?”
“To date anyone... to have a girlfriend, or a boyfriend?—”
“He doesn’t have a girlfriend,” I interrupted.
She frowned at me. “What? Of course he does. He’s always coming and talking to me about her.”
I rolled my shoulders to ease my tight neck. The fucking wooden pallet I was sleeping on was doing a number on my neck, and now it was wound tight from interacting with a territorial male.
Alonso didn’t understand yet—Katarina was no longer available to flirt with. She was spoken for.
“There is no girlfriend. She’s an excuse to come and talk to you. And there I remember you telling me that you weren’t naive, and yet here we are.”
She shook her head. “You’re crazy.”
“That’s my line,” I muttered, and shook off my annoyance at finding that fucker flirting with my little stray, someone so far out of his league it was laughable.
Katarina rolled her eyes and returned her attention to the paper she was writing on.
“You’re industrious this morning,” I murmured, leaning over the desk.
Putting a hand to her side, she made a soft noise of discomfort.
“Ribs giving you trouble?”
“Nothing I can’t handle,” she said quickly, and then looked around surreptitiously.
I found myself fighting a grin. She was, for lack of a better word... adorable. From an avenging angel last night to this sweet and bright-eyed girl this morning. How could such duality live inside one shell?
“Can you look something up for me?” she asked, and passed me the slip of paper she’d been writing on.
“What’s this?” I stared down at her, perplexed.
“The name of the company that pays all the bills for Hallow Hall,” she supplied. She waited for me to respond, and when I failed, she huffed. “They have to be the ones involved in all of it. They aren’t making money off the patient fees here. Some of the patients aren’t even paying to be here, like me. They’re making money another way.”