I watched shadow shapes shift faintly across the ceiling from the streetlight outside and counted the seconds between passing cars. I turned onto one side. Then the other. Then onto my back again. My skin felt too warm. My thoughts too loud.
And then it started.
Not thunderous. Not cartoonish. Just a low, steady snore that sawed gently through the dark and landed on my last functioning nerve.
I closed my eyes. “You have got to be kidding me,” I whispered into the dark.
I lay there slowly accepting the truth with bitter clarity: I was not going to sleep beside a professional hockey player who snored like a distant engine.
Slowly, I slid out of bed, gathered my pillow, and pulled the throw blanket from the chair by the dresser. Bento lifted his head from the floor as I passed, watching me with the smug, resigned air of someone who had anticipated this outcome from the beginning.
I made my way back to the couch in near-darkness, lit only by the weak silver spill of streetlight through the blinds. The fabric was cool when I lowered myself onto it. Narrow. Slightly too firm. My apartment settling around me again, piece by piece, as if it recognized me out here more than it had in there.
Bento hopped up a second later and circled twice before settling against the bend of my knees with a soft, satisfied huff. I let my hand fall into his soft fur, fingers circling.
No matter how much I tried to force the sinking feeling to go, there was no denying that I was in way over my head.
Before I could overthink it, I grabbed my phone and rattled off a message to Lo.
I have no idea what Ezra has gotten me into, but I think it’s going to end horribly.
The message whooshed away into the dark.
From the bedroom, the faint, maddening rhythm of his snoring carried out through the partially open doorway.
Tomorrow, I would stand beside him in front of cameras and microphones and pretend I knew exactly what I was doing.
Tonight, all I knew was this felt like the beginning of something I did not understand well enough to survive cleanly.
And somehow, despite everything in me screaming that this was a disaster, sleep still came slowly, reluctantly, with my cat curled against me and a stranger in my bed.
CHAPTER 10
ALOIS
Iwoke before the light had fully settled into the room.
That was normal.
What wasn’t was everything else.
The ceiling sat lower than it should have, the air warmer, carrying a faint scent I didn’t recognize at first—something clean, something soft, something that didn’t belong in the places I usually slept. For a moment, I stayed where I was, still enough to listen. There was no distant traffic bleeding through concrete walls, no muffled voices in a hallway, no mechanical rhythm of a building that never fully shut down.
Just quiet.
And the steady, uneven sound of breathing that wasn’t mine.
I opened my eyes and let them adjust without moving, taking in the space piece by piece. The partial wall that didn’t quite divide the room, the narrow stretch of floor, the lamp on the nightstand still dark. The bed beneath me shifted slightly as I sat up, the movement enough to confirm what I already knew.
Right.
Her apartment.
The events of the day before settled back into place without resistance. The meeting. The decision. The arrangement that had been made whether either of us wanted it or not.
Her.
I turned my head toward the other side of the bed. It was empty. Not recently vacated, either. The sheets were undisturbed, the space already cooled.