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I don’t need protection. I needhim.

One way or another, I’m going to make him see that.

40

RAE

MEETING REQUEST

Location: The Door Between Us

Time: 2 A.M.

Attendees: Lukas Lazarev, Rae Everett

Agenda: TBD...

Sleep is for suckers, apparently. I’m lying in bed, still wearing the red dress because I couldn’t bring myself to take it off.

Pathetic? Big time.

But there’s something about peeling it off alone that feels too much like admitting defeat. If I unzip it myself, I’m basically conceding that Lukas won. That his cold retreat worked. That I’ll just fold up my little rebellion and tuck it back in the closet where it belongs.

Meek little Rae, always doing as she’s told. Going along to get along. Submissive to a fault.

But what about the Rae I can feel myself becoming while I’m here, with him? The feisty Rae? The mouthy Rae? The Rae who saysmake meto dangerous men twice her age?

ThatRae doesn’t fold.

ThatRae doesn’t retreat.

I kindalikethat Rae.

Restless, I stare at the ceiling beams overhead. The wine I drank has settled into a pleasant buzz, warm and loose in my limbs. I’m no longer drunk enough to do something truly moronic—though I was for a little while there, all at the dinner table by myself, when several rash ideas crossed my head—but Iamdrunk enough that the voice of reason has been gagged and hogtied.

Don’t play games you can’t win, little girl.

Maybe Lukas is right: I can’t win this. Maybe the crocodiles in the moat are going to tear me apart before I ever make it across.

But at least I’ll have tried, right? Isn’t that worth something?

The clock in the hallway chimes two. Then two-thirty. Then three.

It’s sometime soon after then that a familiar, shuffling sound reaches my ears, just like the night before.

Footsteps.

They’re unmistakably his. Even if I didn’t know we were the only two souls in this house, I feel like I’d know they were his by now. I could pick them out of a stampede of buffalo—no one else walks like that, confident from the hairs on his head to the soles of his feet.

But restless. So restless. Just like me.

Because he’s pacing again.

Back and forth, back and forth. I can picture him out there, hands clasped behind his back, jaw thrumming, fighting whatever war is raging inside his head.

Then the footsteps stop…

Right outside our adjoining door.