“Mmmm.” She shifts under me and yawns. “You can’t come at me with your seven-hundred-dollar perfume and expect me to keep this platonic, Rika. It’s devastating.”

I laugh. “Why are you sleeping?”

“Because some of us work nights.” She stretches her arms above us and yawns again. “And we have a long one ahead of us.”

Yes, we do. I close my eyes, her heartbeat filling my ears. I’d give anything not to have to leave this room, just stretch the minutes and make them last forever so Conclave never begins. She’s my safe space.

“Need a hug?” she asks.

But before I can answer, her arms are wrapping around me and holding me, too.

“Nervous?” she asks.

I don’t reply, though. If I don’t make a big deal out of this, I can convince myself that my nerves are just overreacting. I soak up her warmth, her body heat under her cami soothing.

She strokes my hair. “You’re too young for all this, you know?”

We all are. Yeah, I’m a twenty-two-year-old graduate student and mayor, and I’ve taken over a large portion of my inheritance, including businesses and properties, but we all have full plates. It seems the deeper we get, the more danger that arises.

Guilt nips at me. “And you’re too good for all this,” I tell her. Too good for all the tangles we bring into her life. “We love you, you know?” I still don’t meet her eyes. “You’re the breath that feeds the wolf.”

I graze my thumbs over her arms, where my hands are tucked under her shoulders, and hold onto her, because she’s the best of us. Still innocent. Still pure, no matter the ugliness that comes into her life. But no longer vulnerable. There’s not a time when she isn’t here for us, and I’m not sure if we’d be where we are without her.

I know I shouldn’t seek refuge in her as much as I do, but there’s so much going on, she seems to be the only one who realizes that I’m…

Weak.

When it comes down to it, I still feel like a kid playing at all of this.

I feel her swallow, and when she speaks, her voice is quiet. “Did I ever tell you about how I came to live at Delcour?”

No. And I hadn’t pried much into her life except to discover she was thrown out of her house when she was seventeen, and she doesn’t want to talk about her parents.

“I lived in the dorms my freshman year,” she tells me, still stroking my hair in a steady rhythm. “Living off loans, a scholarship, and a part-time job working the beer tub at a dive club in Whitehall.”

I listen. That would’ve only been months before we met, then.

“One night my roommate and I go out and party,” she continues, “have lots of drinks, and come back to the dorm really lit and horny. She calls her boyfriend at Yale on her laptop. They always video chatted on her phone, so he and I never saw each other or met. I only knew he was a genius and twenty-two, a senior.” She falls silent, and I wait. “We’re talking and joking around, both of us kind of flirting with him and making him laugh—which wasn’t easy to do, because he seemed a little sad. I can’t pinpoint what it was, but it was there.”

I remain still, waiting for her to go on.

“Anyway,” she says, “we got on the subject of whether or not it’s cheating if she sleeps with another girl. I look at him and her, and I…start unbuttoning her shirt.” She lets out a small, quiet laugh like it seems so silly now. “I don’t know when it changed from fooling around to full-on making out and undressing each other, but I looked over at his face on the computer, and his smile was gone. It was almost like he forgot how to breathe, you know? That’s how entranced he was. He barely blinked as he watched us.” Her voice drops to a whisper. “As he watched me.”

I close my eyes, listening as she caresses my scalp.

“We fucked for him on my bed, Rika,” she says.

I picture the scene she paints.

“The sex was a little boring—she was nervous and embarrassed,” she explains, “so I had to take control—but I didn’t want to stop, because I didn’t want him to stop watching me. I thought he might touch himself and jerk off or something, but he didn’t. He just watched and took everything in.”

My mind goes back, and suddenly, I’m sixteen again, standing in the catacombs. I liked to watch, too. Or listen, because Michael blindfolded me that day.

“It was so hot.” She goes back to rubbing my back, but I can tell she’s lost in the memory. “It can be so much more exciting when you can’t touch. I just wanted to never leave that night. Everything felt so fucking good.”

Her chest rises under my head as she takes a deep breath and sighs.

“But things kind of went to shit between Aurora and me after that,” she says. “She didn’t say so, but I could tell she was ashamed. And it made me ashamed, because it felt natural at the time, and she was making it dirty. Like she was bullied into it, and I was weird for liking it. And she was also suspicious, and I didn’t know why until she let it slip during an argument that he wanted to see us again. That he’d asked her if we would do it for him again.”

Despite the disdain from her friend, a flutter hits my belly for Alex. I love her, and I can understand anyone who wants more of her. It’s natural for Aurora to be jealous, but it’s natural for Alex to like being desired.

“So, in a fit, she finally agreed,” Alex tells me. “And I wanted to do it, too. I wanted more.”

There’s a pause before she continues.

“A half an hour later though, she walked out, they were broken up, and he was begging me not to stop.”

Her voice is thick with pain. Did she stop? Would I have if it were Michael? Alex and this guy aren’t together, so it either didn’t end well, or it didn’t begin at all.

“A week later,” Alex nearly whispers, “they were back together and I was the campus slut.”

I close my eyes again.

“A month later I’d lost my scholarship, and I hadn’t seen or heard from him. Aurora and I were both kicked out of the dorms because of our fighting, and my boss at the club was introducing me to the first of many of his friends who would help me pay for my new apartment.”

Jesus.

“Choices drive our lives,” she goes on. “I sometimes think about where I’d be if I never wanted him to watch me so much. If I’d never started throwing fucks around to whoever paid for it, because if I could never hear him tell me how beautiful I was again, then I might not care what I did with my body or with who.”

She tightens her arms around me.

“But then…I might never have become friends with you,” she tells me. “My path with you and the guys might never have crossed, and I wouldn’t have a family.”

Her chest shakes under me, and my lungs swell. I feel her heavy breathing, and I know she’s tearing up.

“I need Will back, Rika,” she whispers.

I lift my head, resting my chin on her chest and seeing her eyes glisten.

She purses her lips to keep her emotions in check, but eventually, she explains, “I love you and Banks and Winter and the guys, but…Will gets it.”

I stare at her, my heart breaking a little. Alex puts on a good show, but how easily it never occurred to me how much she was missing him. All the time Damon wasn’t around, Alex was there for Will.