Chapter 5

Andrew.

Meet me at the lighthouse point tonight. Five minutes. Please.

She almost didn't go. She stood in her room with the phone in her hand for a long time, telling herself all the reasons this was exactly the kind of choice that had ended her last life, and went anyway — not because some old, worn-down part of her still wanted to, though it did, but because she was done being someone things simply happened to. If this ended tonight, she wanted to be the one who ended it.

The point was empty when she got there, wind coming hard enough off the water to pull strands of hair loose from her braid. Andrew was already waiting, hands in his pockets, looking out at the dark the way he used to when they were sixteen and the whole world still felt like it belonged to them.

"You came." He didn't turn around right away.

"I came to end this." Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "Not continue it."

That got him to turn.

"End what, exactly?"

"Whatever you think is happening between us. There's no dance, Andrew. There's no version of this year where I—"

"Careful." Something in his voice had gone very quiet. "You're about to lie to both of us."

"I'm not—"

"You check your hip every morning." He said it plainly, almost gently, the way you'd point out something obvious. "Right side. Just above the bone. Looking for that stupid butterfly you won't get inked for another two years." A pause, and when he spoke again his voice had lost every trace of warmth it had ever had for her. "I always hated that tattoo."

The wind kept moving. Blair's whole body went very still.

"How do you—"

"The same way you do." He took a step closer, and for the first time since she'd woken up in this life, she saw the man who'd locked doors and meant it, standing exactly where the boy used to. "I remember everything, Blair. Every year. Every single thing you did to get me. And I remember exactly how it ended for both of us."

"Andrew—"

"Did you really think you could just wake up and be someone else?" His voice climbed, sharp enough to startle a bird out of the rocks below. "Sofia is alive right now because I haven't let you near her yet. That's the only reason. Not because you changed. You don't change, Blair. You just get better at hiding what you are."

"That's not—"

"I am not going to let you do it again." He closed the last of the distance between them before she could step back, close enough that she had to tip her head to hold his eyes. "Not to her. Not to me. I'd rather end you first."

"Let go of me."

She hadn't realized his hand was around her wrist until she tried to pull free and it didn't give.

"Andrew, you're hurting me—"

"Good." Quiet. Almost gentle. Entirely wrong.

She slapped him before she'd decided to. The sound of it cracked out over the water, loud enough that for one suspended second neither of them moved at all.

Then his grip tightened hard enough to bruise, and he shoved her back a step against the low stone wall at the cliff's edge, and the fear that went through her then had nothing old or familiar in it at all.

"Andrew, stop—"

Headlights swept the point before he could answer her. A car door. Footsteps that weren't hurrying, because they didn't need to.

"Let go of her." Alessandro's voice carried across the dark without being raised at all.

Andrew's hand came off her wrist like it had been burned.

Two men Blair hadn't heard arrive were already flanking Andrew before he'd finished turning around, and Alessandro walked past all three of them like they were furniture, stopping close enough to Blair that she could see exactly how little of the calm from his office was left in his face.

"Are you hurt?"

She shook her head. Her wrist said otherwise.

Alessandro looked at it for exactly one second too long, and something moved behind his eyes that had nothing to do with old debts or thirty-day deadlines.

"I don't know who you are," Andrew started, and one of the men shifted just enough to remind him he did, in fact, know exactly who this was.

"You put your hands on something that belongs under my protection." Alessandro didn't look at him while he said it. "That's the only fact that matters to me tonight. Walk away from this point, and consider very carefully whether you want to still be in this town by morning."

Andrew looked at Blair once — not afraid, not yet, something closer to fury barely leashed — and walked.

It was only once the sound of his car had faded down the cliff road that Blair's legs stopped agreeing to hold her up. She caught the stone wall instead of the ground, breath coming in pieces, hands shaking too hard to be still no matter how tightly she pressed them together.

"Hey." Alessandro's voice had dropped the ice out of it entirely. "Look at me. You're safe."

"I'm fine."

"You're not," he said, not unkindly, "and you don't have to be, right now."

She didn't cry. She'd promised herself years ago, in a different dark, that she wouldn't do that in front of people who could use it against her. But she stood there shaking on a cliff above the water, and let a man she didn't trust at all be the only steady thing in reach.

"That debt your father owes me," Alessandro said quietly, after a while, watching Andrew's taillights long gone from the road below. "Consider it paid in full as of tonight."

"Why?"

"Because whatever that was," he said, "it just became my problem too."

Blair looked at him — at the calm, controlled stranger who had just told a man twice his warmth to leave town or disappear — and understood, with the same total clarity she'd felt walking out of his office four days ago, that whatever had started that morning hadn't ended tonight either.

It had only just started belonging to both of them.