CHAPTER 2

Amara

I was off the bed and against the wall before I'd finished the thought, my bag already in my hand, because three lives had built that into me whether I wanted it or not. I stood in the dark of my room and made myself small and quiet and listened.

Footsteps, in my kitchen. Slow ones. Not the careful, hunched steps of a man who thought he might get caught. That was worse. I counted the weight of them and came up with one. Just one.

I thought about the window behind me, and how long it would take to work it open, and whether the sound would carry that far.

Then a voice came out of the dark, easy and a little amused, like the whole night was going exactly the way he'd thought it would.

"You can come out," he said. "I already know you're up."

I didn't move... I stayed where I was and let him come to me.

He filled my doorway a moment later. Even in the dark I could tell he was big... not crowding-big, just there, taking up the space without trying to.

"There you are," he said.

I read him the way my father taught me, fast, top to bottom. Tall. Hands loose at his sides, and that was the part that mattered. A man keeps his hands loose when he isn't worried, and a man who walks into a stranger's house in the dark and isn't worried is either a fool or good enough that worrying would be a waste of his time. He didn't look like a fool.

"You're Amara," he said.

"Who's asking."

"Someone who came a long way to find you." He tipped his head, looking at the way I stood. "You always press yourself flat to a wall when somebody pays a visit?"

"Only when they don't knock."

That earned me a grin... not a small one, either, but a whole one, like I'd gone and made his night better just by standing there.

Then he did something I didn't expect. He crossed to the wall across from me, set his own back flat against it, dropped his hands to his sides, lifted his chin, and looked at me from across the room wearing my exact posture.

He raised one eyebrow.

"Like this?" he said. "Am I doing it right? I feel very ready for danger."

"You're making fun of me."

"I'm paying attention to you. People mix those two up all the time." He pushed off the wall and let the posture go. "In my experience, the ones who stand like that have been in enough bad rooms to learn that a wall can't stab you in the back." Then he looked at me. Really looked... not through me, not past me, but at me, like the looking was the whole reason he'd come. "How many bad rooms have you been in, Amara?"

The way he said my name. Not warm. Not a threat. Like it was a thing he already knew the shape of and was only saying out loud to be polite.

"Enough," I said.

"I believe you." And the strange part was, he sounded like he meant it.

Then the second one came through the door, and the whole room changed.

Where the first one's presence spread out to fill a space, this one's went straight ahead, all of it, pointed forward like something held ready. He didn't glance around my kitchen. He didn't look at the walls or the cold hearth or any of the things people look at in a room they've never stood in before. He looked at me. Right away, and only at me. The way you look at the thing you came for.

"That's my brother," the first one said, waving a hand at him. "He's friendlier than he looks."

The second one gave him a flat, level look that said he'd heard that line a great many times and had never once agreed with it. Then he turned back to me.

"We're taking you with us," he said.

Just that. No warmth around it, no reason hung off the end of it. The plain words of a man who had already decided and was telling me how the night would go.

I looked at him. I looked at the door he'd come through, and the window at my back, and the narrow stretch of dark floor between. I thought about Corvus. About this week. About the word manageable, and the man with the flat voice who was coming to collect me like something owed.

And then I said the one thing no one in this house had let me say in nineteen years.

"No."

The second one didn't move. But the first one blinked, like I'd surprised something loose in him, and then he looked at his brother with something that was almost delight.

"She said no," he said. "To us. Do you have any idea how rarely that happens?"

"It doesn't change anything," his brother said, still watching me.

"No," the first one agreed. "Probably not." But the grin had gone quiet now, turned into something closer to respect, and when he looked back at me his voice had dropped the joke. "Here's how it is, Amara. You can say no. It won't change a single thing about tonight." He spread his hands. "But you can say it. And I'd think less of you if you didn't."

I didn't run.

Running was what they were waiting for... the Omega girl bolting for the door, scared out of her wits, easy to catch. Manageable. I'd heard that word once already today, from the man who was supposed to be the nearest thing I had to a father.

So I didn't run. I crossed the kitchen instead, slow and steady, pulled a stool out from under the table, and sat down on it.

Both of them watched me do it. The first one's eyebrows climbed toward his hair. The second one went very still.

I laid my hands flat on the table, the way you do when you mean to be somewhere a while, and I looked at the two men who'd come through the dark to take me, and I made my voice as plain and certain as theirs had been.

"Sit down," I said.