“Well, this isn’t exactly a vacation,” Ian said, answering a question I’d forgotten I asked. “Why? What’s wrong, Kori?”

“Is there something you want from me that you haven’t gotten?” I demanded softly, holding his gaze. Silently daring him to tell me the truth, if there was anything to be told.

“Well, yes.” He frowned. “Last I heard, you were still trying to figure that part out.”

Right. Whatever it was that would make him sign. “And what you need from Jake, it’s not some kind of game, is it? You’re not just playing a game here?”

Ian pushed his soup bowl toward the middle of the table and leaned closer, his gaze holding mine captive. “No, Kori. I know I joke a lot, and the truth is that I like to see you smile. You don’t do enough of that. But I’m not playing games with your boss. I came here with very serious intent. I swear on my own free will.”

And that I believed. But whether he’d meant to or not, he’d misunderstood what game I was talking about.

“What brought this up?” he asked, handing his half-empty bowl to the waiter who already held mine. I hadn’t taken a single bite. “Did Julia say something to you?”

“We don’t get along,” I admitted. “Which sucks, because Jake listens to her.”

“Well, I gave her nothing negative to report, so try to forget about her.” He smiled at something over my shoulder. “Your lobster is here.”

I made it through the rest of the meal without losing either my mind or my temper, mostly because the food—the parts I recognized, anyway—was amazing and when I got back from my own restroom break, Ian had ordered something with vodka in it to replace the second glass of wine I’d turned down.

I tried to tell myself that he was being nice, not manipulative, but that was hard to believe because in my world the reverse was almost always true. Even a second drink and a huge slice of the most delicious chocolate cake I’d ever tasted weren’t enough to completely settle my nerves. Julia’s interference led me to look for hidden meaning in everything Ian said. She made me overanalyze every smile, every second of eye contact. And she wasn’t finished.

After dinner, I ducked into the restroom one more time, and when I came out of the stall, she was standing at the row of sinks, watching me in the mirror. “It’ll be tonight,” she said, her mouth hardly moving as she dabbed gloss onto her lower lip. “He sounds like he’s ready to move in for the kill. So to speak.”

I squirted citrus-scented sanitizer on my hands. “What, you’re psychic now, too?”

“You don’t have to be psychic to see what’s obvious. When you drop him off, he’ll ask you to stay for drinks. Then he’ll just ask you to stay…”

She turned to leave, then twisted to glance at me in the mirror one last time, her palm flat on the door. “Don’t make it too easy for him, okay? Even a caged rabbit struggles a little before it’s caught.” Then she pushed the door open and left me staring at my own reflection, breathing too fast, my blood pumping fear and anger through my veins.

I tried to breathe, like Kenley had shown me. In and out, exhaling all the hate and pain. But this time it didn’t work. This time memories weren’t the problem, so burying them couldn’t help. If Julia was telling the truth, I was trapped as thoroughly now by my own bindings as I’d ever been by the basement walls. And knowing what was coming didn’t make it any easier to deal with.

You can do this. You have to do this.

I sucked in one last deep breath, then turned for the door, determined to cling to dignity until the last possible moment. But then the rage inside me crested and a wordless shout of fury erupted from my mouth. I whirled toward the sink and my fist slammed into the glass above it. The mirror shattered and slices of it fell everywhere, breaking into smaller shards in the sink basins and on the floor at my feet. And for about three seconds, I felt better.

Then I realized I’d just spilled my blood in a public restroom and had no good way to clean it up.

I snatched a cloth from the stack on the counter and tied it around my cut hand, then picked up the bottle of hand sanitizer and read the contents. Alcohol. I exhaled in relief, then upended the bottle and squirted a glob onto every single drop of blood I could find. I was still on my knees in the mess when the door opened behind me and the hostess came in.

She gaped at the destruction around me, her mouth open wide enough to catch a whole swarm of flies.

“The mirror fell right off the wall. Could have killed me,” I said, dropping the nearly empty bottle of sanitizer in the nearest sink. “I might sue.” Then I marched past her and out the front door to the sidewalk, where Ian was waiting for me.

He took one look at the cloth around my hand and lifted one brow. “Do I even want to know?”

“Probably not.” I lead the way into the alley again without offering further explanation.

“Do you find trouble everywhere you go?”

“Sometimes it finds me.”

I took him back to the hotel and he called downstairs for a first-aid kit, then refused help on my behalf from the man who brought it up. I cleaned and bandaged my cuts in the bathroom, then I stoppered the sink and dumped the bleach from Ian’s travel kit—no Skilled person travels without bleach-solution in a spray bottle, even if it has to go in the checked luggage—over the cloth stained with my blood. Bleach would destroy the blood enough to keep it from being used against me.