I hated puking.

Probably a lot of the suffering was due to the hangover, but I was blaming it on Trev’s head slam. Everything was his fault.

After crawling my ass out of bed, I went straight for the bathroom and scrubbed my face with icy-cold water. When I looked up in the mirror, I wasn’t surprised to see a massive black-and-purple bruise on my forehead.

In the kitchen, I found the fridge stocked with essentials. Some fruit. Milk. Bottles of water. Some lunch meat. A package of English muffins. And a bowl of leftovers.

Elizabeth must have come in after I went into town again yesterday.

I gave the apartment a quick glance, wondering if I’d left anything incriminating out in the open.

Didn’t look like it. I hadn’t had much on me to begin with.

After making my way back to town last night, I’d retrieved the truck with my bag inside it. At least now I had clean clothes.

I threw on a fresh T-shirt and a pair of jeans, and ran a hand through my hair. Good enough.

In the depths of a cupboard, I found a coffeemaker and then set out on the counter a bag of overpriced coffee. Hawaiian Sumatra, it was called. Whatever. Coffee was coffee, and it would do.

Once I had a fresh cup in hand, I sat at the squeaky kitchen table and pulled out my gun. I dropped out the clip, set it aside, and fieldstripped the rest.

Sam had taught me how to use a gun, back when I first joined the Branch. Those memories were still gone—the ones where I entered the Branch, the missions I’d gone on—but the one that had returned, and that stood out like a thumbprint on glass, was the memory of Sam giving me my first Glock.

Guns do funny things to people. They make the weak feel powerful and the powerful feel vulnerable. I was in the first group. When I’d first met Sam, I knew a thing or two about fighting with my hands, but I didn’t know shit about weapons. If I had, I probably would have put a bullet in my dad a long time ago.

With that Glock in my hand, I didn’t feel as worthless as my dad had made me feel. I felt like I finally had a sure way to defend myself.

Sam had taken me to do target practice in an abandoned train yard where we shot at empty pop cans. I was a crappy shot at first. I expected the gun to do everything for me. Point and shoot, kill whatever stands in your way. I was like a kid playing at being a thug.

After a while, after Sam showed me the technical side of aiming, the instinctual side of assessing your target, I hit every can I aimed at and the gun became a part of me, as deadly as my fists.

Sam’s number-one rule about owning a gun, besides the obvious “Respect the weapon,” was that you had to clean it after every firing.

I hadn’t fired my Glock in over a week, since Cas and I did some target practice, but cleaning my gun was familiar, and right now that’s what I needed. Something to keep my hands busy and my mind blank.

I was wiping down the recoil spring when a knock sounded on the door.

“Nick,” Elizabeth called. “It’s me.”

“Hold on.”

Shit.

I grabbed the frame, the clip, the barrel, and the slide and stuffed them in a drawer.

I still had oil on my hands and quickly wiped them on my black shirt before pulling open the door. “Hey,” I said, a second before I laid eyes on her.

In the hours since I’d seen her last, she’d somehow gotten hotter. Her hair was down, for one, when yesterday it’d been wound up in a ponytail. It was longer than I’d thought, reaching to the middle of her back. It hung around her face in loose waves, and I had the sudden urge to run my hands through it.

Short white shorts gave me a good look at her legs. A tight-fitting tank top showed off her chest. I could see the faint outline of her bra through the shirt and saw a flash of black lace in my head. There was no way I could know what kind of bra she was wearing, but apparently I wanted her in black lace. And that observation made my body do shit I didn’t want it to do. At least not right now at eleven in the fucking morning.

“What happened to you?” she asked, and gestured at the knot on my forehead, her eyes pinched with concern.

Without thinking, I ran a hand over the damage and winced in return. Dumbass.

“It’s nothing. Really.”

“Hmm.” She frowned and tilted her head, causing her bangs to slide forward and hide her eyes. “Do you want some aspirin for it? Does it hurt? I could—”

“No.” I shook my head. “I’m fine.”

“Okay.” She shuffled her feet, shifting her weight, her eyes doing the same noncommittal dance. Finally, she raised an arm to show me the deli bag clutched in her hand. “I brought you breakfast. Muffins. I hope you like muffins.”

I didn’t. I might have been borderline alcoholic, but I rarely ate shitty food. I liked my protein. A lot of it.

But I didn’t tell Elizabeth that. I couldn’t, not when she had that expectant look on her face. So instead I said, “Yeah, sure. I like muffins.”

“Good.” She stayed there at the top of the steps for several long seconds, until I realized she was waiting for an invitation.

“You can come in, you know.” I opened the door wider. Her lips turned up at the corners.

“Thanks.” She stepped over the threshold, her flip-flops slapping the hardwood. She brought with her a scent that was heavy on the flowers, but something clean, too, like rain. Smell was one of the senses I didn’t give much thought to. I had to rely a little more on gut instinct. But something about Elizabeth I’d noticed, something that stuck out, was that she always smelled different, and whatever she smelled like, it was strong, like it’d leached into her skin. Usually people have one specific scent that’s only theirs, sometimes diluted with perfume or cologne. Elizabeth didn’t.