Now, she half closed her eyes and followed the lead of Lor’s hips, dropped her head back, arched her neck, and gave herself over completely to the music. The body had needs that couldn’t be ignored. It needed to run, to fight, to eat, to breathe, to move. There were other needs, too, which now that she was back on this world, surrounded by so many people with complicated feelings, had been making their presence known. She wasn’t yet ready to deal with them.

Nothing, no one, had touched her for a long time. It was difficult to process Lor’s body so close to hers, moving in tandem with her own.

So she pretended he was a vine and she was dancing in a great, dark forest, safer than most places because there were no upright creatures on that world, and the dance was only for her, to let her soul breathe, to revel in being alive one more day. In her mind, moonlight kissed her skin, a gentle, fragrant breeze rippled her hair. Abandoned to the moment, the beat, the freedom of thinking no further ahead or back than now.

“Aw, honey, keep dancing like that, you’re gonna get me killed,” Lor said close to her ear.

“I doubt that,” she said dryly.

“Figure it’s worth dying for. If only to get off on the look on that fuck’s face.”

She didn’t dissemble. Didn’t ask who. She knew who, and he knew she did. Lor was a hammer. He called it like he saw it, pounded words like nails into conversation and didn’t care what anyone thought of him. “And what is the look on ‘that fuck’s face’?” she murmured. “He’s behind me. I can’t see him.”

Lor laughed and spun them so she could see Ryodan standing on the edge of the dance floor, tall, powerful, dressed in dark slacks and a white shirt, sleeves rolled back, cuff glinting. Watching, thunderclouds in his eyes.

Once she’d seen him laugh.

Once she’d watched him fuck. A lifetime ago.

Their eyes locked. He took two steps toward her and she flared her nostrils, cut him a cool look.

He stopped.

Lor slid an arm around her waist, turned her away.

“Then why didn’t he find me?” she said. She wanted to know how hard he’d searched. How he’d reacted. If he’d mounted a rescue and how extensive it had been. She’d had no one to ask that wouldn’t promptly report back to him.

Lor wouldn’t carry the tale. They’d shared secrets in the past.

“Aw, kid, he tried. As soon as he heard you were missing. We didn’t know you were gone for a coupla weeks. Mac didn’t tell Ryodan right away.”

Jada cultivated fluidity, resisting the urge to tense. “Mac didn’t tell you right away that I went into the hall?”

Lor shook his head.

She was momentarily breathless. She’d believed they were all out hunting for her. Worrying. Moving mountains to find her. She’d waited. Living by WWRD: What Would Ryodan Do.

“Boss said Mac was chompin’ at the bit to go after you but Barrons vetoed it. Said if she followed you through you’d just keep running.”

True, she acknowledged. She’d been running as if the hounds of Hell were on her heels that night, determined to outrun everything, especially herself. She wouldn’t have stopped if Mac had followed her. She’d have leapt into the nearest mirror in the hall. But truth, the pernicious bitch, didn’t make her feel better. “Why didn’t she tell Ryodan?”

“Dunno. You gotta ask her that. But, honey, it’s not like those two get along real well. They sure weren’t spending any time together. Maybe she was giving you time to find your way out. Maybe she had her own problems.”

Jada did the math. She’d been gone five and a half years and they hadn’t even started looking for her until two weeks after she’d gotten back. She’d spent those weeks coldly combing the country, amassing her wandering army of sidhe-seers who’d come to Dublin for one reason or another, inspiring their loyalty with her strength and laser focus, implementing the plans she’d made wandering through Hell, trying to figure out how to regain what she’d lost by coming home. Years that felt like centuries had passed for her. It had been a single week for those she’d counted friends.

She closed her eyes, finding her center. The place where she felt no pain, only purpose. When she’d fixed herself firmly there, she opened her eyes, kissed Lor lightly on the cheek and thanked him for the dance.

Then she turned to find Ryodan, deliberately late for their meeting.

He was gone.

—

“I thought we were having a meeting,” Jada said as she entered Ryodan’s office.

“We are,” he said, not taking his eyes from the monitor he was watching beyond her head.

“I’d hardly call the two of us a meeting.”

“What would you call us?”

Us, he’d said. With interrogative inflection. As if there was an “us.” Once, she’d thought them Batman and Robin, two superheroes, saving the world. “Was that a bona-fide question with proper punctuation?” she mocked.

“Dani needed things to fight. I was the logical choice. Even something so small as improper punctuation kept her distracted.”

“What are you saying? That you’re not really endlessly irritating—you just irritated me endlessly to keep me occupied?”

“No need to go hunting dragons when the one right next to you keeps yanking your chain. And you had so very many chains to yank back then.”

She stared at him, but he still wasn’t looking at her. That was exactly what he’d done, kept her racing from one thing to the next, provoking her so incessantly that even when she wasn’t with him, she’d been fuming about how much he annoyed her, planning how to one-up him the next time.