Page 44 of Feed Your Fiends

My doll’s so smart. She got her money and shattered my heart because that diamond is irreplaceable, regardless of it never belonging to me.

“Hale didn’t fire me, so unless you order a drink, you can’t stay at the bar,” she says with an amazing amount of bravado. And naivety.

I don’t give a fuck what Hale says. He may be Beaulieu and Libellules’s king, but his audacity to allow my queen to stand at his side where she doesn’t belong is an unforgivable blasphemy and his word means fuck all.

“Order a drink or get away from the bar,” she snaps. “Now.”

My voice is patient and pleasant even when I say, “Last chance, Dove.”

“Or what? You’re going to finish me off for good? Maybe a bullet through my head instead of glass through my feet this time?”

A shard gets stuck in my throat. It hurts, and it hurts even more when I have to explain, “I’d never hurt you, Elle. Never intentionally. Not ever again.”

“Then what are you doing now? What do you call this?” Her eyebrows fly up, but then they scrunch and…pain contorts her features. “Just seeing you hurts.”

“It doesn’t have to. We don’t have to hurt anymore.”

“We?”

“You don’t think it’s torturous for me to see you, standing just inches away from me but I can’t touch you?”

“You just did,” she spits, swiping at her cheek where I’d touched her earlier.

“And it isn’t enough. Aren’t you tired?” I ask genuinely as she stares at me with red-rimmed eyes that match my own. “I’m so tired, dove. Remember what you said? We could rest together, go home together and recharge.”

“For what? More chaos and fuckery?”

“Elle,Please.”

“You’re wasting my time.”

“If we’re together, no time could ever be wasted. It’s called bonding.”

“It’s calledloitering. Order a drink, or fuck off.”

I sigh so deeply that my lungs burn as the second-hand smokey air shoots from my nostrils. “Fine. I want fifty.”

She eyes me wearily. “Fifty?”

“Shots.”

“Are you buying them for the house? We’re already giving out free shots-”

“They’re not for the house. Just the bar.”

At her wrinkled expression, I lift my brows expectantly, and she sighs.

“What type of shot?”

“Line up the glasses while I decide.”

She just stares at me. And stares and stares, trying to figure out what I’m up to.

“I thought you were eager to serve me. Or are you just prolonging our time together?”

With an eye roll, she rolls her chair to the rows of glasses behind her. Gathering as many shot glasses as she can, she bangs each against the bar top as she counts to fifty. With a final bang, she settles the last glass between my spread legs, the last available spot.

“Which drink?” she asks, clearly irritated, but she’s looking at me. My baby’s looking at me just like she did every night in the hospital in her dreams.

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