Page 148 of Chaos

My eyes go wide as they bounce to Lux. “You called him?”

Looking torn between apologetic and defiant, she nods. “I was hoping you’d called him.”

I should’ve. God, I wish I did. “How’d you get his number?”

Her expression turns dry. “Your passcode is your birthday.”

My passcode isGrace’sbirthday, but point taken.

Rolling my bottom lip between my teeth, I warily eye Silas. Obviously, he knows. Even if Lux didn’t explicitly say why she was looking for me, it would’ve been an easy thing to piece together. I search his wrinkled face for the disappointment he surely feels. For anger, maybe. How’s a sponsor supposed to react when their charge fails? Yell? Reprimand sternly?

Hand you a cookie, apparently. A good cookie. The least crumbly, dry one in the pile.

“Whatcha gawking at, girl?” Silas snaps, but there’s no anger behind it—just that typical, curmudgeonly irritation I’ve come to associate with him.“Ain’t nothing I can say to you that you haven’t already thought or heard. Pick yourself up and get on with it.”

Lux guffaws. I make a similar noise. A much more watery one that matches a stuttered, “Well. If Grandpa says so.”

Grandpa says, “Fuck off, devil child.”

And then, Grandpa leads me and Lux to the circle of chairs in the middle of the room, politely pulling out one for her while trying to upend the one I flop onto.

Erica starts the meeting before I can return the favor. Like she always does, she asks who wants to kick us off.

Like I never do, I lift my hand.

A dozen or so shocked gazes land on me. I find Lux’s, drawing strength from it, before clearing my throat.

“Hi. I’m Lottie. And, uh…” I suck in all the breath my lungs can hold. I lift my gaze from my ruined nails. And I say the words I don’t think I’ve ever said aloud, “And I’m an alcoholic.”

I stay longer than I usually would.

I talk to other people, for once—I talk to Erica.

I go to the diner across the street with her and Lux and Silas, and the whole ordeal doesn’t feel like much of one. It feels okay, actually. It feels nice.

My cold, quiet room does not.

I don’t bother turning on the lights. Blindly, I shuffle towards my bed, frowning as I pull back sheets that smell suspiciously fresh, but I don’t question it too much. I just fall beneath them. Practically passing out the second my head hits the pillow, I sleepily reach for another, dragging it against my chest in a quest for soft comfort only to get fucking stabbed instead.

Squinting into the darkness, I fumble for my inanimate attacker, frowning at the unfamiliar, solid shape. I prop myself up and reach for the lamp on my bedside table.

A quiet, warbled noise rips from my lungs when light floods my room.

Because in my hand is the little, wooden horse that looks like Ruin.

With a single strike carved onto the bottom.

36

“Please,” the girl who looks so much like her, yet nothing like her at all, begs. “Please don’t give up on her.”

He’s caught between heartbreak and rage that she thinks he would do that.

He’s caught between heartbreak and rage that he wouldn’t be the first.

There wasn’ta man in my bed when I fell asleep, but there is when I wake up.

“Sorry,” a sleepy voice murmurs, the husky vibrations tickling the sensitive skin of my neck. A hand smoothes along the outside of my thigh—the same thigh, I realize slowly, that’s hooked over a torso. The same torso that twitches beneath my fingertips. “Couldn’t sleep.”

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