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Rachel was quiet.

Dante got out of the car, shut his door harder than necessary, and came around to my side. “Then don’t.”

I looked at him.

He shrugged one shoulder, but his eyes were sharp on mine. “You’re no good to her like this. If you go over there tonight, pissed out your skull and halfway to a breakdown, you’ll do something stupid.”

“I do stupid very well.”

“No,” he said flatly. “You do reckless very well. This?” His gaze swept over me. “This is just pathetic.”

That would have annoyed me under normal circumstances. Tonight, all it did was make my chest ache.

Because he was right.

I wanted to go to her. God, I wanted to go. I wanted to vault that balcony, break the fucking glass, get down on my knees in front of her and tell her I was done with distance, done withsilence, done with every single careful line that had kept us apart all these years.

I wanted to touch her.

I wanted to make sure she was real.

I wanted too much.

And if I went to her like this, wanting everything, I wasn’t sure I’d leave.

Rachel touched my arm lightly. “Come inside.”

I stood there for another second, staring into the dark beyond the car park, to where enemy territory sat somewhere past the trees and the roads and all the miles I usually crossed without thinking.

Not tonight.

“Fine,” I said at last, the word scraping its way out. “But if anyone says something profound to me, I’m fighting them.”

“Noted,” Rachel said.

“Scrap that. If anyone says anything at all to me, I’m fighting them.”

“That’s a very reasonable thing to say,” Rachel replied completely deadpan, and then shoved me through the door.

Inside, the bar was a riot.

Someone had dragged in extra speakers. The lights had been dimmed low enough that the coloured bulbs around the mirrors stood out brighter than usual. The floor was already sticky underfoot. A group of prospects were trying and failing to start a chant near the dartboard.

Jenna was at the bar laughing so hard at something Heather had said that she nearly snorted her drink. Ant was arguing with Sunshine over the rules of some card game no one else appeared to understand. Even Bee, mercifully spared the late-night madness, had left behind one of her glow sticks from earlier, which now sat snapped and glowing neon green on the counter.

The whole place looked deranged.

Perfect.

“Vienna!” someone shouted as I came in. “You look like shit!”

“That,” I called back, grabbing the glow stick from the bar, “is because I am transcending.”

“No, mate,” Greg laughed from somewhere near the fruit machine. “You’re just pissed.”

“Same thing to the enlightened.”

“What happened to fighting?” Rachel murmured low enough that only I could hear.