Page 139 of Tracking Snow

A ghost couldn’t have stabbed me in the back and through the heart.

"I still don’t understand. How is he going to ‘help’ them?" Geanie asks, using air quotes around the word help.

I rake my fingernails through my hair, agitation rising like a swarm of bees in my body. "I don’t know. I don’t know where they’ve been taking our people. Or what is being done to them. He called it a facility. He said they could help Red. Help all of them. He said he wouldn’t let what happened to Carolee happen to them."

Or Rosie. I told him how Carolee looked just like Rosie in death, and when walking my dreams, Three saw it too. My brain still itches in a specific spot over that.

Our people. My mind trips on it.

As The Seven has made very clear many times, I am not one of them. I’m human. Otherwise, I’d be stuck wherever Ariel, Cinder, and Goldie are.

The fact I’m not makes me sick to my stomach. I greedily pour another large glass and down the rum, feeling helpless. Rap doesn’t comment, just calmly watches me tuck away her incredibly rare booze.

I keep drinking because if I stop, I’m going to feel the soft press of The Seven's mouth against my forehead again. I’m going to see him bleeding on the pavement, white eyes wrecked, begging me to believe he wasn’t trying to hurt my friends.

I’m going to watch it happen all over again, the moment his body hit the ground after Red's wolf ate up his powers. I'll remember the way the world went silent except for the sound of my own breathing when Four died in front of me.

I shouldn’t care. Red was trying to protect her husband. Four was burning him, could have even killed him.

But my chest keeps tightening around the empty place his heat left behind. My skin feels too cold, my mouth too full of all the things I can’t say without sounding like a traitor.

So I drink, hoping the liquor will burn away my grief. Rap’s fingers keep playing in her hair. It’s something she’s started doing since Queenie came last night.

The seat at the end of the bar sits empty. Ryder's seat, the one he's claimed since he decided Rap needs a shadow, where he’s parked so he can watch the door and her at the same time.

"Ryder didn’t want to come in tonight?" I ask.

"I closed the bar." Rap's chin lifts. "No bar, no shifts, no security detail. He doesn't get paid to watch me drink."

"He offered to do it for free," Geanie says to me, ratting Rap out immediately.

"He offered a lot of things." She swirls her glass and studies the legs the liquor leaves on the crystal.

Whoa. Does that mean what I think it means? But asking about the boss’s sex life is very, very off-limits. Unless she offers it, which usually means a casual hookup she had out of town on vacation.

"He argued with me on my own stoop for ten minutes." Rap rolls her eyes as if she’s remembering what happened in vivid detail. "A whole speech about his bad feeling." She throws up finger quotes around the glass she is still holding.

Geanie perks up. "Was it romantic?"

"It was insubordinate." Rap knocks hers back in one swallow, and Geanie mouths romantic at me anyway.

"I have a gut feeling The Seven is working for someone else," Rap says, changing the subject. "And I’m beginning to suspect I know who that is, but the why doesn’t make any sense to me."

Before I can ask her to say more, a heavy banging falls on the door.

We pause and look up.

"I thought you put a sign on the door," Geanie says.

"I did," Rap says, sipping her drink unbothered. "They’ll figure it out."

The knock came as loud sonorous bangs this time. The air fills thick with tension as we stare at the door.

Still, none of us move to get it.

The door breaks with a tremendous crash and swings open, smacking into the wall.

Wood splinters across the floor. The warm night air punches into the room. The three of us jerk to our feet as white jackets flood the entrance, boots crunching over broken glass and scattered wood. Two of them are still holding the battering ram.