Page 122 of Shades of Grey & Gold

A small break in his composure; I see it in his eyes.

He covers it with orders, as if instructions are sandbags you can stack against a flood. His eyes don’t leave me, but everyone else moves around us as he speaks.

“Gio, Rudi—hotel. The—” He snaps his fingers, searching for language like he left it in the alley. “—the best one. Rent the floor. Nobody up. Post the stairs. Two at the elevator. Two at the service door.”

“I want to be alone.” I repeat it, but I don’t raise my voice. I don’t need to.

He drags a breath in, makes it soft. “We’ll be in the hall. Or outside your door. And across the street. Wherever you want. But we’re not leaving you completely alone, Max. Cal won’t let me do that.”

Wouldn’t. Hewouldn’tlet Nico do that.

The past tense walks through me like a draft under a door. It ices everything it touches.

The fire doesn’t feel warm anymore.

I stand. The blanket falls.

Nobody stops me until the foyer.

He was here in this spot this morning—no, not today, whatever day it was where the world still made sense—running back through this exact space with a stupid grin and a quick press of lips because heforgot something.

That couldn’t have just been this morning. Yesterday? What day is it?I think to myself slowly.

Whatever day it was, the world was right, on its axis, spinning. And then it stopped. Or I guess it didn’t. Just me. I stopped.

There’s no surviving that,Nico’s words echo in my head.

He is gone.

Nico’s hand finds my elbow. It’s careful, gentle, but out of place. I look at it until he removes it.

“You can’t leave,” he says it slowly, carefully, but with weight behind it, and he means the building but he might as well mean the world.

“I can do whatever Iwant,” I spit back. “And I don’twantto be here.”

The rules ceased to exist back in that alley, I can break every one of them now.

He nods like a man agreeing with gravity.

“Okay. Okay. Hotel,” he tells the others, fumbling for steadiness with logistics. “Rudi, get the car. Gio, the kits. We’ll meet you in the driveway.”

“I said I want to be alone.”

“Respectfully, Max, you do not get to be alone with this, not completely. I can’t let you, he won’t—” he chokes on the words, coughing on a sob. “We’ll be where you tell us to be, but you will not be alone.”

I don’t answer.

I turn on my bare feet and walk out into the night and open the first car door I find and sit.

The leather is cold. My hands are steady. My ears are not. The ringing comes back and I welcome it, because then I don’t have to hear the people around me.

We drive.

I make them take the long way for no reason except the world keeps trying to shortcut toward places I can’t stand to see, and I’m not borrowing tomorrow’s problems, and I refuse to see the penthouse when he will never walk its halls again.

Out the window, the city moves past like a slow parade of doors I don’t open.

That I’ll never open again.