“What the fuck?” I yelped.
The person beside me grunted. The girl with him yelped lightly as well. Everyone yelled out some kind of expletive.
“You are now one with your partner,” the speaker said. “You are now one with us all.”
Logan turned my hand over and placed it against his as if we were holding hands. My heart pounded, not because of the hand-holding, but because it hurt like hell. He laced our fingers so they were intertwined and even through the dark veil, I could feel him looking at me.
“That’s it,” she said, “My name is Nora. We’ll formally meet throughout the weekend and next weekend we have a little gala. No more cloaks!”
With that, she left the room, stepping back into the hole she came out of. I took the thing on my head off with my free hand. Logan did the same. I stared at our hands.
“Did you trade blood with your last assignment?” I met his gaze. “You know that none of this is sanitary. I don’t even know if you’re clean, and here we are swapping blood instead of spit.”
“Do you want to swap spit?”
“No. That’s not the point.”
“All of us are clean. That was the point of the lab work earlier,” he said. “Also, stop bringing up last year’s partners. They have nothing to do with us.”
For some reason, that did nothing to calm me down. I tried to pull my hand from his, but he held on tighter.
“Calm down. If you do that, it’ll go everywhere. Let it set.”
“Are you crazy?” I pulled again. “We’ll be stuck together if we let it set. Do you know nothing about how blood works when it dries?”
“Trust me, I know what happens when it dries.” He chuckled, his eyes lighting up. “Give it a second. It won’t dry. Nolan will bring us damp towels and bandages.”
As if on cue, Nolan showed up with precisely that. Logan uncurled his long fingers from mine and wiped his hand roughly before turning to me. I flinched after seeing what he’d just done, but he held my hand gently and wiped softly before setting gauze on it and wrapping it in a white bandage.
“You good?” he asked, as blood trickled from his own hand.
I nodded. “Do you want me to do yours?”
“I got it.” His lips twitched.
I could tell he wasn’t used to help, which made me want to help more, even if he was a huge asshole. I grabbed the towel, gauze, and bandage from his hands, pulled his bloody hand toward me, and pressed the damp towel softly, slowly, until the blood was cleaned up. It was a superficial wound, so I knew it would heal quickly. I covered it with the gauze and carefully wrapped the bandage around his hand, once, twice, three times, tucking the end in.
“There. Good as new.” I smiled brightly at the job I’d done on his hand, until I met his gaze again and saw the seriousness in his eyes. I lowered his hand quickly and held on to the bloody towel and discarded wrappers from the other things. “So, can I go now?”
“You have somewhere to be?” His voice was hoarse. I chalked it up to the cool air in the room.
“A party.”
“Toga party?”
“Yeah. Are you going?”
“Maybe. I have some things to do before then though.”
“I need to change out of this.” I tugged on my cloak.
“Let’s have a drink and then you change and go.”
“You told me not to drink.”
“That was before this. I didn’t want you bleeding excessively.”
“Oh.” I licked my lips. “I guess a drink wouldn’t be a bad idea. Maybe it’ll help with the throbbing in my hand.”
He took the things in my hand, dumped it in a silver thing, and turned to me, waiting.
“You’re going to leave that there?”
“They’ll burn it.”
We walked out of there and headed back in the direction I’d come from. Instead of going up the second flight of stairs, Logan walked around the staircase and opened a door that was beneath it. He held it open as I gaped.
“There’s a bar here?”
“The best one, because it’s quiet.”
I stepped inside. It looked like a downtown Manhattan bar but minimized for ants. It was that small. Yet, I could see how three people could fit here comfortably. It was as wide as the large staircase and tall. Tall enough for Logan to fit standing upright. He pointed up at the ceiling, which swirled like a staircase. Not the staircase it was beneath though, since that one just went straight up.
“I told you the original owner was a nutcase.”
“She must have been a huge Escher fangirl,” I said.
“Or a nutcase,” Logan said as he walked to the other side of the bar where the bottles were. I took a seat on the barstool across from him, yanking the cloak so it wouldn’t get caught in my sandal.
“This cloak really does nothing for me.”
“Really? Is it the bagginess? Is it the black? You wear black normally, so it can’t be that.” His eyes were dancing as he checked things off.
“You pay attention to me that much?”
“Hey, I knew your size, didn’t I?”
“Yes, and that’s creepy and weird. How did you know my size?”
“Guesstimated.” He shrugged a shoulder as he lifted a bottle of Jameson from the shelf behind him and showed it to me. “This okay?”
“Anything you give me right now is okay. My hand hurts like a bitch. I need a distraction.”
He placed two glasses between us, reached down, opened something that crunched and brought up a plastic cup with ice, and poured our drinks.
“You know, there are other ways to distract from pain.” He slid a glass my way.
“Let me guess.” I lifted it to my lips and took a sip, licking my lips as I lowered it. “You mean sex.”
“Not everything is about sex, Amelia, but I’m down for that too.” He lifted his glass. I lifted mine and tapped it against his. “Cheers. To being in this weird, yet loyal family.”
“Cheers.” I took another sip, relishing the burn as it went down my throat. “Here’s to hoping this family isn’t as dysfunctional as the one we have now.”
He lifted his glass and drank.
“What about your mom? Does she suck?”
“No, I love my mom. She moved away to Colorado when I was twelve. Ran away with her co-worker. I didn’t understand it then, but I sure as hell did later. My father was a bastard. An abusive, cheating, alcoholic bastard. He’s gotten better, but he’s still not someone I’d want my mom with. My brother is a bastard. I’m . . . well . . . I am what I am.” He took a gulp of the whiskey, hissing as his throat worked to swallow it.
“You are who you want to be.”
“You believe that?”
“Sometimes.” I shrugged. “Other times I think I’m just the spoiled little rich girl everyone thinks I am. Living in my glass castle, you know.”
He set his elbows on the bar, leaned in closer to me, and whispered, “I won’t cast stones at you.”
“I appreciate that,” I whispered back, licking my lips again.
“You’re beautiful, even in this shitty cloak,” he said, his eyes scanning mine. “Even with no makeup and messy hair, you’re beautiful.”