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“Yeah,” Tai said. He gave Jacqueline a short nod, to which she rolled her eyes. Then he walked away.

For a moment Ryker wondered how this would go. He waited for the old shame, the self-doubt, the confusion and hurt. But now he was only curious. Was she here to try to suck him back into her world again, had she given up on that, did she plan to take any sort of responsibility for sending people to murder him? He approached his car, stopped a few feet away, and crossed his arms loosely over his chest.

“Well?” he said.

She blinked. “Well, what?”

“No. This meeting was your idea. You have five minutes to say whatever you came to say.”

“That’s not fair, Ryker. I came here to apologize.”

“I heard the ADA elected not to charge you with conspiracy. I assume the detectives ignored my advice that a vampire should conduct your interview.”

“Not entirely. There were two detectives, partners. One vampire, one human.”

“Okay.” She was a better liar than he’d thought.

“I explained that the whole thing was a prank, and no one was ever supposed to get hurt. I was very credible. That’s how they both described me, you know. Very credible.”

“If they only knew.”

Her laugh was loud, but she broke it off when she realized he wasn’t reacting. She took a long moment to stare at him, and Ryker stared right back.

“Even the vampire liked me by the end of my interview,” she said. “He advised me to work on awareness of consequences. I promised I would. He found me very attractive, by the way.”

At the end of everything she’d ever done or tried to do to him, she was simply flat. No interest beyond herself, no concern beyond her image in the moment.

In the flash of an instant, Ryker thought about the things that motivated the people he knew and loved—about Claire working to create a place of community for vampires, Nova writing grants to help preserve the natural world she loved, Logan putting so much care and art into his dishes, Philippa turning her salon chair into a place of self-care and safety, Mackey coping with uncomfortable proximity to humans in order to save their lives. And then there was Tai, battling to make the humans around him safe from himself. There was Leslie, holding tight to the peace her soul loved, not so she could keep it all to herself but so she could offer it in handfuls to him, show him the great worth of simplicity and home and rest. There was Dad stepping into a place of power so he could listen well to the people who’dprivileged him with that power, and there was Mama battling for victims of all kinds, forcing the bad guys to face their reckoning.

Yeah, sometimes Ryker got up in his head; sometimes he got lost in the drive to achieve, to prove he could come out on top. But ultimately he valued a lot of the same things. Things his friends and family had taught him, and things that were born into the core of who he was.

Now here she stood in front of him, the woman who had made him doubt himself and, at one time or another, all of them. And she looked empty.

“Why did you do it?” he said.

“I was bored.”

“With what, your hair?”

She flipped her shiny brown locks over one shoulder just as she’d flipped them on the conspiring video a week ago, when they were dyed a shoddy imitation of Leslie’s gorgeous silver. “Ihatedthat look. I made it look decent, but on average women it’s awful.”

“Did you want to complicate my life? Was that all?”

“I told you, I was bored. I wanted to see what would happen to her.”

“To…her?”

Jacqueline rolled her eyes. “If your life was threatened because of your job. What would Toymaker do? Would she record an embarrassing hysterical reel for her socials? Would she break up with you for being too much trouble?”

Too much trouble. How those words used to bite into him, but now they’d been defanged. Because he was steel? Maybe not. Maybe he’d never been steel at all. When he thought of the woman he loved, waiting in her snug mountain bungalow for him to land in Nashville, waiting to kiss him and touch him as no one else ever had… The roaring anticipation that spread from hiscore all the way to his fingertips wouldn’t be possible in a man made of steel.

And now, when he wasn’t trying to solve the puzzle, the puzzle solved itself.

“You were here,” he said. “The day Tai congratulated me about Angstrom. You were here, deliberately listening to everything we said.”

“Are you just now figuring that out?”

He made a show of taking out his phone and checking the time, then shoving it back into the pocket of his gym pants. “It’s been six minutes, so you got an extra one. Get off my car.”