Page 116

Pace stops, staring. “I named my bird after a keystroke. Do you really want to find out what I’d name a baby?”

I laugh without meaning to. A really bad laugh, too. It’s a deep, snorting bark that immediately makes heat rise to my cheeks.

It also makes his mouth form a slow, sinful grin, his hips rocking into mine. “Christ, you look—”

Bang-bang.

“Rise and shine, bitch!” comes Lavinia’s muffled voice.

There’s a moment where we both freeze, our eyes flying wide with panic, and then it’s a flurry of limbs as we spring from the bed. “One sec!” I cry out, throwing him his jeans, the denim still damp.

“Shit,” he hisses, stubbing his toe on the bed frame, but at my distressed glare, clamps down on it, hopping into his boxers.

“Hurry, hurry!” I whisper, chucking his shirt at him.

It lands on his head, and he yanks it down, muscles twisting.

“Verity!” Sy’s annoyed voice rings out, the bang louder now. “We’re ten minutes late already. Somebody—not naming any names—wouldn’t let me leave the house until we went eight rounds over possession of my jacket. Again,” he adds, “not naming any names.”

And then Nick’s wry, “It was the Archduke.”

“Archduke?” Pace mouths, jamming his foot into a shoe. “Recruit?”

I punch my arms through my robe. “Cat.”

“Fuck.” He angrily pulls on his hoodie, brows crouched low. “Goddamn it. That’s a good name.”

I usher him into the living room. “Go, go, go!” Only, I stop, spinning in alarm, because he can’t exactly go out the front door, can he? “Shit! How did you—”

But Pace is already pulling a chair to the middle of the room, jumping on it, and looking upward.

To the skylight.

I gape at it. “You came in through theroof?”

He bends before springing up, catching the edge of a beam and doing a pull-up that looks criminally effortless. With a twist of his hand, he has the pane of glass hinging upward, feet swinging as he works up the leverage necessary to vault his weight to the opening.

He glances down before pulling himself through, adding, “I’ll be watching if you need me,” before slipping away the same way he came in.

It’s in that harried moment as I’m scanning for any further evidence of Pace’s presence that I find it: two pages of paper, folded into eighths. It must have fallen out of his pocket, I realize, half expecting to see a parking ticket as I unfold it.

Instead, what I find is a damp death certificate, the ink fuzzy from moisture, for someone named Odette Delisle.

Under the cause of death is typed a short, unfeeling passage.

Complications related to childbirth.

* * *

“Isthat the hardest you can go?” Remy’s voice echoes against the rafters. “Because if that’s all you’ve got, we’re going to need a case of bleach to clean up all the blood after LDZ is done with you.”

It’s training day, and the Dukes are all working with the recruits. The closer we get to graduation, the less they’ll fight. Sy’s already pulled back. With the Bruin ring on his finger, he’s got nothing to prove. Nick would rather do his fighting out of the ring. But for Remy, toying with frat boys seems to give him a perverse sense of pleasure—one he’s passing on to the next generation.

With the sounds of the gym behind me, I stare at the door to my mother’s office, unable to actually go inside.

She’s in there. I can see her movements behind the slats of the blinds.

We haven’t spoken since the negotiations. Neither of us have made the effort. Things were too raw. Too humiliating. The pieces of my life laid out on that cherry wood conference table, signed and sealed by the men that rule Forsyth.