Page 44 of Ruthless Knot

"Is that supposed to stop me from smoking?" I ask.

She spins.

The movement is pure ballet—some kind of turn that ends with her facing me, mismatched eyes locked on mine, lips curved into something that's half smile, half warning.

"No," she says. "You're supposed to do it together with others."

I tilt my head.

"More fun that way." She's backing toward the door now, one hand finding the handle behind her without looking. "Smoking alone is lonely as fuck, don't you think?"

The door opens.

She slips through.

Gone.

Like smoke.

Like a ghost.

Like the cotton candy sweetness still lingering in the air, marking where she used to be.

I stand there for a long moment, staring at the space she occupied. The letter crinkles in my grip—my letter, the one I was here to send—and I realize my hand is shaking slightly.

What the fuck was that?

The question bounces around my skull, unanswerable.

I don't do this.

Don't freeze up.

Don't get distracted by pretty faces and sharp tongues and the kind of instability that should send me running in the opposite direction.

But something about her...

Something about those mismatched eyes and blood-stained shoes and the raw, honest desperation in her voice when she saidletters are important...

I shake my head, forcing myself to move. Task. Focus. Send the letter, report back to Kai, don't think about the cotton candy girl who smells like home and fights like a demon.

The counter is ahead—that institutional divider between public and employees-only—and I approach it with the measured steps of someone who's learned to be careful in unfamiliar territory.

The bell sits waiting.

I don't ring it.

Instead, I listen.

Voices filter through from the back room—muffled but audible to someone who's spent years learning to hear things he shouldn't. The staff, probably. Discussing something.

Discussingher.

"—can't believe you took her letter."

The first voice is disapproving.Judgmental.The kind of tone that comes from people who follow rules because they're afraid of what happens if they don't.

"She was on the verge of crying, Margot." This voice is softer. Older. Maria, I think—the name floats up from somewhere, a detail I must have absorbed without realizing. "Said she hadn't heard from her pen pal in over a month. Amonth. You know how much those letters mean to her."