REJECT ME PROPERLY

The text arrived while Alina Argstone was saving a stranger's marriage. Not literally. Literally, she was saving a celebrity chef's brand, which in Halden Bay was worth a great deal more. Chef Marco Bellandi had been photographed kissing his sous-chef inside a walk-in freezer, and before the dinner rush was over, the internet had named the scandal *Cold Feet.* Alina had named the solution. It glowed on her laptop screen: three paragraphs of apology so sincere they made her slightly nauseous. Her phone buzzed against the desk. **Unknown Number:** *Your fiancé is at the Hotel Veyra. Room 1208. Go now.* She read it twice. Then she laughed, because the alternative was not laughing. Micheal was in Northgate for a sales conference. He'd sent her a photo of a hotel breakfast buffet that morning with the caption *miss you babe* and one lazy heart. She called the number back. *The number you have dialed is not in service.* *Go.* The voice rose from somewhere under her ribs, warm and lazy and very much awake. Alina shut her laptop. "No." *Go look.* "It's a scam. Somebody wants me at a hotel so they can steal my kidneys." *Nobody wants your kidneys. You drink four coffees a day.* Daxy had been awake for three years. For the twenty-one years before that, Alina had been the only girl in Hollow Creek whose wolf never came. People had been kind about it, the way people are kind about a limp. Then one night, in the parking lot behind her mother's diner, Daxy had arrived all at once, fur, teeth, and opinions, and hadn't stopped talking since. *You don't think it's a scam,* Daxy said. *You've been sniffing his shirts for a month. They don't smell like him anymore.* Alina picked up her bag. --- The Hotel Veyra didn't have a lobby so much as a cathedral. White marble with veins of gold. A chandelier bigger than her apartment. A string quartet playing to nobody. The doorman tipped his hat at her like she belonged there, which told her exactly how good he was at his job. She rode to the twelfth floor beside a couple arguing in furious whispers about a yacht. Room 1208 sat at the end of the hall. A room-service tray waited outside the door: two flutes, an empty bottle of Krug, and a plate of chocolate-dipped strawberries with every tip bitten off. Micheal hated strawberries. Alina stood very still. Her heart wasn't breaking. It was taking notes. She knocked twice. "Room service." "We didn't order anything." A woman's voice. Amused. Familiar. Something cold walked down Alina's spine. The door swung open. Micheal Jones stood there in a hotel robe, hair wet, phone in his hand like a shield. Behind him, perched on the arm of a velvet chaise and wearing nothing but his blue Oxford shirt, sat Penelope Rain. Her boss. The woman who had signed Alina's paychecks for two years and told her, only that afternoon, that her work showed "real promise, if you'd just learn to be less... much." "Lina." Micheal's face tried five expressions and failed to land on any of them. "This isn't—" "Finish that sentence and I'll put it in a press release." His mouth snapped shut. Penelope crossed her legs with great care. "Let's all be adults about this." "You're wearing his shirt, Penelope. Adulthood has left the building." Alina turned back to Micheal. "Northgate? The conference? The breakfast buffet?" "Stock photo," Penelope offered. *I will eat her,* Daxy announced. *Just a little. Just the face.* Alina tugged the ring off her finger. It slid free too easily. He'd bought it half a size too big and promised to resize it for eight months. She walked past him, straight to the side table where Penelope's champagne sat fizzing in a crystal flute, and dropped the ring in. It sank with a sad little clink. Champagne leapt up and splashed across the front of Alina's dress, a dark bloom on pale green silk. "There." She smiled at Penelope. "Now you have something borrowed." "You're being dramatic." Micheal's voice changed then, sliding into the tone he usually saved for waiters and his mother. "This is exactly why. You're always behind, Lina. Late to everything. Late to your own wolf. Did you honestly think I was going to marry a Latebloom from Hollow Creek and pretend I'd won something?" The room went quiet. Twenty-one years of being the girl people felt sorry for. Three years of finally being enough. And he'd kept that sentence folded in his pocket the whole time, waiting for the right moment to hand it to her. Alina didn't cry. She'd cry later, somewhere with better lighting. "You know what I do for a living, Micheal?" She lifted a strawberry from the tray, studied the bitten tip, and set it back down. "I clean up after men like you. And I'm very, very good at it." She walked out. --- In the elevator, her phone buzzed. **Penelope Rain:** *Given tonight's unprofessional conduct, your employment with Rain Communications is terminated, effective immediately. HR will be in touch regarding your final paycheck.* The elevator hadn't even reached the lobby. Alina started laughing. She laughed so hard the yacht couple edged toward the corner, and she was still laughing when her eyes began to sting, and she had to press the heel of her hand under each one so her mascara wouldn't run. *Rooftop,* Daxy said. "I'm not going to a rooftop." *Not to jump, i***t. To drink. The card.* The card. She dug it out of her bag. It had been waiting in her mailbox that morning. Heavy black stock. No stamp. No return address. Her name in silver ink, in handwriting she didn't recognize. Inside, one line. *The Crown Room. Tonight. You are expected.* She'd assumed it was a marketing stunt for some overpriced cocktail bar. The envelope still felt heavier than a single card should, but she'd been late for work, and then she'd been busy saving a chef, and then her life had caught fire. The elevator doors opened on the lobby. The string quartet was still playing. A bride in a white silk jumpsuit swept past, laughing, trailed by six bridesmaids and a photographer walking backward. Somewhere behind Alina, twelve floors up, a ring was sitting at the bottom of a champagne flute. She didn't step out. *Well?* Daxy prodded. Alina looked up at the elevator panel. *R — THE CROWN ROOM.* Somebody had sent her a text about Micheal. Somebody had sent her an invitation to the roof of the very same hotel. A sensible woman would go home. Alina pressed R. --- The Crown Room was all glass and midnight. Halden Bay glittered below it like someone had tipped a jewelry box over the coastline. The host took in her stained dress, then the black card, and his whole posture changed. "Miss Argstone." He stepped aside. "We've been expecting you." She stopped dead. "How do you know my name?" He only smiled and gestured her in. The bar was half empty in the way only very expensive places manage to be. A single stool sat open at the far end, right in front of the best view in the city. The reason it was open was sitting beside it. Charcoal suit. Dark hair. Broad shoulders angled slightly away from the room, as if the room had personally disappointed him. The bartender served everyone else with a smile and served him with fear. Alina sat down next to him. "That seat is taken." He didn't look at her. His voice was low and level, the voice of a man who had never once had to repeat himself. "By who?" "By the fact that I'd like to be alone." "Perfect. So would I. We can be alone together." She lifted a hand for the bartender. "What's the most expensive thing you have?" The bartender glanced nervously at the man beside her. "The 1926 Macallan, ma'am. Forty thousand a pour." "Wonderful. Put it on Micheal Jones. Room 1208." The man beside her made a sound that, in anyone else, might have been a laugh. Then he turned his head and looked at her. Silver-gray eyes. A face like a verdict. And behind her ribs, Daxy, who had not stopped talking for three straight years, went utterly, terrifyingly silent. Then one word. Low. Certain. *Mine.* At the exact same moment, the crystal glass in the stranger's hand cracked clean in half.