Where Sinners Sleep

Brat Boy

She was still kissing him.

And it was soft. Softer than anything she had ever imagined, not that she had much to compare it with. It felt like every single romance she had ever secretly read late at night under her covers with a flashlight, every story where the girl got chosen, got held, got wanted. His hands were on her waist, pulling her closer, and she let him, which was the most shocking part of all.

This was her first kiss.

Evelyn had never told anyone that. It was not the kind of thing that came up when you spent your teenage years being treated like live in help. Sarah had pulled her out of school at sixteen, stood in the kitchen with her arms crossed and told her that they simply could not afford to keep sending her. Evelyn had known it was a lie the moment it left Sarah's mouth because two weeks later Lily got a brand new laptop for her classroom. But there was nothing she could do. Her father was in the hospital by then, laid out in a bed with machines breathing for him half the time, his eyes open but looking at something none of them could see.

How can someone be so alive yet feel like a grave?

That was what she had thought the first time she visited him after the accident. He was there. His chest rose and fell. His heart beat on the monitor in steady green lines. But Hugo Sonnett, the man who used to carry her on his shoulders and call her his little lawyer, was gone. What was left was just a body that forgot to stop.

She had wanted to be a lawyer. Yale, specifically. Her mother had gone to Yale, and Evelyn had grown up holding that dream the way other girls held stuffed animals, tight and close and a little desperately. Her mother had been a lawyer who argued cases that actually mattered, who wore her hair pinned up and her earrings small and gold, the same small gold studs that now sat in Evelyn's ears because they were the only thing of her mother's she had ever been given.

That dream died the day her father married Sarah.

Everything else died the day he had his accident.

But none of that mattered right now because right now she was in the arms of a complete stranger and it felt like something she did not have a word for. Not home exactly. She had never really had a home so she would not know what that felt like. But it felt like the idea of home. The possibility of it. A warmth she had not been told she was allowed to want.

Then his thumb moved.

Just slightly. Just a slow drag of his thumb along her waist where his hand was resting and the sensation of it pulled her straight out of her own head and dropped her back into her body with a crash.

He pulled back a fraction. Just enough to break the kiss. Just enough for her to open her eyes and find his already open, looking directly at her, green and completely unreadable from an inch away.

She kissed him again.

She did not mean to. It just happened, the way things happen when your body makes a decision slightly ahead of your brain. One more second of that warmth. One more second of not being alone on a bench at midnight with a sad discounted cake and three dollars and a Google Calendar notification that thought it was being helpful.

Then she came back to herself fully.

She pulled away and this time she meant it. She pushed both hands flat against his chest and shoved, hard enough that he actually shifted back on the bench. She stood up so fast she nearly knocked the cake over.

"Who the f**k are you?" she said. "Get your hands off me."

He looked up at her with an expression that was almost amused. Almost. Like amusement was something he did not quite allow himself to do completely. "My hands are not on you anymore," he said. "You moved."

"You know what I mean."

"I asked you to kiss me," he said, and his voice was so calm it was aggravating. "That is all I asked. I did not expect you to climb into my lap and make it a whole event."

Her face went hot. "You had a gun on me."

"And yet," he said.

She stared at him. He stared back. There was a thin scar running along the left side of his neck, pale against his tanned skin, and she noticed it now because she had felt it under her fingers without realising what it was. His suit was white and dark at the same time, the collar and one side of the jacket stained with something dried and brown that she was fairly certain was blood. He smelled like exertion and something else underneath, something woody and deep that had absolutely no business being as distracting as it was.

On his right hand, a ring caught the streetlight. Silver, with a snake carved into it, coiled around the band.

"Brat boy," she said.

He blinked. It was the first time his expression actually shifted. "I'm sorry?"

"That is what I am calling you. Since you will not tell me who you are. Brat boy."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. "That is not going to work for me."

"I did not ask if it worked for you."

He stood up then, slowly, and he was taller than she had registered when they were sitting. He took one step toward her in a way that was not threatening exactly but was definitely deliberate, the way someone moves when they are used to people stepping back.

Evelyn did not step back.

He took another step, close enough now that she could smell that woody musk again, and tilted his head slightly, looking down at her with those green eyes like she was something he had not encountered before and was not sure what category to put her in.

She grabbed his wrist, twisted, stepped into him and used his own momentum to send him sideways. He hit the ground.

There was a silence.

He lay there for exactly two seconds, looking up at the sky with an expression she could only describe as genuinely surprised. Then he turned his head and looked at her.

"How," he said.

"Do not try to corner me," she said. "Ever."

He sat up slowly. Brushed something off his already ruined jacket. Looked at her with an expression that was doing several things at once. "You look pretty sad," he said, "for a girl who hits the ground like that."

"What do you know about me?"

"Nothing," he said. "Yet."

"Not yet. Not ever. Just f**k off, whoever you are."

A low sound behind her. An engine. She turned to see a black SUV rolling to a stop at the curb, dark windows, engine running quiet and expensive.

He stood up, straightened his jacket with the automatic gesture of someone who did it constantly, and reached past her to pick up the cake box from the bench. He looked at it for a moment, the bent edges and the smeared frosting and the single candle still sitting crooked in the centre.

"Let's go," he said.

"Absolutely not."

"It is not a suggestion."

"And I am not your property. Put my cake down and walk away before I put you on the ground again."

He looked at her steadily. Then he pointed. Across the street, above the door of the general store she had just come from, a small camera sat mounted to the wall, its red light blinking in the dark.

"They did not catch me tonight," he said. "But they will check that footage. And you are on it. Sitting next to me. Kissing me. As far as anyone watching that camera is concerned, you are with me." He paused. "Do you know what these people do when they find someone connected to me?"

She crossed her arms. "You are just trying to scare me."

"They remove organs," he said, in the same tone someone might use to discuss the weather. "Slowly. While you are still using them. And then they sell them, and the only mercy in the whole process is that most people do not survive long enough to see the end of it."

"Oh my god, stop it"

"I am not trying to scare you. I am telling you a fact."

"You are being dramatic and I want you to leave me alone and"

"There."

She followed his gaze.

Down the street, moving fast under the orange wash of the streetlights, three figures. The same three. One of them pointed and she heard a voice carry through the quiet night, sharp and certain.

"There they are. She is with him, she helped him, get them both."

Evelyn looked at the men. Looked at the camera. Looked at the cake in his hand.

She grabbed his wrist.

She ran.

He made a sound of surprise behind her but kept up easily, long legs eating the distance to the SUV in seconds. She yanked the back door open and shoved him in ahead of her, physically pushed him through the door, then threw herself in after him and pulled it shut.

"Drive," she said to the figure in the front seat, a young guy in a plain t shirt who turned around with wide eyes and an expression of complete bewilderment at the sight of her. "What are you waiting for? Drive the car. Go. Now."

"She is" the driver started.

"I do not care what I am, drive the car or I will drive it myself and I have never driven anything in my life so I strongly suggest you do not test me on that." She twisted to look out the back window. The men were close. Too close. "Go. Go go go."

The SUV pulled away from the curb smooth and fast and she fell back against the seat as the street disappeared behind them.

She pressed both hands over her face.

"I just turned twenty," she said, to no one, to the ceiling, to whatever version of the universe had decided this was an appropriate way to treat someone on their birthday. "I just turned twenty years old today. I was not supposed to get killed today. If I get killed in this car I swear to god you are both dying with me." She dropped her hands and looked at the driver. "What are you looking at? Eyes on the road." She looked at the man beside her, still holding her cake, blood on his jacket, snake ring catching the light. "And you. You have a lot of explaining to do, brat boy."

He looked at her for a long moment.

Then, very quietly, in a way that she almost missed entirely, the corner of his mouth moved.

Not quite a smile.

But almost.