As long as Kohl was after her and the Sentinel still had a price on her head, Teo and Raurie were in danger simply by association with her.

When they fell asleep that second night, she left a note that she was leaving, slipped out of the safe house, and for the next five days slept in her old spots: an abandoned warehouse, a supply shack near a bridge, the fire escape of an old apartment building. Anywhere empty and quiet.

Now, she was sick of waiting and hiding. If Kohl wanted to kill her, he would do it. Prolonging the inevitable would hurt more than simply facing it.

A block away, a man stood at a corner wearing an oversized jacket and whispering at passersby what drugs he could sell them. Without hesitation, Aina walked up to him and passed him enough kors for a paper bag coated in glue and a flask of deep brown firebrandy, then walked to her parents’ old house.

34

Aina had thought that, if at any point in her life, she decided to go back to the drugs she’d used as a child, something would rise up in her, protest, and remind her how proud she’d been for having quit in the first place.

But as she sat on the roof of her parents’ home with a bottle of firebrandy and clutching a glue-soaked paper bag with only the cold night wind surrounding her, she realized that nothing had ever been easier.

The only other time she’d fallen back to glue was one day four years ago.

Kohl had pushed her harder than ever in training. Afterward, she’d bought glue for the first time in years and planned to put herself into a coma on the Dom’s roof. She’d known there was a chance the plastic bag she inhaled from would suffocate her like the dead girl she’d seen in the river, but she saw no point in being conscious anymore.

She was there for an hour, and the sun had set by the time Kohl found her. She watched him with blurred vision, her pulse pounding faster than it should and her breaths growing short. He pulled the bag away from her face and yelled at her to move.

When she’d stared at him listlessly, he helped her sit up and stayed next to her until she recovered. Though all her senses had been fuzzy and unclear that night, she remembered the exact pressure with which his arm rested around her shoulders, the taut set of his jaw, and the way the moons shone in his eyes as he never took them off her.

His voice replayed in her head, whispering that she should never have done this, that he was trying to help her and she kept destroying her chances. He said he would stay next to her the entire night if that was what it took. By the time she finally recovered, he straightened and muttered that he was glad she hadn’t died.