Anger flickered and died, and I watched her pupils dilate and return to normal in response. She’d had a difficult night. I could cut her some slack. “I didn’t say you were being noisy. I said it’s been quiet. I also said I’m glad you’re back. I’m sorry you had such a hard night with Nina. Is she going to be okay? Felix was . . .” I hesitated, my anger vanishing as I remembered his hunched shadow, as he stood anguished in my kitchen in a moment of lucidity, his eyes rolling as he looked for me to kill him as a way out of his new hell. “I don’t like undead vampires, the way they use people like tissue and discard them, but seeing him broken like that and losing his mind?” I looked up, seeing her own pain. “I feel bad for him.”

Ivy’s eyes were haunted as she watched her fingers encircle her cup.

“Hey, ah, I’m going to check out the perimeter, okay?” Jenks said, then darted off through the drive-up window, scaring the crap out of the barista managing it. Though the sun was bright this morning, it was too cold for him to be outside long. He’d be back.

Chicken, I thought, but I didn’t blame him. Ivy exhaled, still avoiding me. Either she would talk or she wouldn’t.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have interfered,” she said, and I strained to hear her over the noise of “background” music and conversation. Ivy’s eyes came up, heartache mirrored in them. “People suffered for me last night, good people. Not just my friends at Piscary’s who fed that monster, but the ones at the safe house, too. Nina agreed to this arrangement with Felix. Who am I to try to help her?”

I leaned over the table, and Ivy flinched as my hand covered hers. The cup was long cold, but her fingers were warm. “Nina did not agree to this. She bought into a lie, one coated in power and euphoria. People suffered for her, but they did it knowing it was to help one of their own come back. If Nina can survive, if you can bring her back from where Felix filled her with ecstasy and then dumped her, then there’s hope for them. That’s why they took your pain. You gave them hope that they might survive, too.”

Ivy looked away in guilt, and I remembered the wild abandonment I’d seen time and again at Piscary’s under Kisten’s management, living vampires going there to lie to themselves that life was good and they had the world on a string. They needed knowing that there was a way out, perhaps more than they knew.