Hazard saved his report and closed the laptop screen. “Are you wearing makeup?”

Mitchell started to cry.

“Ok,” Hazard said. “What’s going on?”

Mitchell cried harder.

Hazard grabbed a pen and used the tip of it to nudge a box of tissues across the desk.

Dropping his head into his hands, Mitchell dissolved into sobs.

“If you, uh,” Hazard gave the box another nudge, “want, you know, a tissue.”

“I—I—I—” More sobs. “I’m ok,” Mitchell finally managed in a wail.

Sighing, Hazard stood and came around the desk. He put his hand on Mitchell’s shoulder. He wouldn’t have done this for a normal client; he wouldn’t have done it for a lot of people, in fact. But he owed Mitchell. Mitchell Martin had been his first paying client, and because of that, a psychopath calling himself the Keeper of Bees, who was obsessed with Hazard, had abducted Mitchell, tortured him, and left him to die. It was only luck that Hazard had found him in time.

“I’m ok,” Mitchell said through thick sobs. “I’m ok.”

“Do you want some coffee?”

Mitchell’s thin shoulders shook; he was still just a kid, really. Nineteen, almost twenty. A kid who had been so smart he’d gotten bored in school, graduated early, and gone to college at fourteen.

“How about water?”

More sobbing.

Hazard stepped out of the inner office, hurried into the bathroom with its ancient porcelain fixtures, and filled a paper cup at the tap. He went back to his office and found Mitchell behind the desk, going through drawers.

“Where—” Mitchell was trying to say through his tears, pawing at papers and staplers and bottles of Wite-Out. “Where—where—” He kept trying to talk through the tears, but the only word Hazard could make out was where. And then he caught one other word: gun.

“No,” Hazard said, setting down the water. He took Mitchell by the shoulders and walked him back around the desk. “No guns. Sit down. Here’s what I tell Evie when she gets worked up like this: you take one big breath, and then you take one tiny sip of water. Ready?”

Mitchell was trying to say something through his sobs.

“Great,” Hazard said. “One big breath. Right now, Mitchell.”

To his credit, Mitchell tried.

“Now, water.”

Mitchell sipped and sputtered and coughed.

“Big breath,” Hazard said, slapping Mitchell on the back. “And now, water.”

They did it a few more times before Mitchell was finally breathing normally, and then he took a few longer sips of the water and wiped his face and sat back.

Hazard nudged the tissues toward him. Then, when Mitchell didn’t move, Hazard gathered a wad of them and held them out. “Am I going to have to blow your nose for you too?”

Something cracked then, and a weak smile worked its way across Mitchell’s tear-stained face. He took the tissues, blew his nose, and then leaned forward, resting his forehead on the desk. Hazard hesitated; then he set his hand in the center of Mitchell’s back and felt the tremors still working their way through him.