There was a small, brunette woman with fox-sharp features leaning across the bar. He’d never seen the person before, but Victor knew it was her—the woman from the strip club. The concerned Samaritan from the alley, too. And of course, most recently, the doctor who’d helped him escape EON. It wasn’t just the accent that Victor recognized. It was the look in the woman’s eyes— behind her eyes, really —as she glanced toward him, the mischievous smile that lit her face. If it was her face.

They were an EO—that much was obvious.

He watched as the shapeshifter took up their drink and headed toward him.

“Is this seat taken?” Again, that lilting voice.

“That depends,” said Victor. “The Glass Tower—was that the first time we met?”

A wry smile cut across the vulpine face. “It was.”

“But not the last.”

“No,” said the EO, sinking into the chair across from him. “Not the last.”

Victor curled his fingers around his glass. “Who are you?”

“Think of me as a kind of guardian angel. You can call me June.”

“Is that your real name?”

“Ah,” said June wistfully, “real is a murky thing, for someone like me.”

The woman sat forward, and as she did, she changed. There was no hinge, no transition—the brunette girl dissolved, replaced by strawberry curls and dark blue eyes in a heart-shaped face.

“Do you like it?” asked June, as if she were asking his opinion of a new dress, not a distorted reflection of the only girl Victor had ever loved. “It’s the best I can do, considering the real one is dead.”

“Change,” said Victor tersely.

“Aw,” June sulked. “But I picked her just for you.”

“Change,” he ordered.

The blue-eyed gaze leveled on him, a challenge, a dare. Victor rose to meet it. His fingers twitched as he took hold of her nerves, turned the

dial in her chest—but if the woman felt any pain, it didn’t register on her face. Her power—somehow it was shielding her.

“Sorry,” said June with a wan smile. “You can’t hurt me.”

A faint emphasis on the last word.

Victor leaned forward. “I don’t need to.”

He splayed his hand across the worn wood table, pinning her body to the chair.

A faint crease formed between June’s eyes, the only hint of struggle as she fought his hold.

“There are so many nerves in a human body,” said Victor. “Pain is only one of the possible signals. A single instrument in a symphony.”

A smirk fought its way onto the girl’s mouth. “But how long do you think you can hold me? An hour? A day? Until your next death? I wonder, which one of us will give up first?”

They were at an impasse.

Victor let go.