The slip was small.

That was what made it worse.

After Jordan left, the house felt thinner. Elena sat on the couch with Marcus’s hand on the back of her neck and the thick heat of him still inside her and the lower bruises aching under her sweater, and for a while neither of them moved. The heart-stopping near-miss with Jordan had burned through the last of the careful adrenaline they had been running on since Victoria found the bag. What remained was exhaustion and the raw fact that every external person still connected to their lives was now circling closer to the center.

Marcus’s thumb stroked once along her...