The moment you should’ve been there for.
“We’re tight,” I continued, “and she has a strong conscience. I think she’s been hinting to me about Laney’s true motives. She’ll help.”
“Too risky,” Ingrid said.
“Why?”
“Ellis is weak. If Laney bends her, she’ll snap.”
“Gentleness isn’t weakness. Ellis is stronger than you think. You got a better idea?”
“Skip the foreplay. Put a bullet in the bastard who hurt you. In anyone who hurt you.”
Then, with sheer brazenness, Inge looked straight at Tam.
My phone pinged. Thank God. Time for my daily T.
I left the girls to glare-fuck each other and headed for the bathroom. Nearly out of testosterone gel—I was burning through it four times too fast. I needed cash, quick. Needed to see a doc, get my bloodwork done, figure out why the fuck my T level kept bouncing around. And with my YouTube channel suspended and no sponsors returning my messages, my current income totaled a big fat zero.
I needed that job Armin offered. And he was Laney’s lackey.
Always at her mercy, no matter what I did.
The door opened sans knock. “Ingrid,” I began irascibly.
But it was Tamsin. She shut the door as softly as she could. Her voice was hushed, intent.
“Listen to me closely. You need to hear this. Truly hear it, Ren.” She took my face in her hands. “An abuser separates you from your friends. Makes you believe they’re the only person you can trust.”
“Tam—”
“I know this intimately. I let a man do it to me for years. Let him isolate me, render me dependent upon him. Let him hurt me, because I believed it was love.”
I gripped her wrists. “That’s not what Ingrid’s doing.”
“I’m telling you what I see. I’m afraid for you, Renard.” She leaned closer and whispered fiercely, “You can’t trust her.”
“She said the same about you.”
“Believe your instincts. Something feels right, and something feels wrong. Trust those feelings.”
Such a cisgender way of thinking. When her body told her danger, she believed it. She wasn’t subject to the whims of hormones and dysphoria the way I was. Didn’t spend half her life battling her body’s distress signals, trying to figure out which were real threats and which self-loathing distortions.
That was the tragedy: Being trans taught you not to trust yourself. To doubt everything, even your own heart.
“Answer me.” My grip firmed. “Do you know what Laney’s really doing? What haven’t you told me, Tam?”
That coded sparkle in her eyes again. “The Wolf never does anything by accident. There’s always a design within her chaos.”
Tell me your story, I’d said. The one where you kill a man.
“Listen.” Urgency in my voice, throaty and hot. “There’s something me and Laney did together. Something damning. If it ever comes to light, she’ll take the fall, not me. It was collateral, to make me trust her. Maybe that’s her real motive. I tried to use it as leverage to make her take out Adam, and she—”
Footsteps in the hallway.
Tamsin laid a finger against my lips. Not now, she mouthed. Meet me later.
Then she flung the door open and breezed out.
Ingrid waited till I’d walked past, too, before saying, “You should change your code name, Cane.”
“What? Why?”
“To fit her. Cressida.” In the dark, her smile was a curved bone knife. “Because now you’re her Troilus.”
———
My sleep was fitful, restless. In the dream—it was always the same anxiety dream—I ran from something I couldn’t see, chasing me through the tintype haze and mirror fa?ades of the city. But I was too slow. My legs moved sluggishly through air thick as water, churning. I’d throw myself onto hands and knees and run like a wolf, nails clawing pavement, till my brain sensed the lack of biofeedback and slowed me down again. While you sleep, the body enters temporary paralysis. Without feedback from your limbs the brain can’t maintain the dream fiction of running. That’s why you’re always slower than what’s chasing you. Why you always stumble, fall, feel the humid breath snorting against your neck.
I woke sweating and cold. The apartment was empty.
On my phone, an address.
We met at a bar on the North Side, all weathered brick and raw pine, smelling of the wet salted street. Tamsin rose from a booth and headed for the back hall. When I caught up she wrapped me in a suffocating hug, and I hugged back just as hard.
“I’m so sorry,” she murmured against my cheek.
“About what?”
“All of this. All the pain you’re suffering.”
“It’s not your fault.”
Her expression was sorrowful, sober.
“We must talk,” she said. “Candidly. No more games.”