Or you have a ridiculously high one, Indy would retort. You can make a friend, Bristol. It’s not a lifetime commitment unless you want it to be. It also won’t kill you.
Bristol, as ever, had remained unconvinced. And also lonely, by Indy’s reckoning, though she would die before she admitted it.
But Bristol hadn’t been on Indy’s mind that night in Budapest. She’d danced and danced. At some point she’d decided she needed a little bit of fresh air after all that dancing and she’d wound her way through the crowd, buzzing along nicely on the music and the beat she could feel deep inside her.
Indy had slipped out the side of the warehouse, and never knew, later, what made her wander away from the groups of people doing the same thing she was. Either taking a breath from the party inside or carrying on their own festivities out in the summer dark. She’d wandered away from the clusters of them, half wondering if she could see the stars in this part of Budapest. If she got away from those party lights and all the lit-up cell phone screens. If she’d had another motivation, she couldn’t remember it.
She hadn’t known what she was walking into until it was too late.
Scary men arguing in a dark alley. A gun in her face.
Then Indy on her knees on the pavement, hard, her heart pounding so wildly it had made her feel ill.
In that moment, she’d been certain that every warning she’d ever been given was about to come true. With a vengeance. Every dire prediction anyone had made about the way she lived, the way she was, was about to happen to her after all.
You don’t think before you act, her sister had said a thousand times.
I hate to think of you getting yourself into trouble, her mother had said more than once, and all because your head is always in the clouds.
And her father had frowned at her, the day he had dropped her off at the airport. Looking far more serious than he usually did. The world isn’t a magical place just because you want it to be, honey. Be smart out there.
Indy had not been smart. She had been the opposite of smart, in fact, and had reveled in how little care she’d taken because it made for a better experience and then a better story to tell. And she had known, then, that she was going to pay for that in some out-of-the-way alley where no one would ever find her if they left her for dead.
Assuming they left her.
But that wasn’t what happened.
She shuddered now, her hands cupped around her coffee. Far away from Budapest in a crowded café in lovely, fairytale Prague, two years later.
Still, Indy shuddered, because she could remember too well her first sight of him. That face of his, so beautiful it was cruel as he’d stared down at her in disbelief. She’d noticed that face, like the blade of a hatchet, piercing and inevitable. She’d had the impression of a tall, well-built, dark-haired man, but he’d had the eyes of a poet, intense and yet almost dreamy as he’d gazed at her there on her knees.
Their eyes had met down the length of the gun he’d held, pointed directly at her forehead.
And she’d had no doubt whatsoever that he knew how to use it.
He asked her something in a language she didn’t understand. Hungarian, she’d thought, which would make sense as she had been in Hungary. Indy had shaken her head, almost smiling in an out-of-body sort of way, because at least if she was going to meet a brutal end it would be at the hands of a man who looked like an angel.
A fallen one. And fallen hard.
That he was dangerous, brutal and powerful at once, would have been obvious even if he wasn’t holding a gun. Right in her face.
Even with those too-blue eyes.
What are you doing here? he had asked her in English, after trying a couple of other languages and getting nothing. His accent had made the words seem like liquid, swirling around her and washing through her. A new, potent heat.
I have no idea, she had replied, honestly.
And for a long moment, possibly a lifetime, she had been aware only of him. That look on his overwhelming face. That gaze of his that made her want to cry. The electric something that arced between them, even with concrete digging into her bare knees and her hands in the air.
For that little while, nothing else existed.
Nothing.
He had muttered something she’d understood was profane, even if she hadn’t understood it.
And then everything got fast.
Indy remembered it like a blur, though she knew that each action had been precise. Surgical.
He had looked at her. She’d seen something in his gaze, something that had made her breath catch.
Something that had gone through her like an earthquake.
Then he had turned and taken down the other three men standing there with him. She had hardly had time to gasp, to shake, to react. She’d thought of poetry again, all of it lethal, as he’d spun around with blistering speed and laid all three men out flat.
Two kicks, one punch.
Like he was an action star.
Come, he’d said to her when they were all slumped on the ground. You cannot be here.
He’d reached down to pull her up to her feet with a possessive grip on her arm.
And Indy had gone willingly.
More than willingly. Because he’d saved her, that she’d had no doubt—even though it hadn’t been clear if he was one of the things he’d saved her from.
But there was something about his grip on her arm. The way he’d moved them both out of that alley. Quickly, but with that same liquid grace she’d already seen used with lethal intent on his friends.
It had occurred to her then that she ought to have been more scared than she was. As scared as she’d been when she’d first
