Guilty. I felt guilty. And I never felt guilty in my life.

“Bane,” Pam answered, hugging the door, her smile borderline arsenic. My face fell. At this point I was happy to fuck a goddamn tuna can before I laid a hand on her. The lights were dimmed behind her, and I wondered if Jesse was even there. Maybe I should have started my search at Mrs. Belfort’s.

“Is Jesse around?”

She cocked her head to the side, pouting. “Maybe.”

I parked my elbow on the doorframe. “I wouldn’t fuck with me, Pam.”

“But I would.” Her voice was lace and lust, and that damp thing between them that I had no interest touching.

I pushed my way into her house, bulldozing in like a hostile army, knowing she had little to no say about this shit. Darren had hired me. He would have my back if need be. “I want your daughter,” I told her, because a part of me no longer cared about hiding it.

“You’re kidding me.” She followed me across the landing of her house.

“Fucking wish I was. But I know better than to go after her, so don’t worry your little head. At the same time—I’m never going to dick you. Not in this lifetime, and probably not in the next one. So do us both a favor and pretend to be a decent mom.”

Her mouth dropped open, and she stood in front of me, probably waiting for an apology that never came. I turned around and climbed up the stairs to Jesse’s room, feeling the weight of my words on my shoulders.

I wanted Snowflake. I did. I wanted to feast on her pussy and fuck her tight little body senseless and kiss that tattoo on the back of her neck, telling her that I’d seen it before and liked it. That I saw her before and wanted her. That she wasn’t just a goddamn sob story for me.

I knocked on her door. No response.

Then did it again. Nothing.

Third time. “Go away,” she yawned from the other side of the door.

“Not happening. Open up.”

“Bane?” I liked that she was still naïve enough to be surprised.

“We need to talk.” I was pacing again. Why the fuck was I pacing again? Silence rang in my ears before her door slid open. I drank her face through the gap. She was so beautiful, it nearly hurt to see. I dated a lot of beautiful women. I fucked a ton of them, too. No one was pretty the way Snowflake was. Everything around her faded, like a poem with burned edges. She was the lyrics inside it, so focused and sharp. I pushed my shoulder against her door, moving into her room, and it nearly knocked the hell out of my breath.

Hanging from her ceiling was a chandelier made out of small memorabilia: old-school CD-ROMs, pens, remotes, postcards, letters, keychains of her favorite indie bands. It looked like her soul had exploded and poured down between us. The wall behind her queen-sized bed was covered with Polaroid pictures of people’s backs. I recognized her mom. A dark-haired man who was probably her dad. Darren and a bunch of cheerleaders and maybe even a bunch of strangers. Some push pins clung onto nothing. My guess was that they used to hold on to the pictures of the people from her previous life, before they’d fucked her over in every sense of the word. Though I did notice one picture curled under a pin. The back of a young man, his hair light brown and full. Emery, was my guess. His neck was stabbed a hundred times with the pin that was holding it up, until there was almost a pea-shaped hole in the middle.

A fairy lights Mason jar sat on her windowsill, making me wonder how many dreams she still had that were trapped inside. Smutty books scattered on the floor. She had black and white striped Beetlejuice linens and a rusty No trespassing, we’re tired of hiding the bodies sign hanging on her door. Her room had character. Personality. And lots of it.

“Who did all this?” I asked, acutely aware of how close our bodies were, and how her chest went up and down like she was feeling what I was feeling, even though I had no idea what the fuck that was.

“I did,” she said quietly. Her hair was still wet from the shower she must’ve taken after coming back home from the shift. She wore tiny pajama bottoms—again, orange—and a baggy Sleeping with Sirens black top. I didn’t know why, but it was the sexiest thing I’d ever seen.

She was a person.

She was a teenager, on the verge of breaking twenty.

She was a fucking girl, a woman, an in-betweener, with tits and hormones and sass and that layer of ice was melting too fast, and I wanted to fucking drink every drop of it while it did.