Chapter 2
I hated myself for approximately forty-five seconds, and then I picked up my kit and put on my coat, because Oliver's next prescription was going to cost more than I had, and self-hatred was a luxury I could not currently afford.
They blindfolded me in a black SUV with leather that smelled like money and gun oil. I counted turns through the darkness — fourteen, approximately, which meant we'd stayed north of the river, which meant the lakefront. When the cloth came off, Lake Michigan was silver-black through tall windows and the house around me was the kind of house that doesn't get built to impress. It gets built to contain.
Sebastian Lombardi was waiting beside a fireplace that could have fit my entire apartment, sitting in a matte-black titanium wheelchair like a man who had made peace with furniture a long time ago. He was somewhere in his late forties, sharp-featured, with the particular stillness of a man who had trained himself to make immobility look like choice. The room around him had the controlled silence of a space where everyone present understood the consequences of disrupting it — four guards positioned without being obvious about it, Gabriel at the door, and a woman in worn scrubs who was trying very hard not to let her hands shake.
His eyes moved over me with the clinical disinterest of a man who has been sold hope many times and has learned to price it at zero.
"So," he said. "Are you here with crystals, miracle oils, or another speech about positive energy?"
I had treated enough men like him to know that trembling was the wrong answer. "I'm here for one session," I said. "After that, I go home."
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The guards found this briefly amusing. Sebastian did not. He leaned back in the chair with the patience of someone who has buried every expectation he ever had and resents anyone who tries to dig them up. He was not cruel in the way of men who enjoy it. He was cruel in the way of men who have decided that hope is the most dangerous thing in a room and are determined to eliminate it before it can do damage.
He allowed me to examine his legs.
