Devour

CHAPTER ONE: PROOF

Rule 1: The most dangerous person at any party is the one who isn't impressed by you.

— Killian —

Marcus Reyes was wearing a linen jacket the color of oatmeal and had already told the story about the ring three times, and each time it got better, which was how Killian knew he was happy.

The story was that he'd left the ring in the car in August rather than carry it thirty-one floors up to ask a man he didn't need to ask. Marcus told it as a comedy — the traffic, the sweating, the tie he'd worn for no reason — and got a laugh every time. It was not a comedy. It was the most serious thing Killian had watched anyone do in a year, and Marcus had worked out early that the only survivable way to say a serious thing to a room was to make the room laugh on the way in.

Killian knew the technique. He'd more or less taught it to him, over eleven months and a lot of bad days at a racetrack.

He stood at the edge of the terrace with a glass he wasn't drinking and counted the room, because counting was easier than the thing he wasn't looking at.

Eighty-one people. A venue on the water, chosen by Kristyn, paid for by Marcus, with the bay going flat and pewter behind the string lights and a September night that hadn't cooled off and wasn't going to. Snapper. A lot of citrus. Nothing heavy after seven and the last thing before dessert served cold, because he'd specified all of it himself and then stood at a pass in somebody else's kitchen for two hours making sure a caterer he didn't know executed it the way he'd written it down.

He had asked Kristyn for exactly one thing out of the whole event and it was the food. She'd looked at him across her own desk and said *yes, fine, yes* and organized a folder that didn't need it, because she was one of four living people who knew he could cook and the only one who knew why.

Everyone here was happy and the night was doing what he'd built it to do, and there was a specific spot at the back of the terrace where nobody was standing, and Killian did not look at it.

He'd gotten good at not looking at it. February was seven months gone. The arrangement had ended the way he'd designed it to end — clean, contracted, survivable — and he'd have told anyone who asked that he was fine, and it would have been true in the way that a car with a slow leak is fine, which is to say it holds until it doesn't and you don't find out at the light.

"You cooked," Marcus said, arriving at his shoulder. "Everybody's saying it. They think we hired somebody good."

"You did hire somebody good."

"They think we hired somebody who *isn't in this conversation.*" Marcus looked at him. "You okay, standing back here?"

"I'm the host. Hosts stand at the back."

[…continued in the book]