When the notification came in, Peter jumped to his feet.

Hazel had nowhere to go, so why had she taken so long to come to him after the fire?

As he waited for her to make it up the stairs, he paced the floor in front of the door, sucking in a breath to calm himself before pulling it open. He wasn’t supposed to know about the fire, so he couldn’t accost her about that. Of course, it was fully in character for him to berate her for keeping him waiting so long.

Still, he tempered his words as her face came into view.

“Where have you been?” he wondered as casually as he could manage.

Guilt flashed across her face, and Peter forced himself not to react. He couldn’t confront her about her absence, and she offered enough to censure with her insufficient remorse for showing up so late. Not that he had worried about her safety, exactly, but as she had delayed her arrival, his mind had supplied narratives where someone had taken her from the burned out building so they could use her against him, threaten to harm her to try to control him. For her to just walk into the apartment, as if the wait had signified nothing? Peter had to adopt a preternatural stillness to contain his anger.

“I was at Sophie’s for quite a while,” Hazel explained morosely, as if her own misery justified her disregard for him. “…but there was this emergency – I thought she was going to die. Then, she just shrieked and fell asleep. The doctors say she’s out of the coma, but I don’t know how they tell the difference.”

Circles darkened Hazel’s eyes, but her cheeks were flushed, her lips red from the cold, and Peter found his anger subdued as his body reacted to her vulnerability, and he remembered that he now held the means to keep her with him. Where else would she go that wouldn’t cause other people problems? And Hazel hated to be an inconvenience to anyone.

“How did that happen?” he prodded. “She just suddenly woke up?”

The NCB agent you were battling for masculine dominance woke her up for me, Hazel leveled silently. Not that she would hint at the truth to Peter; Hazel had no doubt that he would be, not jealous exactly, but possessive. If Peter decided to unleash his self-indulgent irritation on a relatively low-level agent? Hazel had experienced the kind of aggression Peter could manage with his heartlessness and need for control. She would not wish that on an enemy, much less someone who had treated her kindly.

She glanced around the room, the lights dimmed for evening ambience, and stepped toward the couch. “Can I sit down?” she redirected. “I’m so tired.”

“It was that bad at Sophie’s?”

An ironic smile split Hazel’s expression. “I mean, yes? But that is only half the story.” She sucked in a breath like she was about to deliver bad news. “My apartment building burned down…” Hazel let the words hang in the air, and Peter’s eyes opened as if in understanding.

Of course, he had already known, but he couldn’t let her in on that little secret. And if he kept pressing about Sophie, he would seem uncaring. It would wait – she would be with him for the foreseeable future. “Makes sense that if it were going to happen it would happen in that ancient building. Probably a connection glitch with the Bridge.”

“Do you still happen to have that box of my stuff from your other place? Apparently, I have no earthly possessions at the moment.”

“I have your stuff,” he acknowledged, “but we will get you more. Your staying here will be pretty convenient. Come in my room, and I’ll get it for you.”

Though she hesitated, Hazel followed Peter into his room. She honestly had not been in his room in the new – well, the two-year-old apartment. In the old place, there was just a folding wall separating the bedroom from the living area, so it stayed open most of the time, and he and she had hung out in either room interchangeably.

The newer, fancy apartment separated the bedroom from the living room with a long hallway, lined floor-to-ceiling with windows facing a view of downtown. It was beautiful, even though Hazel’s nervousness stripped her of some of the appreciation the view otherwise would have garnered.

In Peter’s room, a huge king-sized bed stood simple and chic in the middle of the room, taking up most of the space. The larger part of the room was white, from the walls to the lush rug at the foot of the bed to the large chaise lounge between the bed and the huge bathroom. The coffered ceiling sported varying shades of grey on the three levels, and tall, thin vases of the same color stood sentinel in the corners near the headboard. Across from the bed, a wide, short chest of drawers – also grey – held a huge computer monitor, and on the wall opposite the door stood a matching taller dresser, laden with stacked prints in shades of red. A sensual red painting stretched the width of the bed. Between the bedroom and the bathroom, a fireplace shared by the two rooms burned with a low glow.

“I actually unpacked them and washed them.” Peter drew her attention back to him. “They’re in the bottom drawer of one of my dressers.” He led her past the bed to the tall dresser, and pulled out the lowest drawer.

As he stepped back to make room for her, she leaned over to pick through her belongings. She had missed some of the clothes, loved pieces that she would have been wearing all this time.

Once she grabbed a pair of pajamas, she stood and turned to her feet. Peter stood mere inches from her, and she rocked back into the dresser, stunned by the look on his face. Until that moment, her mind had drifted in bewilderment, but the lesser emotions subverted beneath a sudden animalistic awareness of Peter, as if taking her eyes off of him would place her in inexplicable danger.

“If something had happened to you,” he breathed, reaching for her face, and her pulse sped, split between terror and anticipation. A moment later, Peter had pinned her body against the dresser and covered her mouth with his. For a full minute, she could think of nothing but the heat of his mouth on hers. When he lowered his lips to her neck, she moaned in pleasure, and her mind fought to gain footing as he spun her to the bed. Instead, she felt herself falling, and only Peter’s hands controlled her descend toward the duvet. As she felt his weight on top of her, her mind finally snapped, and she panicked.

“Stop, Peter!” she begged. “Stop, please.”

Though he cooled the heat of the kiss, he did not get up. Instead, he wove one hand gently into her hair and the other slid down her side to the skin at her waist. His mouth moved down her neck to her collarbone as his hand slid along the top of her waistband, sending shivers through her as heat flowed along the tender skin of her belly.

“Please,” she whispered again, and Peter stopped the motion of his hand beside her navel, opening his mouth in a pant before rolling off of her.

Though she wanted to dash out of the room at a sprint, she just lay there breathing for a minute. “Damn it, Peter!” she complained, forcing anger to strengthen her tone. “What is wrong with you?”

“What is wrong with me?” he accused, rolling over to lean on his arm and look down at her. “What is wrong with you? This is the most natural thing that has ever happened to either of us, and you just keep pushing me away.”

“I came here on the second worst day of my life,” Hazel complained, sitting up, “and instead of comforting me, you try to use the chance to get me into bed.”

“That’s not what happened,” he contended. “I was terrified at the thought of something happening to you.” He flipped back onto the bed, staring at the ceiling.

It was Hazel’s turn to look down at Peter. “You’re not terrified of anything.”

He rolled away from her and stared at the wall. “I’m surprised you don’t know me better than that,” he whined. “I’m terrified of lots of things. Someone like me? I have a lot of enemies, and now I realize they might target you to get to me?”

“Peter,” Hazel contradicted, placing her hand on his arm. “No one even knows we’re friends. How could that happen?”

Leaning up, Peter turned to face Hazel. “Sophie knew, and she isn’t exactly the kind of person who holds her own counsel.”

“Sophie would have no reason to talk about you at all. I don’t think –”

“I guarantee that Sophie complained to people about me because she wanted you to herself.”

Unlike you, I guess? Hazel leveled silently.

“And then there’s that agent from the other night…” Peter searched Hazel’s expression for how she would take the accusation, and seeing her close off even more than normal, he eased forward. “There was something about the way he looked at you – you were right to be concerned about him. It’s almost like he was stalking you.”

“He was looking for Austen Trace as contact for a kid I play with.”

“Maybe at first, but I don’t think he appreciated that I pulled you away from him. There was something unbalanced in his eyes.” Peter reached for her hands, clasping them in both of his. “Have you noticed him hovering around since that day? Maybe near your apartment? I mean outside of the Crash – which happened to everyone – nothing has really happened to you before this. Suddenly you come to the notice of this guy, and your apartment burns down?”

Shocked, Hazel avoided his eyes. Rel had been at her apartment, but he had explained all that, hadn’t he? Did she really believe he would burn her apartment down? He would have the resources from the government, but did he seem the type? If she were honest with herself, Peter seemed more unbalanced than Rel Martins, but maybe the guy was trained to mask his insanity. Government-types had done it before, she knew. When she realized she hadn’t answered Peter, she fumbled for a response. “No hovering…I think you’re overestimating his interest in me. He told me that night it was a case.”

“Even if it was a case, you don’t think there are people in the government who would want to find a weakness in me to exploit?”

Huffing in irritation, Hazel pulled back her hands. “I’m not a weakness to exploit. If that’s what this is going to turn into – if it means I have to walk around worried about how everyone might use me against you, maybe I should just stop coming over. I’ve stayed away for months before, and you hardly noticed. You certainly don’t need me around complicating your calculations, because I know that is what would happen. You’re not actually afraid.”

Shit! Peter complained. Would she really leave him? That was not an option. He wanted Hazel to move closer and more convenient, not farther away and more inaccessible. He had to rein her in. “You’re like everyone else. ‘Peter Donovan, he has everything, he’s brilliant, he must not have any problems.’”

“No, Peter,” she disagreed, standing to her feet – lying with him on the bed would not help her make her case. “I’m not like everyone else. I’ve known you a lot better than anyone else alive, and I’ve seen you in circumstances most people would never have the opportunity to see. You don’t get scared; not really. You get angry that you can’t control what is happening around you, and maybe that comes from some deep-seated fear, but your fear is usually just an excuse to get away with what you want to do.”

As soon as she said the words, Hazel regretted them. Peter Donovan ran his life on image. Not his public image, exactly, though that mattered. Instead, Peter cultivated an image of himself that even he could believe, and Hazel had always let it go, but it wasn’t real. Peter didn’t run on the same emotions other people did. Not the same way. To slap him in the face with what she knew though? That was the type of thing that sent Peter into high gear, his need to wrench the world back into a shape he could live with. Hazel found herself backing toward the door.

Peter, though, only slid to the floor, fighting the urge to laugh out loud. Somehow, Hazel always surprised him. He forced himself to wipe his expression of amusement before he responded to her. Recently, she had surprised him several times with just how well she knew him, and her assessment of his fear was no exception. All he derived from “fear” was excitement, and a desire to press forward into solution. For his audience, though, he had to restrain himself. He grew very quiet and solemnly still, and surprised, Hazel halted her egress. Had her words actually reached him?

“I’m sorry I did that,” he asserted, his voice almost robotic in tone.

Hazel doubted that he had apologized to many people in the past, certainly not without an audience that needed his image preserved. Probably explains why he sounds so strange, she decided.

When he rose from the floor and turned toward her, she took a step back. Peter just walked to the door and grabbed her hand on the way out. “Come on,” he commanded, and she followed.

“You are so strange,” Hazel wondered, staring at his back.

He turned and grinned at her for a second before continuing past the windows. “And you said you knew me.”

Once they entered the living room, he led her to his computer and threw her down in the chair. “You never helped me with my glitch problem. You were so caught up on the virus theory, which I checked out, by the way. No go on the virus. Nako and Bandwidth checked out. I don’t have access to Sophie, because her dad has so much security, but you could check her code, if you want. I will forward you the hack we used to get a read out, but I don’t think you’ll find anything. These people are just coincidences.”

On the screen, Hazel’s game pulled up, and her fingers moved automatically to position on the controller. Her heart beat hard against her ribs, a new anxiety taking hold. Maybe she could blame Peter for the anxiety caused by what he had tried in the bedroom, but Hazel had only herself to blame for the anxiety that awoke with his words. She had stolen from him, and she had justified it. All his claims about the “coincidence” of Trip players passing out had not been enough to distract her from the other considerations. With her mind so battered, she held no certainty that she could keep up her feigned ignorance of the glitch. How did Peter even know about the Trifecta? He’s the Architect. He anticipates everything. If he found out she had intercepted his email and used the access to Trip, what would he do?

“The developers and I have worked together pretty extensively,” he assured her, “so they do that kind of stuff for me. This was the surprise I told you about the other day before I got… sidetracked.”

Access? she wondered. Still, despite her nervousness about the game, Peter’s words brought a blush to Hazel’s cheeks. He communicated entirely too much pleasure at the memory of their prior day’s liaison, especially while her body still fought shockwaves from the encounter a few minutes before. When Peter crouched down beside her and reached his arm along hers to direct the controller, their fingers touched, and Hazel closed her eyes. He is determined to overcome my choice, she mused as shivers ran up the skin of her arm. He was as masterful at seducing her as he was at engineering the Bridge, even backing off when pushing her would have sent her running.

Or what if he actually cares? she wondered.

She thought of Rel, though, of his consideration. Of how he treated everyone, not just her. Of how she had never seen him angry or controlling or even unconcerned. Not just about her – lots of people could tailor their behavior to present company. When Rel noticed someone, he cared about that someone, and he was kind. It was strange – and amazing. And Hazel couldn’t believe she was thinking about Rel when Peter was reaching to her face to brush a tendril of hair away from her eye.

Maybe it was disrespectful to Peter, but she didn’t actually owe him anything outside of the demands of regular friendship. Still, he had made his intentions clear, and she didn’t know if she was toying with him or if he was pressuring her. It was definitely the latter, but could it be both? Of course, to toy with him would require that he not be playing. Glancing at the calculating look on his face, Hazel knew with certainty that he was playing.

“So, you go past the prefecture in Breslau, and there is a little pub on the right-hand side of the screen.”

Where was he taking her? Though she didn’t recognize the scenery, when he directed her to a pub, her heart sped. The SOA symbol showed etched into a stone on the corner of the little building.

“Now you have to fight this guy to get inside.”

Another entrance to the Trifecta…he was sending her into the Trifecta! She tried to think back if the bartender had addressed her by her Trifecta name or if she had needed to give it to him each time. If he mentioned Pete’s Trifecta name when she approached, Pete would know she had used it.

No, she thought she had to enter it each time. She prayed she was right. As if for the first time, Hazel began a sequence of attacks against the spectre, unleashing some of her most powerful combinations on him and draining herself near zero health. She debated letting herself get killed, but Pete would never believe that she would be mindless. Instead, she paused with her finger raised. “I have an idea…” She could feel Pete’s glare on the back of her head. The pounding in her skull almost obscured her vision as she worried that he had found her out. Still, she forced herself to consider how she should act if she were ignorant. “Why do I want to get inside? What’s in here?” After a couple of hits that drained her health, she paused as if in thought. “Will you tell me if I’m right, if I ask you?”

“I want to see if you can get it yourself.”

“Even if this works…” she murmured, sending an attack down on her own head. “How am I going to be able to do anything in this area if I have no strength left?” As she knew it would, the spectre vanished, and Hazel did her best to feign excitement. Peter seemed too intent on some calculation to notice anything about Hazel. It really bothered her that she could deceive him so thoroughly, but then again, she was actually a little scared of what he would do if he found out she had stolen his entry. She had definitely stepped over a line, and she didn’t ever like the way he reacted when he felt imposed on.

“How strange that this pub has the SOA symbol on it…”

“It’s not SOA,” Peter corrected. “It’s SOA Haywire. A group of Wire activists who want to shut down the SOA.”

Suddenly, the symbol made much more sense, and Hazel began to wonder if some Wire militant had sent that Queue car after her. People on both sides sometimes resorted to unscrupulous methods. SOA Haywire seemed just the type of group who would dislike her.

“Friends of yours?” Hazel wondered bitterly.

“Not really. They have some interesting side ventures that don’t have anything to do with SOA, so I’ve discussed a few things with them in the past. They’re just ideologues, but not too zealous. The Haywire thing is a sidenote for them. But none of that is important here. I wanted to show you this. You enter the pub, and the bartender will renew your stats, then the next time you talk to him, he’ll ask if you want to enter the Trifecta.”

“The what?” Hazel feigned confusion as her chest tightened with nerves.

“That’s my surprise!” he leaned back with a smile. “Access to a load of special weapons and spells and such. You’ll love them. I mean, it’s pretty similar to a lot of the other special offer stuff or purchase equipment, but since you won’t let me buy you things -”

“I’m not rich, so I don’t want to play rich,” she leveled with a scowl.

“You could be rich,” Peter countered, brushing her cheek again with the back of his hand, though not to move her hair this time.

When she closed her eyes, Peter leaned in and planted a kiss behind her ear.

“Since I know you’re not asking me to marry you,” she leveled, opening her eyes, “no, I can’t.”

Peter just laughed, but he didn’t press. “Your choice, obviously. Now go talk to the bartender.”

Blowing out a breath, Hazel obeyed. She opened a dialogue with the bartender.

“How may I help you,” the AI prompted.

“Now type in ‘access Trifecta.’”

Hazel obeyed.

“You want to access a restricted area,” the AI responded. “Please enter your unique identifier code.”

Sighing an internal sigh of relief, Hazel waited for Pete’s instructions - the AI hadn’t revealed her prior access.

“Type this in, and then go through that door.”

With her anxiety finally waning, Hazel’s mind kicked in. She turned herself into an automaton, waiting at every turn for his instructions until she could let natural excitement lead her to fight enemies and gain weapons. Fortunately, Hazel had only explored a few places in the Trifecta, so she headed toward the places she had not mined for equipment. She fell into such an easy pattern that she jumped when Peter spoke from beside her ear.

“Where did you get that weapon?” he queried.

Panicked, Hazel thought back, but she couldn’t figure out what would have set off his sensors. “What weapon?”

“The gilded falchion. I’ve never seen that one before.”

Closing her eyes, Hazel cursed at her stupidity. Of course, she had gotten the weapon in the Trifecta, and somehow, she had been clueless enough to use it in front of Peter. “I traded for it,” she covered quickly. “I was in a chapel in Brussels, and this guy wanted to trade for a universal spell I had formulated last year.”

Peter didn’t speak for a minute, and Hazel almost turned to look at him. When he slid his arms around her, she almost choked on her panic and died in the game. “That is very impressive, Hazel. I always forget how smart you are. That weapon is from the Trifecta.”

“Seriously?” she replied, praying that he would attribute her breathlessness to his sudden touch or her excitement over the news – rather than her anxiety at the prospect of discovery.

“Seriously,” Peter acknowledged. “Remember a few days ago when I said I wanted your help? This is what I wanted your help with. The glitch is in here, in Trifecta. I figured I would die fifteen times before I reached it, but you can get there easily, and maybe we can insert some code to fix it or contact the game administrators with the fix. And I thought you would level up and get equipment on the way, too, so it was a win-win. I never dreamed you would find the goodies without me.”

He had no way of checking out the story of the man in the chapel, but Peter suddenly realized that there was another way Hazel might have found the Trifecta, and he had a new direction for his investigation into his Tryptech incident. He had given her access to his rendering: she could have just stumbled on it, used it, and then – in typical Hazel fashion – panicked over her imposition on him. If that were the case, Peter could put at least that worry to bed. Take it to bed soon, he quipped, leaning in for another nip of Hazel’s ear. He could feel her rapid breaths, and he slowed the motion of his hands lest he let himself get carried away and push her too far.

When Peter reminded her of the glitch, his words and his physical encroachment sent her into a spasm of nerves. Hazel’s entire body went tense, and when he began to nuzzle her neck with his face, she found her finger robotically tapping on the same key over and over for a full thirty seconds. What had arrested her thought? The glitch. Rel had said someone was “targeting” people. What if whoever had made the Trifecta had created it for the purpose of luring people to the glitch and snuffing them out, like Piroulette?

Were there other games with similar glitches? There was no way – it would have made the news. So the target had to be Trip. Either an un-Wired competitor who resented the Wires, as Hazel had earlier speculated, or some non-Trip motive that intended to…harvest the kids of influential people?

Peter lifted his head, and Hazel sucked in a breath, suddenly aware of her frozen state.

“What’s wrong, Hazel? What do you want to kill? Something send you into a panic?”

He knows I stole his entry, her fear warned her. If he knows, why is he playing this game with me? Suddenly, her revelation about the glitch seemed much less pressing than her current circumstances. Why was she scared? Was she mixing up her new revelation about the glitch with her concern about Peter? Her mind couldn’t manage it all.

Without answering herself or Peter, she pressed forward in her game, in the direction that seemed most logical. Her heart was fluttering in her throat. She didn’t know why she was actually afraid to tell him what she had done – she shouldn’t have used the code, but she could just tell him the truth. She hadn’t done anything so horrible – just moderately nosey.

When he nipped her ear with his teeth and whispered across her neck, her thoughts threatened to dissipate into a jumble of impressions. “Focus, Hazel,” he crooned, followed by a deep laugh.

By a sheer act of will, Hazel slammed down on the world around her, her mind focused as a laser on the screen before her. She couldn’t do it – she couldn’t. If she let her mind unhinge, she might confess everything, including her meetings with Rel, or she might lose herself to his constant physical pressure. She would not end up in Peter’s bed, and she would not betray Rel by sharing his intel. Desperate, she shoved down her fear, falling into the one thing that she knew well enough that it had become instinctive – she played her game. By the time she finally approached the cave, she had calmed down, despite the fact that Peter had whispered every direction in her ear and trailed his fingers along the skin at the waistline of her jeans. When she was playing Trip, the world could burn, but nothing could distract her from her game.

++++++++++++++++

“I’ve got it,” Rel tapped an invisible spot on the desktop. “Look at this.”

Vee linked the chart Rel offered and began to note as he lit the appropriate locations. “I have a few names from Hazel, and it’s not much, but there are three here…” He highlighted his chosen points. “These two are in towns with receivers, and this one in Yoruba is the only town within a hundred miles of a receiver.”

“Receivers, huh?”

“I mean, Hazel told me about this group – SOA. They hate Wires. So we find a few accidents here and there that happen – look at the dates.”

When the dates popped up, they meant nothing to Vee.

“Now, look at the dates that the power drains started.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“I think that someone set up these accidents near these sites to get access to the old server farms without being noticed.”

“There were a few drains that started before any of the incidents…”

“Maybe the gambit. Had to have some ground servers to go after the first victims – to give them the resources to go after the rest. I think that was why the guy in GP, he was not at home. His son was with him when the first incident occurred. If I’m right, the kid fell into the coma before the incident. If the people doing this could manage a couple of those, then the dominoes fall. They knock a kid out; the incident occurs giving SOA people access to tap the ground server into the Bridge somehow. I’d have to ask Hazel about the how to.”

“Okay, so we get these kids in ransom mode, this SOA group connects the ground server to the Bridge, and then there’s another group of kids near satellites? Did they need someone on both sides?”

“Again, I have to ask Hazel. I don’t even know if she knows this stuff, but I can just ask.”

“Are you gonna ask her out, by the way?”

Rel scoffed. “First of all, that is none of your business. And secondly, not at the moment. She’s going through a rough time.”

“Which is why she needs to know she can count on you.”

“I don’t want to put pressure on her. I think that Peter is putting enough pressure on her, and it would be unkind to do the same. She said I’m her anchor.” Rel seemed thoroughly confused by the idea.

Vee just laughed. “That is so sweet. But I think you’re in danger of being shoved into friend territory.”

“If she needs a friend, then that is what I’ll be. Seriously. Peter has more testosterone than most bodybuilders I’ve known - and they pop pills. It’s like Hazel is his, and if I start pulling on her, she’ll get ripped apart in the tug-of-war. No, I’m content to just hold my hand out when she wants to take it.”

“Rel,” Vee put her hand on his arm, “you are a good man.”

“No such thing.” He shook his head. “But I do want to be.”

“And sometimes that’s how it happens.”

Huffing a breath, Rel stood to his feet. “I need to ask Hazel about the parts of this we don’t get. Can you get a read on where she is?”

“A word of advice?” Vee offered.

“Sure.”

“If you want this relationship to go anywhere, you might try contacting her like a regular guy. Send her a notification?”

Rel raised his hand to his forehead. “I am a moron.”

“Nah, just the hazards of our profession. We have to think too hard to remember how everyone else lives without our level of information, and how to be polite when we have access to secrets.”

“Notification sent. Hopefully she’ll reply.”

“I guarantee that she will like that you’re giving her a choice.”

Rel smiled at Vee, rising to his feet. “Thanks.” Thinking better of it, he paused his egress. “Can I ask you a question?”

Narrowing her eyes, Vee offered a skeptical, “Yes…” The level of tension in Rel’s body had just sprung tight enough that she would have expected danger if not for the confusion on his face.

“Do you know how…chemical emotional manipulation works?”

“That seems a dangerous question. Do I need to revise my ‘good man’ speech?”

Gaping at her, Rel shook his head. “That is not what I’m talking about! I’m talking about…” He paused, unsure if he wanted to tell her. “What happens when you add serotonin and dopamine with…adrenaline and testosterone.”

“Basically a love potion,” Vee murmured, disbelieving.

“Maybe at normal levels, but in the amounts unleashed in my system, it’s more like a lust potion. I’m not even sure it’s healthy, at this point. Like those druggies who burn out their systems after getting too high and can’t feel anything when the high is gone.”

Vee pursed her lips at him. “But even at normal levels, the tactic is dangerously unreliable. You might send your prince out to find a princess, and he’ll come back loving a frog. Why would you consider it?”

“What? No! Not me! Even if I wanted to – which I would be an idiot to try – you know we can’t just amp up our hormones on a whim. We have to submit a request when we know we’re going into hostile territory. No. Ever since yesterday before I showed up at the DeSotos, someone has been manipulating my Neurex – has been triggering the hormones in a way we were never trained for. Everyone knows it doesn’t work that way, so there’s no justifiable reason for doing this to me. It’s like someone wants to turn me into a monster – bad enough in a general sense, but if directed toward a woman I’m already attracted to.”

“Oh, friend,” Vee breathed. “That is brutal.”

“It’s really bad,” he agreed, his face melting into a pitiable frown.

Reaching for his hand, Vee gave it a quick squeeze. “Well, they picked a bad subject with you, Rel, because like I said, you are a good man. They may want to make you a monster, but I don’t think that is something that could ever happen to you. In my opinion, the fact that you have recognized what is happening has already taken away a lot of the power.”

“And it’s not constant. It’s just a surge when I first encounter her. But my biggest problem is that I don’t know how much I like her and how much is just visceral attraction. How deep does this go?”

Vee smiled. “You’ve had girlfriends in the past. I daresay that you’ve had similar struggles with them on occasion, though maybe not to this extent. Before all this happened, was she the kind of girl you liked as a person, or was the attraction just physical?”

Rel flashed Vee a smile, and her question brought him enough relief that he fell into levity. “Is that really an either/or question?”

Returning his smile, Vee crossed her arms over her chest in satisfaction. “Sounds to me like you have your answer. So go get her – not literally, you know. I mean, once she answers the notification.”

Rel threw a wry glare at his friend, a smile still in place as he stalked out of the room, ducking as he passed through the doorway. For now, he could relax a little, slightly more confident that he was not setting Hazel – or himself – up for disappointment. She probably wouldn’t reply tonight, and Rel needed some sleep. Back to the apartment it is.