One
Natalia Anatolyevna Kobliska was born to proud parents Anatoly and Raven Kobliska, née Blake, just before Christmas, a healthy, though fussy, baby girl with a faint curlicue of jet-black hair on top of her head, and a smushed little pink face that was almost always scrunched up from bawling her lungs out. Those were the healthiest things about her. By February, she didn’t sleep all the way through the night, but she would settle for an hour or two and give her poor parents a reprieve. She was deadest to the world between one-thirty and four-thirty a.m., a fact which Cass knew well, even in her current state.
Cass was drunk. Not about-to-vomit drunk, but not fun-drunk either. The sidewalk tilted dangerously beneath the heels she’d borrowed from Raven, and the frigid air felt good against the overheated bare skin of her legs.
The passing headlights blurred and trailed like the tails of comets, and she squeezed her eyes shut against their glare, which only made the world spin faster.
She was in trouble. Pretty bad trouble, and rapidly slipping into more dangerous territory, but she still had enough wits about her to know that she couldn’t call Raven. Shecould, but Natalia was still in a bassinet in Raven and Toly’s room, and the ringing would wake her. It was just after three, she’d seen on the grandfather clock as she staggered through the house’s vestibule, which meant Nat would scream and scream until sunup.
That wasn’t fair.
Just like it wasn’t fair that Cass finally got invited to one of Sig Blackmon’s parties and she’d only taken three sips of a brightred cup of punch before she flushed hot, started sweating, and realized it was hitting hermuchharder than it should have.
She opened her eyes, and the cars parked along the curb juddered and leaped like they were in the middle of a California earthquake. There was a high whine in her ears, counterpoint to the drum-drum-drumming of her pulse.
Raven kept saying she wasn’t careful enough; that she ought to be smarter after all she’d lived through. But she wasn’tstupid.
She fumbled her phone out of her purse and almost dropped it. Shit. The screen was so bright she could hardly look at it, but she managed to open her call history. The contact she wanted was number two on the list of recent calls, and she spent what seemed an eternity steadying her thumb so she would hit it and not Raven’s number above it.
The screen went black, SHEP lit up green across the middle.Calling…
Cassandra wrapped an arm around the lamppost beside her and clung on for dear life, wobbling in her heels while she waited for the call to connect.
Come on, come on, come on…
“Kid.What?” Shepherd’s voice was two notches lower and three shades rougher than normal with sleep. She felt bad about waking Raven and Toly, but Shep was…well, let’s just say shedidn’tfeel bad.
Cassandra took a breath and found, when she started talking, that her tongue didn’t want to cooperate. “Shep. Sheeeeeeppppp. Shit.”
It was quiet on the other end, one beat, two, then there was an almighty rustling of bedsheets, and his voice became a short, sharp bark, completely alert. “Where are you? Are you drunk? What’s going on?”
“‘M drunk, yeah. But not…not on…purpose. I had ssshhhree sips. Tha’s all, I swear!”
“Shit, okay, you’re…yeah.” More rustling. He cleared his throat, and she could tell he was upright and moving around, now. “Where are you?”
“Sig’s house. Well, his parents’ houssssse. Fuck I can’t…” She laughed though she didn’t want to, but her voice sounded sofunny. “I can’t talk. Damn. It was only three, Shep, really! Only thhhhreeeee.”
“Okay, forget it. Your phone’s got an Air Tag on it.” Buckles jangled on his end. “I’ll find you. Are you safe?”
That was a complicated question while the earth was seesawing all around her. “I don’t…”
“Are you alone? Are you with somebody?” His voice took on a hard edge. “Who the fuck isSig?”
“He’s…” Conveying the complicated art school politics that meant she was a pariah despite her sister’s beauty and fame, and that she’d finally managed to edge her way in with the old money progenies, was beyond her at the moment. “Um,” she managed, and then hiccupped dangerously. She wasn’t nauseous, exactly, but burping seemed like a bad idea.
Shep sighed. He sighed a lot, and Cass liked to think she’d become something of an expert linguist when it came to interpreting the Sighs of Shepherd. Heh. That had a fun little ring to it. Sighs of Shepherd. That sounded like an album title. An album with a dark, moody cover; perhaps Shep himself, his broken-nosed profile against a black backdrop, that low-lidded you’re-a-pain-in-my-ass gaze directed out into the middle distance. He was…
Oh. He was talking, and she should be listening, because that last sigh was one that meant I’m Gonna Have to Shoot Someone, Aren’t I? and he wasn’t thrilled about it.
“Justsit down, Cassie,” he commanded, and, still holding onto the lamppost, Cass folded her legs, slid downward, and plopped onto her bum right there on the cold concrete. She wished she wasn’t wearing a skirt. “Stay there. Don’t drink anything. Don’t take anything. Don’t talk to anybody. I’ll be right there.”
“Okay.”
“Repeat it back:don’t talk to anybody.You got that?”
“Don’t talk to…anybody,” she slurred.
He sighed again. This one was How Is This My Life? “Fuck me,” he muttered. “Stay.” Then the line went dead.
