Chapter 83 Sorry, Not Sorry
Molly wore a green dress.
She'd stood in front of her wardrobe for twenty minutes and talked herself out of three different outfits before landing on a white one, a short summer dress with thin straps and an open back that dipped low enough to qualify as a statement. She'd bought it in the summer and worn it once, and it was the kind of dress that required a specific kind of confidence to carry off, the kind she had approximately sixty percent of on a good day.
She told herself she was dressing for herself. She repeated this twice in the mirror while she put her earrings in and slipped a pair of gold lace-up sandals on her feet.
The restaurant he'd suggested was small and warm and not the kind of place she'd expected, which had been her first surprise. The second was that he pulled out her chair without making it seem like a performance. The third was that the conversation was easy in a way that she hadn't braced for, moving between topics with a natural rhythm that she kept trying to locate the ulterior motive in and kept failing to find it immediately.
She was halfway through her pasta and actually, genuinely enjoying herself, which felt like a trap she was walking into with her eyes open and her feet moving anyway.
"What made you switch schools?"
“Huh?” She blinked twice.
“Grace mentioned it…” he lied.
"Oh… My mum wanted me closer to home after my dad left for abroad." She kept her voice easy. "It was a whole thing. Not interesting."
Zion nodded and looked attentively, making her feel like she was the only person in the room and had all his attention, like what she was saying was the only thing worth hearing. Molly had always found this quality in him specifically unfair.
"You've been going through a lot lately," he said. "Everyone was talking about your brother. I'm sorry about him."
"Thank you," she said, and meant it, then felt the familiar tightening in her chest. The news had reached her school, it was one of the reasons the counselor had called her, and she was surprised she was in school. He wanted her to bare her heart and talk about what she felt, but Molly wanted none of that as she made up words for him to be satisfied before she left.
Zion was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "You and Grace Ainsley are close, aren't you."
Molly felt the shift.
It was subtle, but she’d felt it. The sentence was structured as an observation rather than a question, delivered in the same even conversational tone as everything else, and his expression hadn't changed. But Molly felt the shift the way she'd been feeling shifts lately, with the part of her that had been quietly recalibrating since the kitchen. She set her fork down.
"We're friends, yeah," she said.
"I haven't seen her around lately," Zion said. "Neither has anyone else from what I can tell. She's not been to school." He looked at Molly with those attentive eyes. "You wouldn't happen to know where she's been?"
Molly looked back at him and held her expression steady. "I haven't seen her either," she said. "We're friends but we're not attached at the hip. She doesn't report to me."
Zion nodded slowly. "Of course." He picked up his water glass and looked at it for a moment. "It's just that the people who care about her are a bit worried. She took off without telling anyone and it's not the safest time for her to be on her own." He looked up. "If you did know where she was, it would only be in her interest to share it."
"I told you I don't know," Molly said. Her voice came out more defensive and she didn't soften it.
Zion held her gaze for a moment longer than the conversation required.
Then he reached across the table and put his hand on her forearm, and his eyes changed.
Something in the air around them shifted immediately, a pressure at the edges of her awareness, pushing inward with a subtle insistence that was trying to get somewhere she didn't want it to get. It was not a physical sensation exactly, more like someone attempting to open a door from the outside. She felt it clearly and completely and it was the most disorienting thing she had felt in a week that had contained several disorienting things.
She looked at Zion's eyes, the colour of them had changed at the edges. Glowing, faintly, the way Grace had described.
“Where is she?”
He was trying to compel her.
The push came again, stronger, she felt it find her attention and press. She stared back at him with a calm expression. The sensation that kept pushing to be let go was then met with something that did not move. Something that sat in the centre of her and met the pressure with a resistance that was not effortful, just present, the way a wall was present. Not doing anything. Just being there.
The compulsion slid off it.
Zion blinked. He tried again, she could feel the renewed pressure, and it found the same wall and achieved the same result.
Nothing.
Molly reached over and pushed his hand off her arm.
"Don't," she said. She kept her voice low because there were other tables nearby and she was not going to cause a scene, but the word carried everything it needed to carry without volume.
Zion looked at her with an expression that wasn’t there before. Recalculating and amusement, she also saw a hint of curiosity.
She picked up her bag from the back of the chair and stood up.
"I'm going to go," she said. "Thanks for dinner." She meant neither sentence the way the words suggested but she said them anyway because habit was a powerful thing.
She turned and walked toward the door, keeping her pace even. She walked out the restaurant's entrance, feeling the cool night air on her arms and face. She was about to walk to the road to stop a taxi when something, or rather someone blocked her path. She looked up and registered the figure standing in her way.
She stopped.
He was large in the way that stopped you before your brain had caught up. Not as large as some of the people she had seen in Grace's world, but large enough, and he was standing with the stillness of someone who had been waiting in this exact spot and was not surprised to see her.
Lorenzo Torres looked back down at her. He was not smiling, nothing showed on his face at all, he just stared down at her.
“Hello, Molly.”
She had already begun to back away, and she turned her back to him, which she later realized was stupid, and briskly walked away.
"I'm sorry for this," he said.
His voice was quiet and he sounded like he meant it, which was somehow worse than if he hadn't.
Before Molly could take more steps, she felt a blow to the back of her head and her world went dark.