Chapter 82: Preoccupied
POV: Carly
The vodka was not getting better.
It had been approximately twenty minutes since the toast and her throat was still protesting and she had accepted a glass of water from someone she did not know and was nursing it while standing next to Niko watching Enzo and Mauricio run a beer pong table with the specific energy of people who had been doing this for decades and were incapable of losing.
Which was probably true.
She was having fun.
That was the thing that kept catching her off guard. She was in a building she had never been in with people she had spent five years keeping at arm's length and she was having fun.
Enzo was funnier than she expected. Not just funny the way someone performed humor but actually funny. Quick and self aware and with a specific talent for saying the thing everyone was thinking before anyone else had decided whether it was okay to say it.
Mauricio was quieter. Measured. He had handed her the water without being asked and she had noted that.
The other vampires in the room had moved from suspicious to curious to something approaching comfortable over the course of the evening and she had matched it without forcing it and it had felt like the right way to handle it.
She was having fun.
And then she noticed Niko.
Not in the way she usually noticed him which was involuntary and constant and something she had mostly stopped fighting. This was a different kind of noticing. The specific awareness of someone whose attention had moved somewhere else.
He was looking across the room.
She followed the line of it.
Aurora.
Aurora was at the other end of the room talking to someone Carly did not recognize. Not looking at Niko. Just existing in the room the way she always existed in rooms, which was with a specific quality of presence that Carly was never going to be fully comfortable with.
Niko was looking at her.
Not the way he looked at Carly.
She knew the difference. She had been studying the difference since October whether she had intended to or not and she knew what it looked like when he looked at her and this was not that.
But it was something.
Something she could not name cleanly and did not like not being able to name.
She put her hand on his cheek.
He turned immediately. Eyes back on her. Warm and present.
She gave him a smile she was mostly certain looked real.
He kissed her. Quick and soft.
She kept her hand against his face for a moment longer than the kiss required.
"You okay." He said.
"I'm great." She said.
He looked at her.
She looked at Enzo missing a shot for the first time all night and the whole room reacting like a natural disaster had occurred.
"I want to go say hi to Enzo." She said. Which was true.
She crossed to the beer pong table and let the noise and the laughter close around her and did not look back at where Niko was standing.
She was fine.
She trusted him.
She did trust him.
She just also had eyes.
POV: Katy
She had been watching the whole thing from the bar.
Not conspicuously. She was good at watching things without appearing to watch them. Had been doing it for long enough that it had become as natural as breathing would have been if she still needed to breathe.
She had watched Enzo's speech and thought it was more sincere than it had any right to be from someone she had clocked as primarily performative within thirty seconds of meeting him.
She had watched Carly take the bottle from Aurora's hand and felt something that might have been pride if she was willing to call it that.
She had watched Aurora watch Niko cross the room to Carly and had filed away the specific quality of that watching.
And she had watched just now as Carly noticed Niko looking at Aurora and had done the specific math that produced the smile that did not quite reach the eyes and had moved away to give herself somewhere else to look.
She put her cup down.
She thought about what she had said in the library. He invited you right after the locker room thing. She had meant it as a joke and it had landed but underneath it was a real thing which was that Niko Monroeson had invited Carly into his world at a specific moment and Katy was still deciding whether that was purely because he wanted her here or whether it was also because he wanted to prove something.
To himself or to Aurora or to both.
She was not going to say that to Carly tonight.
Tonight was not the night for it.
She looked around the room.
She thought about Zdravei Katerina.
She thought about a faction review notice on a board outside a headmistress's office.
She thought about Whitney Salem feeling a witch's call differently than she should have.
She thought about all the things she was quietly collecting in this school and what she was going to do with them.
She picked her cup back up.
One thing at a time.
Tonight she was going to stand at this bar and watch her friend navigate her first night in this world and make sure nothing went sideways.
Everything else could wait.
Author's Note:
Katy standing at the bar watching all of it and collecting all of it and deciding tonight is not the night. She is the most quietly dangerous person in this story