There’s no change in her, not even when I tighten my arms or lean my head on her shoulder.
“I’m okay too,” I continue. “Though I might need some antacid. Something about that homemade dijon dressing just isn’t sitting quite right. Not sure what it could be.”
Sloane huffs a breath of a laugh and leans some of her weight against my chest. Wherever she’s gone, I know in this moment that I can bring her back.
“David might have some pointers for me. Sounds like he’s having no trouble with dinner.”
“It’s really bad, Rowan,” she says into my shirt, her voice muffled. “When I went into the kitchen to get the bowl, he had half a sausage link hanging from his mouth.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad—”
“It was raw.”
“Okay, yep. That’s pretty bad.” I swallow down the uncomfortable protests of my stomach and cleanse the imagery from my mind with a deep breath of Sloane’s ginger scent. I don’t want to let go, but time is always working against me when it comes to her.
It works against me almost as hard as she does.
Sloane tenses in my embrace and I let her go before she can pull away. “We should probably check on him,” I say, shifting my attention away when she looks at me with a question in her furrowed brow.
“Yeah, I guess we probably should.”
Sloane shifts around me, her gaze lowered as she leads the way out of the dining room. When I offer to take the metal bowl she refuses, claiming I might spill it on the walls and give her twice the amount of cleanup work, but I don’t think that’s the full reason. Maybe she just feels guilty for not telling me about Thorsten earlier. Maybe she needs something else to focus on. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s because she meant what she said. That she cares.
I mull over her reasoning as I follow Sloane down the corridor, the bowl held as far from her face as she can manage without the risk of spilling. Her steps slow until she stops and lingers just before the threshold to the kitchen. When I halt at her side, she looks up at me with a grimace, her nose crinkling, a little spattering of blood dotting her cheek like a crimson echo of her natural freckles. If I could, I would tattoo it right into her skin.
Fucking adorable.
“It’s too quiet,” she whispers. “I don’t like it.”
“Maybe he wandered off.”
“Or maybe he’s in a meat coma.”
“Christ. Too soon.”
We lean forward and peer through the door.
David is sitting on the counter, his legs swinging and his gaze vacant as he spoons what seems to be cookies and cream ice cream into his mouth straight from the tub.
“That’s a relief,” I say as I let go of a held breath.
“He’s living his best life.” Sloane’s shoulders drop and she watches David for a moment before heading into the room with careful steps as though not to spook him. He tracks her movement as she stops at the sink to ditch the contents of the bowl before dousing everything with bleach, but he doesn’t move, just keeps slowly digging into the pint of ice cream.
I lean against the doorframe and cross my arms as I watch Sloane work at the sink. “When did you figure out who Thorsten was?”
“Pretty much right away.” She shrugs, her focus still caught on her hands as she washes the bowl more thoroughly than it probably requires. “I heard about a cannibal killer in the UK from a few years ago who hadn’t surfaced recently. When Lachlan gave us the location and I looked into disappearances nearby, they fit the same profile as the victims in his previous location. After that, I went through local real estate purchases from the last few years and bingo, found him.”
“Did you consider at any point that you might want to clue me in about a cannibal inviting us over for dinner?” I ask.
Sloane shrugs, her attention still not shifting to me. “Maybe. Mostly only when I was scraping human meat off your tongue. Up until then, no, I can’t say that I did. You insisted on worming your way onto my dinner invite, after all.”
“Christ.”
She giggles, clearly delighted with herself. Her eyes shine with amusement when she turns to me as she dries her hands with paper towel. “Worked out pretty well in the end, wouldn’t you say?”
“Not really.”
Sloane grins as she heads toward David whose focus is consumed by the ice cream in his grasp. She shoots me an unsure glance before she stops by his swinging legs. “Hey, David. I’m Sloane,” she says. He doesn’t acknowledge her words, just watches her as he slides a spoonful of ice cream into his mouth. “Maybe we should take a break from the food, what do you say?”