Total pages in book: 102
Estimated words: 97537 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 488(@200wpm)___ 390(@250wpm)___ 325(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 97537 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 488(@200wpm)___ 390(@250wpm)___ 325(@300wpm)
My heart drums in my throat. It’s fine. This is fine. I’m a cool, collected detective with an avocado in her bag and cinnamon on her tongue and the truth winking at me like a lighthouse.
He leaves; I count to thirty, buy a pencil I don’t need, and follow.
We pass a dog in a sweater. We pass a busker singing Leonard Cohen off-key. Arrow jaywalks without looking ridiculous, which should be illegal and is probably part of his hacker skill tree. He cuts down Riverside, past the shuttered print shop with the faded sign and the side door with the keypad lock.
He checks the street—left, right, up. I flatten myself against a mural of octopus tentacles wearing a crown. He enters a code I cannot see (but my blood shouts 1948 like it’s a winning lottery number), slips inside, and the door wheezes shut.
I take a long, slow breath. The river smells like cold pennies and wet rope. A gull screams like a hinge. I stand there with my ridiculous avocado and my cinnamon and my heart pinging off my ribs and know that some days the universe does you the obscene courtesy of confirming your worst suspicion and your best hope in the same breath.
He’s Hoover.
He’s been Hoover all along.
My emotions pile up, then bottleneck. Relief slams grief, which rear-ends fury, which cuts off desire, which honks at betrayal, which flips a U-turn into something suspiciously like giddiness. The traffic jam makes me dizzy.
With Arrow being Hoover, that means his ‘team’ has to be his closest friends, and roommate. Gage, Render, Ozzy, and Knight. I’ve known Gage, Render, and Knight since high school, and only met Ozzy once or twice through Arrow.
Grrr. Did he think I wouldn’t find out?
I find the buzzer on the side door. My finger hovers. I could press. I could walk up those industrial stairs, push open the door, and say you idiot, you beautiful idiot, how dare you and thank you and take that mask off or I’ll rip it off with my teeth. I could watch his face crumple and rebuild in real time. I could lay it all in the open.
Or.
Or I could have a little fun.
Because here’s the thing: I’m hurt. I’m also thrilled. And under both, I’m me—Juno Kate, a girl who used to prank her sister by swapping the sugar with salt before brand shoots and live-tweet the chaos like a tiny goblin. If Arrow thinks he can hide the entire Hoover operation behind a rubber face and a voice changer, then he underestimates the lengths to which I will go to make a man sweat.
I step back from the door and check my phone. A text sits there, unread from ten minutes ago:
HOOVER: Running late. Ten minutes.
From where I’m standing, I can see the shadow of him pacing past the second-story window, a shape in motion, waiting for me.
I type, thumbs flying:
Copy. On my way. Hope you’re ready, Ghost. I have questions.
I hit send, then take the long way around the block to the front entrance, because dramatics matter. My pulse steadies into something like a plan. I tuck the avocado deeper into my bag—it seems rude to interrogate your vigilante while holding produce—and fix my hair in the warped reflection of the glass.
Up the metal stairs, past the peeling “RIVERSIDE PRINT” letters, down the corridor that smells like ink and old paper. I pause outside the loft door—the one I’ve entered half a dozen times now, the one with the keypad code that means we built something together I didn’t know was ours. I don’t knock. I wait.
Inside, I hear him. Footsteps. A chair scrape. The faint rustle of plastic, then the soft click of a modulator. When the door opens, Ghostface fills the frame, tall and careful, the scream smiling at me like an inside joke that’s about to become a confession.
“Juno,” he says, voice deep and altered. “You made it.”
I smile back—sweet as a knife. “Of course I did,” I purr, stepping past him, letting my shoulder brush his chest. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”
And suddenly, I can’t wait to see how well the man I think I’m falling for lies when I’m staring straight into his mask and calling him darling.
Time to see how good Arrow Finn is under pressure.
Time to see how good I am at playing with fire.
16
Arrow
Juno walks into the loft like she owns the place—which, in a way, she does. The room changes shape around her; screens feel brighter, cables fall into line. It’s the same space as it’s always been—ink-and-metal air, router lights pulsing like fireflies—but her energy is…different. Calmer, but sharpened. Cat-slow, not jittery. There’s a new current under her movements that I can’t read.
I log it and pretend not to. We’ve both had no sleep, and I chalk it up to an adrenaline hangover from the Delphine.