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my miserable existence somehow tolerable.
    And then Cam came. And my entire universe shifted.
    It was still shifting, still spinning, a maelstrom, but Cam was at the center of it. He’d become my anchor. All I had to do was hold on. So why did I suddenly feel like everything I had, everything we had, was about to get ripped out of my grasping fingers?
    It was because Chris Varro was here, and it couldn’t be a coincidence.
    The first wet dream I’d ever had about a guy had featured Chris Varro. I’d been in Cam’s head at the time, and his wet dream was my wet dream, and Cam and Chris had fucked. The memory of Chris’s hands on Cam’s skin became Chris’s hands on me, his teeth on my shoulder, his fingers wrapped around my cock.
    I closed my eyes and groaned. “Fuck!”
    How unfair was that? Chris Varro could still make my dick hard.
    That asshole.
    I rubbed my dick through the coarse fabric of my fatigues, then figured that probably wasn’t the smartest thing to get caught doing while on duty. I jammed my hands in my pockets instead.
    I hated Chris, and not just because he was Cam’s ex. I hated him because he should have been on Cam’s side, but he hadn’t been. Not when it counted. Cam had been gone for four years by the time the Faceless sent him back, and everyone, even Chris, had suspected he was a traitor. And Chris should have been different. He should have been better than that.
    They’d fucked in Cam’s dreams, but they’d talked as well, and laughed and touched and loved each other in a hundred different ways that had nothing to do with getting off. That should have counted for more than it did when they met again on Defender Three.
    Jesus. Not that I wished Chris had been nicer or anything. The fact he’d been a dick had worked out pretty well for me, after all. I wasn’t asking for competition. It’s just that Cam was worth more than a thousand Chris fucking Varros, and the whole universe should have known it.
    And maybe in some weird, fucked-up way I hated him because I felt rejected. Because the first time I’d met Chris, I’d thought—infected by all of Cam’s dreams and breathless with the shock of seeing him in the flesh— I loved him , and he hadn’t even looked at me twice. Okay, so my first bitter taste of unrequited love had lasted all of thirty seconds before I reminded myself that I was nothing but an echo chamber for Cam’s emotions, but it had hurt all the same.
    Stupid.
    I climbed off Marcello’s bed and headed down the hall and fetched him from the shower. He was a skinny kid. Most of that was from eating mush, I guess. He still had a faint scar on his gut from where he’d worn a feeding tube for the first few months after his accident, but the doctors had taken him off it now because he needed to know how to feed himself again if he was ever going to get the hell out of this hospital.
    Marcello dressed quickly, avoiding his reflection in the mirror.
    “Hey, you’ll be as good as new when they fix your face up,” I told him. We both knew it was a lie. He’d never look like the same guy he must have been before the accident, but at least he wouldn’t look as monstrous as he did now.
    He shrugged, and we headed back to his room.
    “Want to play cards?”
    He sat down on his bed and shrugged again.
    I sat down on the other end. “You don’t seem real enthusiastic. Seriously, you think you’re having a bad day? You won’t even believe what happened to me yesterday.”
    “Ot?” What?
    “I walked into Cam’s office, and who’s already there? His fucking ex .”
    Marcello’s eyes widened.
    I pulled the cards out of my pocket, knowing I could tempt him into a hand after a few rounds of our other favorite game: the continuing saga of why my life sucked more than anyone else’s. Marcello knew I was at least 90 percent bluster and bullshit.
    Probably 95.
    So Marcello let me bitch and moan about how much my life sucked, shaking his head and making all the right