Charles would be joking if he said that didn’t catch him slightly off guard. Two days with this man was too many. All he could hope for now was that they both made it back to New York in one piece—and preferably without him committing homicide.Ten minutes later, they were still in a cab that had been “driving to a restaurant nearby,” according to August. Charles suspected that “nearby” was just August’s polite way of saying on the other side of the planet.“Excuse me, I don’t know if you are familiar with this place,” August broke the silence, putting on the exaggerated tone of a clueless foreigner.“Familiar?” The cabman chuckled, his voice thick with a local accent. “My grandmother…born here. My mother too. Me as well. My father… Canadian, but he moved here after marrying my mother. I lived here all my life, and maybe I…die here too.”“Wow,” August said with the full, wide-eyed enthusiasm of a tourist who’d just “found a local guide to the exot

“Oh, shit,” August stopped walking. “I should’ve told you earlier, sir. That guy I introduced you to earlier, that silver guy, he’s her boyfriend. Found out like… thirty seconds ago. Unless you’re cool with us staying there—”“Let’s just look for another place,” Charles cut in before his brain could even register the rest. The last thing he needed was to be that stranger in some messy lovers’ drama.“Hey, where’s your house?” August asked the boy.The kid froze for half a second, eyes darting. “I… I don’t… ha… have a house.”“Who you kidding? You think you’d still be breathing if I’d left you back there?”What a pain in the ass August was. Did he ever stop to think how terrifying a man his size looked when he leaned in on someone?“You’ve been here a couple of times,” Charles said, facing August. “Haven’t got any friends?”“Those two are the only friends I—wow. Shit.” He grinned in a pained way that made Charles not want