Adam starts with the hallway, the closets—anything big enough to hide bulk in. He pulls open every drawer, every door.

Eris pours out the gin and makes him a new one, with a new glass. She places it on the coffee table with her martini. She puts the stereo on, takes a bag of crackers from the pantry, and settles down on the couch with her book.

Adam opens the door to her bedroom. The bed is perfectly made, the room dark and expensive. The products in the cupboards of the master bath are organized by colour and size. The towels are folded four times.

Adam moves to the walk-in closet. The dresser drawers are mostly filled with black clothing, but there's the occasional colour. The dresses are all silk, the jewelry is all diamonds. He moves back into the bedroom, opening the nightstand drawers. She has a few books in one, some extraordinarily expensive silver lingerie and condoms in the other. Adam has her medical file, so he knows she takes medication for birth control, and she's had the same boyfriend for years. Adam realizes oblivious Nikolas must not be the only man she keeps close.

He leaves the bedroom and passes by the living room again as he goes up the stairs. She's reading a book on the couch, martini in hand. There's no possible way there's nothing incriminating in this house. No possible way. It's just hidden well.

Adam opens the door to the study. This place is slightly less organized, so he sorts through her files. Lawsuits on Nyx, lawsuits on the cops, lawsuits on Adam—Leonardo's case. He thumbs through it. The notes are illegible—Eris' handwriting is neat, but it's in Greek.

Eris flips the page in her book and takes a sip of the drink. Too much vermouth.

Adam moves to her most recent lawsuit on the police. The notes are in Latin, now. The ones on a red-light ticket she's fighting are in Arabic.

"How many damn languages do you know?" Adam shouts from the study.

"Thirteen," Eris calls back as she flips another page.

He's not exactly surprised. No one can crack all these notes by themselves. The business files for Nyx, the profits, the returns, they're all in a different language from the last, none of them in English. Adam tosses the papers away in frustration. He goes to the guest bedroom, the exercise room. There isn't anything incriminating in this house.

Adam goes back down the stairs. Behind the bookcases, between the cushions. He moves every single thing in the house, and he finds nothing. Eris doesn't keep her stores in the penthouse after all.

Adam sits down on the couch across from her. "There's nothing here," he says.

Eris flips another page. "No?" She offers him the crackers. He doesn't take any.

"I don't get it. If you don't have it here, where are you hiding it?" He leans back, his head rolling to the ceiling. It's some of the most incredible carpentry work he's ever seen.

Eris watches him lull. He has this ability to look comfortable even when he's upset or frustrated. He takes the gin off the coffee table and leans back again, propping his feet up on the coffee table. She rolls her shoulders, tempted to tell him to take them away, but she refrains.

He took off his shoes when he came in, which she does, too. She wears the heels in the house, but only because they take nearly an hour to get off. One must be careful with the pearls.

"Some old abandoned airport? Some hotel? Hold on, Nyx owns a hotel, right?"

Eris stretches her feet out on the couch, still in the heels. "Yes," she says. "But there's nothing there."

Adam watches the fan spin. "Where, then? Where's all this fucking cocaine?"

"I don't sell cocaine."

Adam finishes the gin, then turns his head to look at her. "Off the record," he says.

Eris glances at him. She smiles. It's more than beautiful; it's sensational.

"Just tell me that you sell drugs," Adam says. "Tell me I'm not insane. Tell me the truth." His voice is exhausted, but Eris knows him and all his tricks. She nods to his shirt.

Adam gives her a look. "I don't have a mic on me."

Eris smiles again, enigmatic. She brings a finger to her lips.

Adam sighs. "I said off the record."

Eris shrugs, then turns back to her reading.

"Fine," Adam says. "Check me." He knows what she's doing, and he doesn't know why she's still trying. He doesn't know why he's letting her.

Eris closes the book and sets it on the table. Her legs slide off the couch, and she stands. Maybe she's just finding a reason to touch him, but she also isn't going to admit it unless she knows there's no mic.

She leans over him, placing an arm on the couch behind him. She reaches out, runs a finger along the outside collar of his jacket.

Adam looks up at her and clears his throat. She watches him as she does it, spinning her fingers so she can check the inside. The smooth pads of her fingers brush along his neck, then run down the buttons of the jacket. One at the top, the second in the middle.

She does it like it's teasing. Adam tries looking away, but that just makes it worse. She smells of something he can't quite place—pine, maybe. Her finger is precarious, down to the third button. Adam can feel his muscles tensing.

"Eris, come on," he says. He means for it to resemble a command, but in the end it comes out a little quieter than it should. A little more like he's begging her.

She tilts her head slowly, running her finger down the fourth button, then stopping at his waist. She folds her legs under her, sitting beside him. She slides her finger across his waistband, and Adam shifts. Her eyes are on him, watching every muscle tense and relax.

"Eris."

Her eyes aren't quite on him anymore. They travel over his nose, down his neck. She twists her finger, checking the zipper of his pants.

Adam tries to make it through this part, if only to win this little game she's playing, but at the last second, she puts a little too much pressure on her finger, and Adam pushes her away.

"There's no mic," he says.

She curls her fingers into her hand, the points of her nails disappearing. "Cocaine, mostly. A little bit of fentanyl, a little bit of ecstasy," she says, voice monotoned.

Adam shifts again, frustrated now in more ways than one. He searches her eyes, watches the skin over her collarbone tighten as she relaxes into the couch. The structure there is so beautiful, the skin is so golden, and Adam doesn't know why she doesn't show it off more.

"Why?"

"Good money."

Adam shakes his head. "We both know you could've invented some sort of technology, some sort of company. Made yourself a billionaire. Money isn't why you do it."

Her face is completely devoid of expression. Only her eyes move, following him as he shifts uncomfortably again.

"Thrill," she says.

Adam considers this. He likes thrill, too. Everybody does. But there's a line between thrill and danger. "It's fun? To almost get caught? To almost lose your freedom? Things like that are fun to you?"

"Fun isn't the right word, Adam," she says. She lifts her arm to the back of the couch, reaches out to touch his hair.

"Don't, Eris."

Her hand stills. She just wants to touch it. She won't do anything more. She has these intrusive thoughts plaguing her day and night. She knows how to control them.

She draws her hand back. "Fun isn't the right word," she says again.

"Then I don't get it. I like thrill, too. I wouldn't like the anxiety of getting caught."

She rests her hand near his head, but doesn't touch anything. What Adam doesn't understand—what nobody really does—is that Eris gets the anxiety from boredom. From a lack of things to do. Anxiety boils up on Wednesday, when the club isn't open and she's done all the work for the week already. Anxiety appears on an empty freeway. Anxiety takes her neck and crushes it when things are simple and easy to understand. If her mind is not perplexed to some degree, she'll flake away into nothing. She'll fall apart into the same existential crisis she experienced when she found out the universe was expanding, and there was nothing she could do about it.

"They did a study a few years ago," Eris says. "The brain pathways of a gang leader and a street Sergeant. The emotional recoil, the neuron connections—they're all the same. The willingness to act, the ambition, the raw violence. Criminals differ from the police in only one way, and that's intent. Most of the time, Adam, they're exactly the same nature, but the nurture has been different."

Adam knows that. He saw the study, too. "You had criminals for parents, then? Grew up immoral? That's what you're saying?"

Eris shifts slightly, shaking her head. "My parents were poor, and we lived in a place equivalent to the south end, but they weren't criminals. They were clueless, though, so they didn't understand why I could do long division in my head at three but failing school."

"Every gifted child has that same story."

She shrugs with a slight smile. "Maybe they do, but I got tired of it. In junior high, they put me in classes for limited students, so I stopped going. By high school, I only went enough to be considered for a degree, which I didn't end up getting. As my classmates sat down to write their SATs, a helicopter dropped me onto a Swiss mountain."

Adam lifts his brows. "You were an extreme skier?"

"Skiing, skydiving, free climbing. Whatever was most likely to kill me."

"You wanted to die?" Adam asks.

"I wanted to feel like I might die."

That was a theme in extreme sports; Adam had seen it before. But Eris didn't have that same wildness that Adam had seen in those people.

"Why stop?"

Eris stopped because she couldn't take the blood. But if she told Adam that, she would have to tell him why she couldn't take the blood anymore. So she tells a half-truth instead.

"Sports stimulate the body, but they don't stimulate the mind. I needed psychological warfare. So I went into law."

"And the day you graduated—or the day you dropped out, rather—you bought Nyx. Why go that route? Why didn't you go to the police? We're both feeling the same thrill during a chase."

She smiles. "The law protects a hundred criminals so they can protect one innocent. The police have rules, regulations. The good side is the limiting side."

"And that's it? Being a criminal simply suits your talents better? There's nothing in that genius mind that wants a good legacy—wants to know you made a good mark on the world while you lay on your deathbed?"

"Why would I spend my entire life abiding to confinement just so I can feel good about myself a moment before I'm dead?"

"What about religion?" Adam insists. "Some sort of higher power you believe in that urges you to do good in your life. You're named after a Greek goddess, aren't you? I know Hellenism is hardly a thing anymore, but it's still culture." He nods to the book on the couch. "And you clearly still read about it."

She glances at the book. "It's interesting, and I like the parallels. Plus, I'm named after the goddess of chaos, Adam. Discord and strife, not moral goodness. I'm not religious. Religion is just a curtain to hide how selfish you really are. Be good, and you'll get to go to heaven. Then you're not good, you're just acting that way for your best interest."

Adam searches her eyes very carefully. While he may not agree with her, she speaks with that calm intellect, and in a way, it's slightly demeaning. She talks slowly, purposely, as if she's dumbing down her words as they come out so he'll understand them.

"And I'm not entirely immoral, Adam," Eris says. "I've never killed anyone."

Adam's eyes snap to hers. "Thousands of people die from your drugs. From what you sell them."

"People are people, Adam. They'll find something to kill themselves with no matter who is selling it. If it wasn't me, it would be someone else. I don't lace; I don't mix." She smiles. "In a way, I'm the best thing that's ever happened to those people."

Adam's counterargument is diminishing, and he's starting to wonder if Eris may have a point. If he's busting his ass over a criminal that, should he take out, would just be replaced with someone worse.

"And you?" Eris asks. "Why law?"

Adam's head is whirling. Maybe Eris isn't the devil. Maybe he's not really on the good side. Maybe all this work is futile. Maybe his domestic life with his domestic family is something he's going to regret.

"The thrill," Adam says. "Same as you. But I graduated with honours."

Eris tilts a smile. She loves his honesty, loves his lack of a poker face. She can see every emotion he goes through, how at war he's become with his own ideas.

"You like the thrill," she says. "But that's not why you became a cop."

Adam sighs and sips the gin. Good gin, imported from Whales. "My father was an alcoholic. Beat my mother. I didn't do anything, so now I spend the rest of my life trying to make up for it. The same old sob story every cop has."

Eris glances down at the drink in his hand. She knows, of course—that Adam is an alcoholic just like his father—but she also knows that if she brings it up, he'll leave. And she doesn't want him to leave. She also knows Adam has a bad habit of generalizing people's lives—Eris' past as a gifted child, his sob story as a cop.

"Do you—" Adam nods to the room. "Do you use, then?"

"No," she replies. "Don't even know what it feels like."

"But you like thrills. Cocaine is a thrill."

"If I took it, I'd never stop."

Adam glances down at the glass in his hand. "You handle liquor just fine."

"I drink liquor because I like the taste, not because I like the feeling."

Adam used to hate the taste of liquor. Somewhere along the way, it became a simple price for the feeling. Now it's just there.

Eris watches him carefully. She bribed Judge Finsen to look at the custody case of Daphne, so she knows what was in Sarah's statement.

Adam rolls his shoulders. He's exhausted—all these night shifts, all this pressure from Wilkes. All the annoyed looks and the jokes about candy hearts.

His glass of gin is empty. Eris wants to refill it because she wants him to be satisfied, but she also doesn't want to take away from whatever reckoning he might be having about it. Her fingers itch to touch him. She wants to reach out, touch the line of his jaw, the contour of his lips. She wants to run her fingers through his hair, over his face.

He closes his eyes for a moment. He wants to ask for a refill, but he doesn't want her to think he needs it. When he opens his eyes, the sparkle of the diamonds in her ears reflect the lights, which are dimming with whatever Eris' schedule usually is. It's late—past midnight, creeping closer to one. The penthouse is deadly silent; the city outside is alive. Adam is exhausted.

"Pretty earrings," he says, spinning his empty glass. He wants to ask for the gin. She won't care if he asks. He should just ask.

"You like them?" she asks.

"They look expensive."

"They are."

Adam spins his glass again, not looking at her. If he has another, he'll have to take a cab home. Well, if he has one more then waits a few minutes, he'll be fine.

Adam passes the empty glass to her. She takes it. She's still in that position, legs folded and arm next to his head, and she doesn't move.

"You want another?" she asks.

Adam knows they both know. He knows she's just trying to get him to say it. She wants to fix him, wants to make him better.

"Of all people, you'd think you would just let me drink," Adam says. His tone is sharp, uninviting.

Eris gets off the couch with the glass. Her heels click over the hardwood, light and gentle. She takes the gin out of the cupboard, fills the glass. Gets him ice. Because he wants it.

Adam can hear her graceful movements in the kitchen. He knows what happens if he has another. He knows he has somewhere to be tomorrow morning. He knows, he knows. But he likes that she's just getting him the drink, no questions asked. He likes that unique perspective she has, even if he doesn't agree with it.

She hands him the glass, then curls back into that position. Her heels sparkle. They're full of straps and pearls, and they probably take hours to get off.

Adam looks over at her. He remembers wanting the gin in his bones, in his heart, he remembers the feeling of wishing she would hurry up and bring it over. But once he meets that gaze, he suddenly doesn't feel a rush to drink it.

"Thank you," he says.

"You're welcome, Adam."

Adam closes his eyes again. Eris doesn't judge. Not Daphne's broken arm, not Adam's drinking. She doesn't care, because she's done worse to people. It's the same feeling as getting drunk, losing his worries. It's just trading one addiction for the other.

Eris reaches out and places a hand on his face, even though she was told not to. Her heart is stumbling along, skipping out behind her. She runs her thumb across the half-circle under his eye, carefully and slowly.

"Are these from me?" she asks, her voice a whisper.

Adam opens his eyes, then smiles. Her face is hard to read, but that just means he gets to look at her longer while he tries to decipher what she's thinking. Her hands are smooth, warm.

"A little bit," he says.

Eris searches his eyes. She wants to kiss his forehead, his chin, his nose. She wants to curl up with him in her massive, lonely bed. She wants to touch his hair, his arms, his shoulders. She wants to massage out every worry, every doubt, every fleck of anything that gives him trouble, including herself.

"What does it feel like?" Adam asks, lifting a hand to close around her wrist. He circles his thumb over the back of her hand. "The skiing, the climbing. What does it feel like to take that kind of risk?"

"It feels like living, Adam," she answers. Her thumb falls a little, down from his eye, across his cheek.

He isn't sure if the risk-to-reward system his mother taught him holds up here. He isn't sure if the concept of the risk-to-reward system stands a chance against the feelings he's never had a chance to feel.

"I don't know if I've ever really taken a risk like that," he says, not breaking her gaze. "Dropped onto a Swiss mountain or something. If I've ever really done something that logic didn't support, just to know what it felt like."

"Do you want to?" she asks.

Adam can feel his heart beating, hammering. Yes. Yes, yes, yes.

Her face is inches away, and her hands, her heart, everything wants to lean in, press herself close. But she waits, because she just can't take that sour taste of rejection. It's worse than blood.

Adam lifts his hand from her wrist to the back of her neck. She's so close he can see every nonexistent flaw. Her skin really is that lovely.

"I think so," he breathes.

That's all Eris needs. She closes the distance and kisses him, slowly, carefully. His hand rests against her hair, keeping her close. He tastes like gin, like addiction. Like bad decisions.

He reaches out to bring her closer. Eris' skin is so exposed, so unhidden. She shifts over him, lets her knees sink into the back of the couch, lets herself sink into him.

Adam pulls away, kisses her jaw, her neck. He does it right, the first time, without being told how. She feels the gentle pinch of his teeth at her ear, then hears the whisper of his voice, "Please tell me that was just gin."

She laughs, her fingers trailing down the back of his head, living in the feeling of his breath on her neck.

"Just gin," she says.

He smiles—she knows he does, because she can feel his teeth. He adjusts, moving her to the side. He kisses her lips, alluring, exotic. He shifts over her, and she feels the couch cushions mould to her back.

He runs his hands down the dress, over her legs, down to those shoes. He loves that she wears them even though she's tall. He loves that confidence, that uncrackable exterior. He undoes every strap, one at a time. He's careful with the pearls as he lets them fall to the floor. He kisses her calf, her thigh.

Eris sits up to meet him, wrapping her arms around his neck. It's Adam, so smooth, so level-headed. It's Adam, with his lovely eyes and his inability to give up.

There's something new to it as Eris kisses him again. It's more, now, a little more rushed. Her fingers undo every button, deft, sure. She has that confidence, that experience, that sensuality. She takes his arm, pulls him standing, leads him to her room. She walks backward, keeping her gaze on him, fingers curling to ask him to follow. There is no awkwardness to her walk, no note of doubt. She closes the door behind him, lets the dress fall to the floor. Lets him touch every inch of her.

It settles her mind, satisfies her insatiable thoughts for just a moment. It's why Eris sells drugs—because it's risky. It's why she cheats on her boyfriend—because it's risky. It's why she fell for a cop—because it's risky. Risky is chaos.

And that's what Eris does.