Thea had gotten to the point where she’d prefer not to sleep because she would inevitably have to wake up. To go from the happy escape of dreams of Alex and Dimitri, both alive and warm beside her, to the dark solitude of an empty bed, was the worst kind of hell. Except she was running out of excuses to stay awake. Her latest research project was long done, but she’d given the Foundation a three-month timeframe and they had already paid her paltry stipend for those three months. The fact that she had managed to complete three months-worth of research in half that amount of time wouldn’t matter to them. They would only think she’d miscalculated the difficulty of the project, not that she’d been working double-time on it just so she could avoid having to sleep. She re-read her research paper for the third time, scouring it for some detail she might have missed, a date she might have gotten wrong, a name, a lineal connection out of place—anything that would mean more work. She glanced at the clock that was nearly buried under her stacks of books and notes.
