His jaw flexes. I glance down—he’s hard, straining against denim, very obviouslynotunaffected. A flush climbs his chest.
“Trust me, I want to,” he says. His voice is hoarse. “But if I let you put your mouth on me in the middle of this kitchen, we’re not stopping until I’ve fucked you six ways from Sunday, andKael’s ghost will rise out of the floor to strangle me with his bare hands.”
“He’s not dead,” I say faintly.
“Feels like he might be if we keep this up,” Bran mutters.
I should be offended. I’m not. I’m…weirdly flattered.
“Besides,” he adds, thumb brushing the inside of my wrist. “This one was for you.”
Emotion swells in my chest, inconvenient and hot. I look away, swallowing hard.
“Show-off,” I say.
“Always,” he says.
He leans in and kisses me again, softer this time, tasting of salt and something uniquely me, and for a second the world goes quiet.
Then the timer on the stove beeps, shrill and insistent.
Bran pulls back with a low curse. “Of course,” he says. “Lasagna.”
I stare at him. “You just gave me the best orgasm of my life and now you’re going to pull a Garfield?”
He laughs, the sound rough and disbelieving. “Sit there and don’t move,” he orders, kissing my forehead once for good measure. “You try to get off this counter before your legs work again and you’re going to fall on your ass.”
He turns back to the oven. I watch the play of muscles in his back as he opens it and pretends to care deeply about Italian-American comfort food.
My legs are, in fact, jelly.
My heart is worse.
Because somewhere between the boredom and the argument and the way he dropped to his knees in front of me like it was the most natural place in the world for him to be, a line shifted inside me.
Henry is still out there. We’re still hiding. None of that has changed.
But something between Bran and me has.
And for better or worse, I have a feeling there’s no going back.
TWENTY-FOUR
HIM
IleaveLucyFallslike I always meant to: after midnight, headlights off for the first mile, someone else’s blood drying tacky between my fingers.
Miguel’s.
He whispered his name before I slit his throat. “Please. My name is Miguel. I have a girlfriend, please—”
I didn’t plan on him, not exactly. He wasn’t part of the original script. But stories evolve. The cast changes. Sometimes the wrong character walks into a scene at the wrong time and you have to work with what you’re given.
That damned alarm went off before I was ready.
That shriek—that fucking wailing—went up and the horses started stamping, and there he was in the barn in his stupid ‘hellyeah, brother’ T-shirt, bare feet shoved into boots, squinting into the dark like he was going to “check things out.”
Wrong time. Wrong place. Wrong night to be a hero, Miguel.
