“She could already be fleeing the city if we don’t find her soon. We have to search the surveillance feeds.” She sits back down at her workstation and starts flipping through camera footage without saying another word to me.
I’m frustrated by her withdrawal, but I won’t push it any further right now. More than anyone, I know how many pressures Phoenix has closing in on her from all sides. But I won’t let it go without her knowing one thing. “It meant something to me. Ammit might have pushed me to do things faster than I would have otherwise, but I was still me in thatalley. I knew exactly what I was doing.” I pause. “Were you still you?”
Her hand on the mouse pauses in its clicking. I think I see her throat work as she swallows. Her cheeks go pink. But then she continues clicking through screen after screen without answering me.
“I checked my phone log, and I called Vlad at eleven twenty-three.” She zeroes in on the location coordinates and accesses the camera feeds near the club. “So we can work backward from there.”
I sit down in the chair beside her as the alley comes into view from several different angles. I don’t miss her sharp gasp as she rolls the fast-reversing cameras back far enough that the previously empty alleyway suddenly has several figures on it. Us.
She tries to drag the progress bar forward again quickly, but not before both of us get an eyeful of us having sex in several different positions. The footage plays in comically fast reverse.
“Wait, you have to go back further,” I say while trying to keep my voice steady. “Ammit fled right at the beginning before we started.”
“Dammit,” Phoenix curses under her breath. She starts to reverse the footage again but accidentally pauses on a frame of her on her knees with her hands on my ass. In the frozen image, she’s taking my cock deep into her mouth. The beast inside me growls at seeing the erotic image of us lost in each other’s bodies. I go hard just looking at the screen and remembering exactly how her mouth felt on me. The suction. The warmth. The desperate need in the way she took me.
“Jesus,” she hisses while finally dragging the bar in reverse again. She goes back past the entire sex scene until she stops right when we leap on each other and start ripping off our clothes.
Because there she is in the corner of the frame.Ammit. There’s just one brief moment where her face looks freaked out before she tears off down the alleyway at a sprint.
“South!” Phoenix announces with triumph in her voice. “She’s heading south toward the river.”
Phoenix zooms in on Ammit’s face with practiced efficiency. She takes a screenshot and emails it off to her contacts at the police department, who are monitoring the perimeter of the locked-down city.
Phoenix seems more than relieved to close out of the window containing our sex tape. She moves on to a camera feed further down the alley. She must have noted the time stamp on the previous camera because this time, she drags the progress bar directly to where it picks up Ammit running past.
I was a little too distracted by the previous footage to pay attention to details. But I try to get my head back in the game now and look at the time stamp in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen. 10:47:02 PM. Well damn. We were going at it for almost half an hour. It felt like just the blink of an eye to me.
Phoenix pushes play, and we watch Ammit run down a darker part of the alley. Then she turns left when she comes to a larger street. Phoenix clicks on another camera feed with quick precision. “Got you now, bitch,” she whispers while leaning closer to the screen.
Phoenix keeps chasing from camera to camera with impressive speed. She follows Ammit’s path until the goddess reaches a river that cuts through the middle of the city. There’s no camera coverage along that section of the waterfront.
“Dammit!” Phoenix slams a fist on the table beside the keyboard hard enough to make me jump. The monitors shake slightly from the impact.
“It’s okay,” I say while reaching out to touch her shoulder. This time I actually make contact. “Vlad shut down the city byeleven-thirty, and look at this.” I point to the last timestamp we have Ammit on video. 11:38 PM. “She’s still somewhere inside the city limits. It’ll just take us a little longer to find her with the surveillance network. Why don’t I take over for a bit so you can take a break?”
Phoenix nods and shoves away from the desk abruptly. “I need to take a shower.”
Right. I bet she does. Does she still feel me on her skin? Of course she does, and she wants to wash it off as quickly as possible. I can still smell it on both of us—the unmistakable scent of sex between us. All of my brothers and I were cursed with an overactive sense of smell that makes these things impossible to ignore.
She shoves the door as she leaves the lab. It doesn’t close fully behind her, and I listen to each of her steps as she strides down the hallway to her bedroom. That door she slams with enough force to rattle the frame.
Jesus Christ,she’s doing it again.
Here I am, trying to focus on tracking down a dangerous goddess through camera feeds. But that smell is wafting through the air from underneath her bedroom door. That same smell that used to torture me on certain nights when I lived here all those years ago.
She went to wash the scent of our alley encounter off her body. But now there’s a different scent in the air. It’s even stronger than before, mixing with the sweet smell of her shampoo and body wash.
The exact same thing that used to happen back then.
I’ve just gotten my hunger back under control after seeing that footage of us. But I immediately go hard again in my jeans.
She’s touching herself in the shower.
I remember the first time it happened like it was yesterday. It was the second night I stayed here after she first showed me this computer lab. I can’t remember everything we said that night. She’d just gotten back from doing something Vlad had sent her to do, and she seemed upset about whatever it was. Then she disappeared into her room for the night. Ten minutes later, a scent began wafting out with the shower steam from underneath her door.
The scent was so primal. So uniquely her. Every time it reached the monster in my belly, it made me want to tear down her door and claim her. I never would have acted on it, of course. But the wanting was there, sharp and desperate.
Smelling Phoenix’s arousal then and smelling it now makes it impossible to focus on the computer screen in front of me.
