It was his turn to shrug. “Family’s family.”
She had no idea what to say to that, so she walked into the room instead. A suite out of her vintage dreams sprawled before her, draped in silks and lit by milk glass lamps designed to look like lilies. A white marble fireplace stood between towering mahogany bookshelves. Arrayed around it were antique couches and well-loved leather wing-back chairs.
When she dared to look up, she found a ceiling bursting with hand-sculpted plaster molding. The designs were heavily floral, but only a few of the flowers were recognizable to her. They were interspersed with pomegranates spilling their seeds, bats in flight, and a massive gilded disk in the center — a moon, perhaps, or Grim’s symbol. Maybe both.
This wasn’t the home of someone who was rich. This was the home of someone who wasfilthy fucking rich.
“You know, I’m totally fine staying in a hotel,” she croaked, skin crawling at how out of place she felt standing in what was essentially a palace. “I’m sure no one would?—”
“You want us to go to a hotel?” Felix grimaced. “That’s a nightmare for security, Dahlia. Milo would have my ass if I told him we were staying anywhere but the house.”
He kept trying to push her toward what she could only assume was a bedroom, but Dahlia planted her bare feet and swung around to face him. “Notus,”she clarified. “Me.”
He gave her a blank stare. “I’d stay here and you’d go to a hotel?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t understand.”
“What don’t you understand?”
Felix raised his eyebrows. In a voice that implied it was a perfectly normal thing to say, he answered, “Why you think I’d let you go anywhere by yourself.”
Dahlia stared at him for a beat, at a loss. It wasn’t entirely because she was completely overwhelmed by everything that had upended her life in so little time. The truth was that she simply didn’t know how to act.
Standing so close to him, hearing him say some bullshit she should’ve expected after knowing him for so long, the strangest dissonance overtook her.
They’d spoken for hours upon hours on the phone. They’d shared thousands of text messages. He sent her gifts and she’d eased him to sleep at dawn with rambling stories from the bar.
In many ways, despite her best efforts and all good sense, Felix was one of her closest friends — second only to Cecilia, of course. And if she was honest with herself, he was a lot more than that.
But when she stood there in the palatial suite, Dahlia realized she didn’tactuallyknowhim. The man standing before her was a stranger. He wore the face she knew, but that face had always been safely contained within the bounds of her phone. That raspy voice was piped through a speaker. Those words were just text on a screen.
Trying to assimilate the two Felixes that existed in her head and in the room was disorienting in the extreme, and it took a hammer to her confidence. If they’d had this conversation through the phone, she wouldn’t have hesitated to roll her eyes and argue her point, but standing there…
Dahlia had no idea how to talk to him.
Her tongue pressed flat against the roof of her mouth, which hadn’t stopped aching since Felix burst into her home. She wasn’t sure if it was the stress of everything or the mouthwatering scent that hung in a cloud around him. Either way, it added to her discomfort. Averting her gaze, she curled her toes into the antique carpet and asked, “So what happens now? What are you going to do with me, Felix?”
Her bag hit the floor with a dullthunk.She looked up to find him shrugging off his long black coat. He certainly didn’t need it in the muggy heat of an east coast summer or in the carefully climate controlled mansion. A crisp black button down stretched taut over his lean stomach and wide shoulders as he tossed it carelessly over the back of a couch. Keeping his eyes on her, he unfastened the buttons at his wrist and began to methodically roll up his sleeves. Corded forearms were revealed one delicious inch at a time.
Like he wanted a report on the weather, he demanded, “Tell me how you’re feeling.”
He looked perfectly calm, but something about his stare and the quick, efficient flicks of his claws as he fixed his sleeves by his elbows made her begin to back away. “Uh, fine?”
He didn’t follow her, but his gaze tracked her progress as she slowly inched back toward the fireplace. “Are you in any pain? How are your fangs? I bet those pretty little things are sensitive right now.”
Dahlia touched the tip of her tongue to the roof of her mouth again. The flesh there was hot and swollen. It appeared to be getting worse by the second. There was a peculiar pressure not unlike how she’d felt before her fangs came in, as if something was just dying to be released.
It wasn't quite painful, but it wasn’t far off.
“The roof of my mouth hurts a little,” she admitted, touching her lips with the tips of her fingers. “There’s a weird pressure. I thought that’d go away after they took my teeth out.”
For a split second, Felix’s easy demeanor slipped. A vision of who he really was came through as his smile turned predatory. “How do I smell, pet?”
Good. Better than good.
The thought popped up instantly, a bubble of something hot and primal from a deep, dark place in the back of her mind. A pulsing ache throbbed in her gums.
