Chapter Four
VALENTINO
Montrose gives me a flirty smile, full of filthy promises that my dick is aching to cash in on. Then, he licks a hot stripe over the pulse point in my throat, singeing my flesh and drawing a gut-deep moan from me. I press into him so he can feel the throbbing outline of my cock against his, and between one blink and the next, he’s gone.Gonegone. I stumble into the brick side of the building with a muttered curse, and the sound of Montrose’s laughter echoes on the breeze as I blink away the haze the hot little demon managed to cast over me for a second time in twelve hours.
“Dude, where the hell did you go?” Mac calls out, and I huff through my nose, expelling a flicker of flame and smoke in an attempt to clear Montrose’s dizzying scent.
“I’m here,” I answer gruffly, pushing away from the wall and reaching down to adjust my cock so my erection will be less obvious, because I have a feeling it’s not about to settle down anytime soon. Not with the promise of meeting up with the demon again tonight.
Mac appears in the mouth of the alleyway with his head cocked, his eyes darting around the space and his nostrils flaring. Can he smell Montrose? I bristle at the thought of anyone else inhaling the pure sex scent of him. I want to rush forward and put a hand over Mac’s nose before he can get even a single whiff of my demon…thedemon. Not mine. He wrinkles his nose and waves his hand in front of his face to clear the odor.
“Blech, it smells like rotting garbage and burning flesh. Did somebody torch a body back here or what?” He gags.
I look around, noticing the space itself for the first time. The alley sits between two businesses with apartments over each of them. Two overflowing dumpsters are obviously the source of the offensive smell Mac is talking about. I just didn’t notice them over Montrose earlier. As for the burning flesh smell, I think Mac needs his nose checked, because I can’t catch so much as a whiff of that.
I narrow my eyes as a thought occurs to me.
“Could your demon be here? Xazedose?” I look around, not exactly expecting some horned hell-beast to pop out of thin air and throttle my little brother, but not ruling the possibility out either.
He shrugs and rubs the back of his neck.
“Maybe,” he murmurs. “You think he would show up in the middle of the day, on a busy street like this?” He looks over his shoulder, then back at me, biting his lip and looking like more of a helpless whelp than I’ve seen him look in a century, when he actuallywasjust a wee dragon still tripping over his own wings.
“That was kind of the point, bro,” I remind him, stepping out of the alley and slinging my arm around his shoulders. “We wanted to lure him out, remember?” I inhale deeper and shift my eyes for a better look at the street around us, studying every person who bustles by, searching for any signs that they might be a demon in disguise.
“Yeah,” he says, still not sounding as cavalier about the idea as he did earlier when he was safe and sound at the compound.
“You’ll be fine. I’m not going to let a demon lay his claws on you,” I promise, and Mac nods.
When I’m satisfied that none of the bougie shoppers with their overpriced coffee are actually Xazedose, I guide my brother through the front door of Timeless Treasures.
A barrage of odors hits me as soon as we step inside: dust, aged leather, decaying paper, and so many types of metal and precious stones that it would make your head spin. My dragon purrs, the sound rumbling deep in my chest, and Mac moans out loud. Same reaction, just a hell of a lot less chill.
“Pretty,” he breathes in a deep, reverent voice that’s pure dragon, his gaze snagging on the jewelry case.
I tighten my arm around his shoulders to hold him back.
“Easy,” I rumble. “You can’t loot Dempsey’s shop. Lake will hold you down while Hem eviscerates you.”
Mac huffs, and I chuckle at his youthful frustration.
As my dragon finishes sifting through the symphony of interesting smells, I pick out one in particular from the mess and scrunch my nose.
He seems to pick up on it at exactly the same time, making a similar face. “It smells like?—”
Before he can finish that sentence, Dempsey bursts out of a back room, his face flushed and his glasses askew. He’s tucking his shirt in with one hand and attempting to tame his messy hair with the other.
“Welcome to Timeless… Oh, it’s you guys.” He sighs in relief, and Hemingway saunters through the door behind him, looking just as disheveled, but without the hint of flustered embarrassment at getting caught.
“Excellent timing. Really, top notch,” he grumbles, and I bark out a laugh.
“After all the times you’ve cockblocked me over the centuries, bro, you’re long overdue for payback.”
Dempsey’s eyes go wide, and he pushes his glasses up again nervously. “You didn’t—We weren’t…”
While he stumbles through a pointless denial, the stairs at the back of the shop creak and Lake appears from the upstairs office. He’s ridiculously overdressed for whatever office work he was doing in the dusty old apartment over Dempsey’s antique shop. He has on a peacock blue suit with a ruffled lace shirt underneath it, and diamond earrings dangling from each lobe, no doubt straight from Nico’s hoard.
“Oh, are you two done fucking?” he asks casually, noticing Hem and Dempsey.
