“You are correct; I am a lady. That is why I’m not slicing off your white-trash head and letting it bounce at my feet for my amusement. We are at a party hosted by my family, at which you are guests. You have attempted to disrupt and destroy that atmosphere for your own amusement, despite how it would affect the entire community in attendance this evening.” The drunken socialite tosses her hair over her shoulder and gives her a fangy grin. “Such behavior would grant me the excuse to killyou; however, I will say this once, so I’m being sporting. Behave or die. It’s your choice.”
Pulling the scimitar out of the wall, she walks away to rejoin the droids from Deli’s family on the lawn as Belle slides down the wall, breathing heavily. Mayhem and Veruca run to her, and Chaos comes flying out of the crowd, a vision of looniness in white in the moonlight.
I watch as Roman and Janus slink away from the bar where they’d been with Philomena to join us, and I spot the look on the bad boy Hex’s face as he watches Chaos tend to her ‘mummy’. Constantine is still staring at the place where the cat was when she almost attacked Wilde, as if he has no idea what to do. The lines are drawn, and they have chosen sides.
The only question is what will happen next?
The Cat Gets All Melty
DELILAH
The house is as still as a crypt, and the candle on my nightstand seems to burn with punitive slowness. Silence has always haunted me, but it’s worse now—ever since the party collapsed, since nobody could keep the facade together, and everyone’s hidden cracks yawned wide open in the middle of the living room.
The echoes of that night remain at the Maison, even though the glasses have been washed, the wine stains blotted, the shattered picture frames buried at the bottom of the recycling. It’s as if the air still vibrates with what happened when Wilde stepped into the light, back from the dead like some sort of romance novel zombie. My extended family is angry and restless as they try to work out their own emotions about it, especially regarding how it affects Rafe and me.
Sleep is a myth right now—I walk the grounds at night as I try to make peace with the universe, knowing that people under my care violated its tenets so boldly.
I lie down with the best of intentions, but my body refuses to obey. Instead, I toss and turn, limbs tangling in silksheets that feel more like restraints than comfort. Sometimes I surrender to the insomnia to pace the bluffs again, barefoot with my familiars observing me. It’s in these moments—when exhaustion has me so thoroughly in its jaws that my thoughts shimmer, fragmenting at the edges—that he finds me. Taurus will materialize from some shadowy doorway, his hair tousled, eyes luminous and gentle, and pull me close with no words. He smells of jasmine and his tobacco and the sleep I can’t seem to find on my own.
Sometimes, if I’m lucky, he’ll hum a tune—some half-remembered lullaby, or something he’s made up on the spot—and the vibration of his voice will settle me, at least for a little while.
But even when I drift off under his lullaby as he guides me back to our room, it is never true rest. My dreams tilt at the impossible, veering from pleasure to panic in the space of a breath. Wilde is always there: his familiar smile twisted in the guise of his demon, smug and ready to take me back to the incident in front of everyone at the party as retribution. I wake up tangled in sheets and sweat, heart galloping, sure that I’m tied down again. Even when Taurus is lying right next to me, I can’t shake the sense that he will see me that way and disappear as his image of me shatters. Occasionally, my mate will wake, sigh, and brush the hair from my face while I pretend I’ve been asleep the whole time.
It’s a little game we play that allows both of us to avoid the fears we don’t want to give voice to in the dead of the night.
These endless nights have their impact. My reflection in the mirror is wan, eyes rimmed red, the color from my cheeks leached away as if by a slow poison. My patience is a scraped-out barrel; even small demands from the world—emails, phonecalls, duties—feel insurmountable. Still, in some perverse way, my Company work is easier. The brain fog blunts my natural humanity in a way that makes me more efficient and quicker to complete them without asking questions.
I care less, so the reasons ‘why’ aren’t important to me as they are when I’m on my game.
But my personal life is spiraling. I snap at friends, ignore texts, and refuse to deal with the business of helping the Resistance members deal with this insanity. Every interaction feels like a rehearsal for the next apology because it always comes back to my previous refusal to help create the abomination now walking around our community. Taurus says not to worry, but I worry anyway—I built this place as a refuge, and now it’s a war zone.
It’s a struggle to muster the energy for even basic acts of self-preservation. I survive on hunting at work, the takeout Taurus brings me at night, and whatever random things I crave because of Maeve. When I eat, it’s ravenous, like I’m trying to fill not just my stomach but every hollow part of me that’s opened up in the last week. At dinner, Taurus sits next to me, watching me shovel food into my mouth, and there’s a tenderness in his gaze that makes me want to cry. Other times, he leaves me alone, but never for long. I think he’s afraid of what would happen if I were left completely to my own devices.
I know Talia must be experiencing the same with Rafe; he has struggled quietly with all this drama as long as I have, including his own guilt about the incident.
When I wake up today and my husband is not here, it’s like a puzzle with all the edge pieces missing. I grope for him in the half-light, hand clutching at empty sheets. For a moment I lie perfectly still, as if my body—so used to being curled around thewarmth of his—might fool itself into conjuring the missing heat. The duvet is bunched up around my hips, the sheets still faintly warm where he had been, but now there’s only an indentation and the ghost of his scent. I blink, half-blind from the persistent ache behind my eyelids, and reach out hoping my arm will brush against a familiar thigh, a shoulder, maybe the delicate arch of an instep. All my hand finds is the cold slack of the fitted sheet and a tangle of my hair.
I get up, shivering as my feet hit the wood floor, and reach for one of his shirts on the back of the chair. It’s oversized and soft as down, smelling faintly of him, which makes it better than a hug but worse than nothing at all. There’s a lazy comfort in pulling on the shirt and letting it settle around my frame, the sleeves falling past my fingertips and the hem grazing my thighs. I catch sight of myself in the closet mirror: bedhead like an electrocuted dandelion, lips chapped, one eye goopier than the other.
I look like a person who needs to be rescued from a hostage situation, which, in a sense, I am.
The house is silent. I get up, pull on my robe, and shuffle into the hallway. The air smells faintly of coffee, but there’s none in my room; it must have been his. I pad from room to room, his absence prickling me until I can barely swallow. I check his study—neat and untouched as usual. The kitchen is empty, except for a used espresso mug. Every object out of place is a clue, every crumb a breadcrumb in a narrative I have to reconstruct.
I consider calling out his name, but the hush is so profound I can’t bring myself to break it. So I do a perimeter check, like a security guard in my own life. I peer through the frosted glass of the back door in the kitchen into the garden and pool area,but he’s not there. Circling back to our bedroom, my heart skips a beat every time I pass a mirror and catch my gaunt reflection. There’s no note on the nightstand, so maybe his mission was last minute. It’s not until I close my eyes and concentrate—all my focus, all my willpower, every sense straining towards the faintest possibility—that I feel him in the music room.
Of course. I should have known.
I shuffle down the hall, turn the old brass handle, and there he is, exactly where he always is when the world becomes too much: perched on the piano bench and bathed in golden early light. Inside the room, the air is cooler, the dust motes floating in shafts of light like so many microscopic galaxies. He’s sitting sideways on the bench, legs stretched out in the only pair of pajamas he’s ever owned—a pair I bought him, midnight blue silk in the color of his eyes. Taurus is shirtless, his back tight with tension, hair a tumble of spiky, bleached morning messiness. There’s a tumbler of scotch on the closed lid, sweating in the morning air.
My mate plays with his whole body, each chord a small violence, each run up the keys a sprint towards something just out of reach. I hover in the doorway, arms tight around my waist, and just watch. He’s playing one of my favorite pieces, but slowly, in a mournful rhythm, as if searching for a memory lodged deep in the cracks of the ivory keys.
It’s so tender it makes my ribs ache.
When he finishes, the sudden silence is electric. He sits there for a second, fingers pressed motionless to the keys, shoulders shuddering with the residue of effort. I step forward, feet silent on the parquet, and touch the edge of the piano—not him, not yet, but the place where his sound lives. The instrument vibratesfaintly, and I feel as though I’m touching his pulse through wood and steel.
Taurus turns his head and gives me a smile that’s half apology, half dare. His eyes are sharp, bright, pulling me in the way they always do, and for a moment the tension drains from the room. The sight of me in his shirt pleases him, and he lifts his glass in a silent toast before taking a slow, deliberate sip.
My expression is wry as I ask, “No mission this AM?”
