Her gaze came back to mine.
She knew I was lying. She also knew that I wouldn’t lie without reason, and that calculation played out behind her eyes in under a second.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”
Mira tossed the ice cream in a nearby bin without argument and fell into step beside me, close enough that her shoulder brushed my arm. The contact was deliberate. She was telling me, without words, that she trusted my instincts even when they made no sense.
I guided her back to the car, hand hovering at the small of her back without touching. My senses stayed wide open, cataloguing every movement on the street, every shadow in every doorway.
The eyes followed us.
All the way to the car, down the block.
And as I pulled onto the main road, checking the mirrors every three seconds, one thought pressed against the front of my mind.
We were missing a piece.
A piece bigger than Hudson.
And whatever it was, it already knew exactly where to find her.
13
— • —
Mira
Rain drummed against familiar windows.
It was my previous apartment above the bookshop, the one that didn’t exist anymore. Candles burned on every surface because the power had gone out hours ago, and I thought there were three other people in my place.
Solomon sat beside me on the couch. His arm stretched along the back of it, not touching me, but close enough that I felt the warmth radiating off his skin through the thin gap between us.
I turned to him. “You’re a giant teddy bear. You know that, right?”
His chest rumbled close to a laugh.
“Big, scary, terrifying giant teddy bear.” I shifted closer and wrapped my arms around his torso, pressing my cheek against his chest. His heartbeat thudded against my ear, slower than any human’s should.
He was so warm. Impossibly warm, heat bleeding through his shirt into my skin.
Solomon’s hand landed on my back. One palm, tentative. Then his fingers spread across my spine and pulled me closer.
I tilted my head up to see his face. Candlelight caught the scar. It started from his temple down to his jaw, turning his pale silver eyes into liquid mercury. He looked at me in a way that cracked my ribs open and poured warmth into places I’d forgotten existed.
I poked his cheek. Just to see what he’d do.
His hand caught mine. Fingers wrapped around my wrist with a gentleness that shouldn’t have been possible from hands that big. He lifted my knuckles to his mouth and pressed his lips against them.
Soft, deliberate. A gesture from another century, from a man who was, apparently, a different creature.
My breath caught and my eyes tracked his mouth as it brushed across my skin, the barely-there pressure sending sparks racing up my arm and pooling low in my stomach.
His gaze held mine and my hand stayed in his. We slowly leaned toward each other.
His eyes dropped to my mouth, and the space between us shrank to inches, to nothing, to...
My eyes flew open.
