Glancing around the room, I reach for my clothes, pull them on, wincing as the clothes sit over my frostbite burns, and then I head for my door, wondering if it will still be locked.
It isn’t.
And a small smile pricks the corner of my lips as Idecide to make my way out for breakfast. But when I open my door, what looks like a care package sits at the base of the door.
Furrowing my brows, I lean down, pick it up, and bring it inside.
Peeling back the layers of cloth, I find a folded set of clothes, clean and practical, left with the quiet efficiency that suggests maybe Luna moved through this corridor without making a single sound. The gesture is stripped of sentiment and delivered with the same precision she applies to everything in this clubhouse. There’s a small jar of Ivy’s healing salve, the herbal scent drifting through the air with a familiarity that has become, somewhere along the way, something close to comfort.
Professional courtesy extended to the president’s…whatever I am.
Not ownership.
Not yet.
Just the first careful acknowledgment that whatever I am now, whatever Raze and I became last night, the club has noticed.
And they are not looking away.
And somehow, that makes me feel like maybe, all those nights ago, I might have stumbled into the right place all along.
Chapter Sixteen
RAZE
I left before dawn cracked the sky.
While she still breathed slow and trusting against my chest, and every step I took away from that bed cost me more than any battle I have ever survived.
The warmth of her lingers against my sternum like a brand that refuses to heal, heat seared into skin that has been nothing but ice for three hundred years, and as I stand in the main club room with the first pale light bleeding through high windows, I press my palm flat against the spot where her hand rested and chase the ghost of it through muscle and bone.
She fit against me with an ease that made the centuries between us feel like nothing, and the sound she made when I shifted, barely a murmur, soft and unconscious, nearly undid every reason I had for leaving.
But staying would have changed nothing.
It would have given me one more hour of pretending this could last, one more stolen morning when the flame burned gold, the cold retreated, and I could convince myself thatcontentmentwas something permanent, instead of a borrowed breath drawn from a woman the witch will erase from existence the moment she arrives.
So, I left.
I dressed in the dark, left her door unlocked, and walked past the dome where my flame burns brighter than it has since before the curse took hold, crimson bleeding into gold in patterns that pulse with a rhythm I now recognize as hers, and I told myself that the ache spreading through my chest was strategy, not grief.
I almost believed it.
By late morning, the clubhouse is loud again.
Boots thud against stone, and laughter carries from the bar. Someone has found a half-decent bottle of whiskey and decided it deserves to be shared, whether it wants to be or not. The brothers sprawl through the main club room in loose clusters, bruised, stitched, alive, the way we always look after a fight that didn’t take more than it gave.
Rhett and Bennett have resumed bickering like the temporary ceasefire of the battle never happened.
“I’m just saying…” Rhett drawls, shadows curling lazily at his feet, “… if Heavenreallywanted you, you wouldn’t still be slumming it with us.”
Bennett snorts, halo flickering faintly. “And if Hell wanted you, they wouldn’t have kicked you out for…”
“That wasone time!”Rhett snaps.
“… starting a bar fight with three archdemons and stealing Lucifer’s bike,” Bennett finishes smoothly.
“It was more of a borrow.” Rhett gleams. “And he shouldn’t have left the keys in it. He’s a demon and should know better than to trust other demons,especiallyhis hellhounds.”
