I hand him the little pamphlet titled “Dryads at Wartime.”
“Is this like a passion of his? Books?”
“Something like that. Treehorn is a watcher.” Elliot pauses as he searches for the proper place. “He’s obsessed with understanding people. This is technically his personal collection. He just wasn’t sure what to do with them after he’d read them all, so...”
“Read them all?”
I look at the shelves again.
There are at least four hundred texts in this section alone. How on earth?—
“Treehorn is very old,” Elliot explains.
“How old?”
He shrugs.
“Older than Argent?” I ask.
Elliot chuckles.
“No. No one’s older than Argent. That creepy fuck is ancient.”
“Thank you!” I shout. “He is creepy, isn’t he? Why does he never?—”
“Blink?” Elliot says, pulling the thought right out of my head.
“Yes!” We both laugh, and the sound echoes across the high ceiling. “Gods, I wish I could pry his eyes out.”
Elliot steps down a few rungs to reach for the next set of texts in my hands, but he pauses, brows knitted together.
“What do you mean?”
“He stares at me,allclass,” I say, trying not to sound exasperated. “Like he’s fantasizing about eating me.”
Elliot descends the rest of the way, his usual playful demeanor replaced by a look I recognize. Although it’s usually a look I see on Dame.
“That’s disgusting, Iris. Did you speak to the Enchantments Chair? They should know about that.”
I sigh.
“I’m not an idiot. Of course, I told them. But how do you think that went? A succubus accusing a thousand-year-old vampire of staring. Gee, what’s next? A banshee complaining that the sirens are too loud?”
Elliot’s arms cross as his face twists, and I shake my head, already knowing what comes next.
Be it the beta in him or those infamous Cross genes, Elliot is a man of action, almost to a fault. Our current predicament is evidence of such. But I don’t need Argent failing me because my boyfriend, that’s not my boyfriend, has anger issues.
“No, I don’t need you to do anything. There’s only a few months left of term. I’ll be fine.”
His teeth grind, and his tail falls limp as I utter those words again.
“That’s not the point,” he growls.
“Oh, please enlighten me as to what the point is.”
“The point is, I’m not going to let some old fuck harass my girlfriend for two hours twice a week just because she’s a succubus.”
“I’m notactuallyyour girlfriend. You know that, right?”
