“That you love Atlas. I knew it.” Her grin lights up her face, but Lucien shocks the hell out of all us when he replies, “Of course I do; I wouldn’t have kept him around this long just for decoration. It’s the four of us against the world now, Cambria, and I’m not going to be ashamed about that.”
She bites her lip. “But you always wanted to keep things between us in private.”
He reaches over to gently coax her lip free of her teeth with his thumb. “Not because I was embarrassed by you, love, but because I didn’t want anything like this to happen. As soon as someone realized how important the three of you are to me, they went so far as to set the house on fire. It could have been Victor or any number of other people I’ve pissed off with some dealing or another. I didn’t want to drag another mess into our lives by being careless.”
She sighs, but it sounds more content than defeated. “Alright then. First thing’s first, we need to find somewhere else to stay.”
“We’re making an awful lot of assumptions right now,” I point out. “We aren’t sure who exactly is behind this or how far their connections go. We’ll want to err on the side of caution instead of just getting a hotel for the night or renting something in any of our names.”
“I’ve got a couple of friends that still owe me favors,” Atlas reluctantly suggests, transparent in his distaste for calling them in. “We can crash at one of their places for a few days while we plan our next move.” Lucien’s hands tighten on the steering wheel as we slow to a crawl, the desolate remains of the house coming into view.
Atlas whistles low. “I’m going to call this my side of the bet taken care of.”
Cambria rolls her eyes. “Loserhas to do it. Not that it needs to be done right this second since we didn’t add a timeframe. You better start paying closer attention to your wording before you end up as a demon’s concubine.”
“Are demons real?”
She gives me a flirtatious smile. “A week ago I would have sworn not, but apparently my memory isn’t what it used to be. We never did find what was hiding in the woods near my mother’s kingdom, after all.”
Between my episode earlier, the shit going on fae side, and now someone tried to kill not just Cambria, but Atlas and I? Honestly, I should be freaking out. It just feels so surreal that it’s hard to accept as my new reality, that my life has become something that would get me committed if I tried to tell anyone. Why the fae are obsessed with keeping their existence a secret is beyond me. No sane human would believe it, and they have abilities humans could only dream of.
“We’ll need to come back to empty the safe as soon as it’s cleared and there aren’t so many people around. Let’s swing by my office so I can grab a few things and we’ll take it one step at a time,” Lucien decides, not wanting to look at the fiery remains any longer. “We’ll leave the car. I don’t trust someone not to attach a tracker or a bomb to it at this rate.”
Amazing how the world can be bigger than I ever dreamed, yet it chooses to throw everything at the four of us.
Chapter 7
Cambria
––––––––
“Fuck, Atty, how doI get in on some of that?” Jeremy asks, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees.
Atlas comes back from the kitchen with a few beers tucked under his arm and a glass of cheap wine for me. I would pretend to be offended, but who are we kidding here? Most beers taste like shit and I love the fruity stuff. I want to actually enjoy what I’m drinking.
I waste no time downing half the glass as I sit sideways on Dorian’s lap. Atlas picks my legs up to slide into his spot on the couch and rests them back on his thighs, his friend eyeing everything curiously.
