Page 59 of Veil of Night & Flames

I want them both.

Now I just have to figure out a way to make that work without the two men I love killing each other.

But that’s a question for later. Now, I simply slip out of the closet and into my bed as I let myself drift into sleep with the memory of Adric’s sensual touches drawing me under.

Chapter

Seventeen

He’d been running hot for days.

It had started in Paris. A bone-deep heat that twisted through him like a wild yearning. A craving he desperately wanted—no, needed—to satisfy.

At first, it had been low. An odd awareness of his own body that had started a few days after Adric had used his blood to save Chase. There, but barely enough to notice.

Over time, the odd awareness had become a slight tingle, then a hot pressure, then need and want so intense his cock ached for release, a beautiful kind of torment that had slowly backed off.

He’d filed it as venom damage, an unexpected remnant of the wolf bite. A heat that sat in him now and never quite banked.

In France, it had been even more wild and intense, but the newly trained crew of Europe-based Hunters had needed a steady hand, and so he’d done what he always did. He’d shoved the want into the work and kept moving, fighting the feral need the way he fought everything—by throwing himself at the job. Training. Patrolling. Teaching.

Most of all, taking out the mares one by one in the dark under the city. More than three dozen in the few days he’d been there, and with each kill, the fire in him seemed to gutter, only to flare back to life hours later, distracting him from sleep, from thought, from every goddamn thing.

The hunting should have spent him.

Except it wasn’t about the hunting. It was about a different kind of hunger. Need. A dark, feral craving that no kill could touch.

Cora.

That was it, of course. The need. The pull. He wanted her. Craved her. Missed her. And he’d been a continent away from her for the better part of a week. No wonder he was crawling out of his skin, desperate to touch her again. To be inside her. To feel her curl up against him and whisper his name.

Tonight, he and Griff had wrapped the hunt and crossed back late to the Griffin’s Nest for a quick debrief before Chase headed home.

Now he was settled in his apartment, dark and stale and too quiet.

He’d wanted to go to Cora first—had, in fact, worked very hard to talk himself out of it. It had been well past midnight Florida time when he’d returned, and he knew she was deep in a paper she was writing for one class or another.

Showing up to haul her out of bed would’ve been the move of a man who couldn’t stand to be alone with himself for one night.

He could stand it.

Probably.

Just to up his odds, he poured a whiskey, grabbed the book off the coffee table, and dropped onto the couch, hoping the prose or the alcohol would scratch—or at least quiet—the damnable itch.

Fanny Hill. He’d pulled it off the back shelf at the Griffin’s Nest before they left, and Griff had rung it up without so much as a blink. “Solid prose,” Griff had said, with an uncomfortably knowing look.

Chase had shrugged. “The English in the eighteenth century understood pacing in a way modern prose can’t emulate.”

It sounded good, but he was hardly a literary scholar, and he damn sure hadn’t bought the book for its prose. Or rather, he’d bought it for a very particular style, genre, and temperature of prose.

But after forty minutes and only three chapters, he was running hotter, yes, but with no release. It wasn’t a fictional woman he wanted—he wanted Cora.

With a frustrated groan, he tossed the book onto the table, downed the whiskey, closed his eyes, and let pure, basic, feral need consume him.

Why not? He was a grown man—more so than most—and he was alone in his own apartment, and he was allowed to want her—to think about exactly how he wanted her.

The way she curled naked against him when she shared his bed. The way her hair fanned across his pillow. The small sound she made when his mouth found her neck while she was still half asleep. The way she arched toward him when he slid his hand under the hem of her shirt.