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I groan, trying to push myself up, wanting to feel my body against his in the aftermath. I half expect him to protest, push me back down onto the table, but he helps me, and his warmth spreads over my back, his mouth near my ear, breathing against my skin until my head spins.

“Don’t leave me.” The words were out before I thought about them.

His lips press against my neck, hot and moist. Fuck, was that a kiss? The tenderness ripples through me and I gasp.

“Sleep well.”

The edges of my consciousness blur, warmth covers me, and I slip away on clouds of pleasure.

CHAPTER 3

Kaia

The beeping of my alarm wakes me, pulls me abruptly from sleep. Cold linoleum presses stiff, like an unyielding kiss, against my cheek. I’m in a tangled mess on my kitchen floor. Is that really brimstone that clings to my skin? And why do I have a blanket on me?

I blink at the ceiling, at the familiar water stain shaped like a crooked heart, and slowly the memories surface. The heat at my back. The hands on my…

Oh fuck, I remember everything.

I sit up too fast and the room tilts. My body aches in the best possible way, muscles loose and sated in a way they haven’t been in… since the death of my husband. The loneliness that’s been my constant companion, that weight pressing on my chest every morning when I wake alone. It’s still there. Of course it is. One night with a monster doesn’t erase years of loss.

But something else fills the spaces between the ache now. Something lighter and warmer.

Happiness?

I laugh, the sound startling in the pre-dawn quiet of the kitchen and press my hand over my mouth. A grin splits my face, wide and reckless and probably a little unhinged.

Thank you, I think, sending the words out into the shadows, hoping he can hear them wherever he’s gone. He did after all go upstairs to my bedroom and bring back the blanket from my bed. Thank you for coming when I called.

My phone is still beeping. The clock reads 4:47 AM, and I shut it off. Now the real workday starts.

I push myself to my feet, straighten my dress, re-knot the apron around my waist and finger-comb the flour from my hair. The dough I’d been kneading sits abandoned on the table, and I smile at the evidence, that the encounter hadn’t been a dream.

My hands know what to do even as my mind still spins, and I check the ovens are at temperature then line up the ingredients and start measuring.

The familiar rhythms ground me, but today they feel different. Like maybe I can keep doing this, that I won’t drown in debt. And just maybe I will continue the business without my deceased husband. The thought doesn’t cripple me like it normally does.

I shape the first loaves, my hands pressing and folding without thinking. Quick scores across the tops. Then croissants, the laminated dough cool and smooth as it folds and turns under my palms. Cinnamon rolls spiraling tight. Scones studded with dried cranberries. Berry tarts for the commuters who’ll rush in around seven, coffee in one hand, train tickets in the other.

The kitchen warms. Bread bakes. And somewhere between the second tray of croissants and the last batch of scones, I realize I’m humming with a smile tugging at my lips.

Last night was a full moon.

The thought hits me as I’m sliding another tray into the oven, and I pause, oven mitts still on.

A full moon is when he may come, Malak, the incubus who’s been whispered about in this town for longer than I’ve been alive. Women talk about him in hushed tones at the farmer’s market, half-joking, half-wishing.

But it couldn’t have been him. Could it?

Malak only took virgins. Young girls with their whole lives ahead of them, untouched and pure. Not widows, not matter that I’m still young, drowning in grief and flour dust, whose bodies remember another man’s touch even as they ache for something, anything, to fill the emptiness.

And yet... the brimstone scent was real. The way he touched me like I was something precious, something worth savoring. The gesture of bringing down a blanket to keep me warm, that’s not the sort of behavior from a deamon, right?

I glance at the clock. 6:15.

The first trays come out golden. I pause, oven mitts still on, staring at them. When did my croissants ever puff up like that? And the color on those loaves is a deep amber, not the usual pale gold I’ve been settling for.

I arrange them in the display case, dust powdered sugar over the berry tarts, wipe down the counter. My hands move while my mind’s elsewhere. His hands on my hips. His breath against my neck. The way he filled every empty space inside me until I couldn’t tell where my grief ended and his touch began.