Hellfire – Princess of Hell

“I think I saw him.” I was already stepping away from Valerian. “Give me a minute.”

“Vera.”

I glanced back.

“Be careful.” He wasn’t smiling.

I moved through the crowd toward the back wall, keeping my sight-line on the spot where the figure had been. Bodies closed around me, warm and slow, and I navigated through them without touching, tracking the gap between two vampires where I’d seen the profile. Blond hair, similar build. Not proof, but enough.

The room’s far edge held a heavy curtain, dark red, separate from the rest of the décor. I hadn’t catalogued it on the way in because Valerian had steered us through the middle of the room. Now I watched the fabric shift.

I went through it.

A corridor. Service width, bare concrete, a single strip of light overhead. Quieter back here—the bass from the main floor became something felt rather than heard. A door on the left stood ajar, a woman in very little clothing moving through it with a tray of glasses without looking up. Further ahead, a figure stood with his back to me.

Similar build. Same hair colour.

He turned before I could decide anything.

Not my body. Close in the bones—same general height, same colouring—but the face was different, older, and the eyes caught the light wrong. Vampire.

Those same eyes measured me in the two seconds before either of us spoke.

“What do we have here.”

Not a question. I put an apologetic tilt into my posture.

“Sorry—I was looking for someone and I thought—” I gestured vaguely toward the curtain. “Wrong person. I’ll get out of your way.”

“Wait.”

His eyes brightened for half a second. Something moved through the air, pressure without temperature, and I recognised the shape of it before it finished landing. Charm. Different construction than succubus, but the family resemblance was there.

It washed over me and dissolved.

I kept my expression neutral. Charm spells didn’t take on succubi. But he didn’t know what I was, and watching him register that his spell hadn’t worked was more informative than anything he could have said.

“Curious.” His head tilted. “You’re not a typical woman, are you.”

“I know a little about magic.” I kept it mild. “Occupational hazard.”

“And what are you doing here?” Something had sharpened behind his manner, not hostile exactly, more assessing. “This area is staff only.”

“I came with Valerian.” I let the name land before continuing. “I genuinely thought you were the person I was looking for. I apologize for the intrusion.”

The shift was immediate. Not dramatic—just a degree or two of warmth entering his posture, a recalibration.

“Valerian is interested in you?”

“I wouldn’t read that deep into it.”

The woman with the tray passed us again going the other direction, close enough that I had to step aside. She didn’t glance at either of us.

“He brought you here.” The man’s attention had acquired a quality I recognized without finding it troubling. “That means you impressed him considerably.”

I understood the construction a beat after I registered his meaning. Not the building—the room. The specific room we’d passed through to get to this corridor.

The hunger was still there, low and patient, and I noted with some remove that I wasn’t bothered by the implication. The body filed it as information. Possibly useful, probably not relevant, no particular alarm.

“I should get back,” I said.

“Perhaps I can help you.” He hadn’t moved, but something in his stillness changed—less appraising, more deliberate. "After all, this is my establishment.

* * *

I’d already come this far.

That thought arrived with no particular drama. Six weeks ago—less than that, closer to five—I wouldn’t have walked through the front door of a building like this. Too many unknowns, no exits catalogued, no read on who held power over whom. The Liam who’d lived in that flat in Greenwich had a functional sense of self-preservation, and self-preservation would have kept him on the pavement outside.

Instead I was standing in a service corridor behind a vampire den, talking to a man whose charm spell had bounced off me, who’d just told me he owned the place, and my dominant emotion was mild calculation about whether the information was useful.

Hell had done something to my threat calibration. I wasn’t sure yet whether that was adaptation or damage.

Either way, I was already here.

“Vera,” I said. “And I’d ask why you’d bother helping a stranger, but I suspect you’ll tell me.”

The corner of his mouth moved. “Medric.” He didn’t offer a hand. “And Valerian doesn’t bring guests through that room without reason. What’s a small favour to a friend of a friend?”

The logic was clean enough that I didn’t press it. I described the person I was looking for and watched Medric’s expression during it. Not for tells, exactly. More the way you watch a new variable in an equation settle into position.

He listened without interrupting.

When I finished, he was quiet for a moment. Something moved behind his eyes—not the charm, just thought.

“I haven’t seen him.” He didn’t hedge it, didn’t soften it. “Not tonight, not before tonight.” A pause. “You’re certain he’s here?”

“Yes.”

Medric studied me for a breath, measuring whatever certainty looked like on this face. Then he accepted it.

“Then he’ll surface. Tonight or tomorrow—people don’t stay hidden in this building indefinitely.” His eyes tracked to the curtain behind me, then back. “Go back to what you were doing. If your friend is here, he’ll come to the floor eventually.”

There was nothing to argue with in that. I nodded once and turned back toward the curtain.

The bass reasserted itself as I pushed through the fabric, warm and low, and the crowd closed around me on the other side. I picked a path back toward the mezzanine, scanning automatically—blond hair, lean build, the gait I’d know even in this body’s altered perspective.

Nothing.

Which left the question I’d been holding since the tracking spell put him inside these walls: where had she taken it?

My body. The original one. Liam Dawnstar’s body, which currently had someone else inside it and was apparently frequenting vampire dens in northwest London on a Friday night.

I spotted Valerian near the bar, turned at an angle that suggested he’d been watching the curtain. I adjusted my path toward him.

Whatever the original Lilithiel was doing in there, she was doing it while wearing my face, in my muscles, with access to everything I’d left behind in that flat. The emergency cash was gone, I’d taken that. The laptop was gone, Police had it, or the AOR. But everything else. My name. My history. My body’s instincts and reflexes, which were nothing like this body’s instincts and reflexes.

She’d be lost in them. I’d been lost in hers for weeks.

The thought didn’t land the way it would have a month ago. No spike of panic, no urgent need to correct the situation immediately. Just the problem, sitting there, waiting to be solved.

Valerian handed me a glass as I reached him. He hadn’t signalled for it; it had appeared in his hand at some point during my approach.

“Successful expedition?”

“Inconclusive.” I took the glass. “He wasn’t in the corridor.”

“Medric spoke with you.”

Not a question. I looked at him over the rim.

“He seems to know this place well for someone who doesn’t run it.”

Valerian’s expression shifted into something that wasn’t quite a smile. “Medric knows every room in every building he’s ever entered. It’s a particular habit of his.”

The music changed—something lower, more deliberate—and the floor shifted around us, bodies reorienting. I turned my attention back to the crowd.

My body was in here somewhere. The spell didn’t lie.

I watched the room and waited.

* * *

Thirty minutes dissolved into the music and the low amber light, and the real didn’t appear.

I turned from the crowd. “Come on. Let’s go back.”

Valerian fell into step beside me without argument. “An excellent choice.”

I exhaled through my nose. Standing here watching the floor wasn’t going to conjure anyone. Medric had said she’d surface, and Medric struck me as someone who’d learned not to be wrong about the rooms he owned. If she was here, she’d appear. If she wasn’t going to appear tonight, I’d find her tomorrow.

That was the whole thought. It completed cleanly, without the anxious loop I’d have run a month ago.

The booth held the same loose cluster—Harper with her legs folded under her, Silas leaning back with both arms spread across the seat, Rose saying something that made Julian tip his head back. Eleanor had acquired a new companion since I’d left, a broad-shouldered man whose pulse was visible at his throat.

I slid in beside Rose and reached for a drink someone had left unclaimed at the table’s edge.

A month. Six weeks ago I’d been a structural engineer eating cereal at midnight, still running calculations about Faith’s exit in my head. Now I was in a vampire den in northwest London in a body that moved like it had been engineered for exactly this—for the low light and the close heat and the particular geometry of a room full of apex predators choosing, for the evening, to be charming instead of lethal.

And I wasn’t fighting it.

Silas was watching me with the careful attention vampires used when they’d decided you were interesting. I met it directly, let him look, because this face could afford to let people look. That was just fact. Using available tools wasn’t anything to unpack.

“You came back empty-handed,” Harper said.

“For now.” I set the glass down. “The night’s not over.”

Rose raised an eyebrow. “Optimistic.”

“Patient.” I leaned back into the seat. The music was doing something interesting in the low register, a frequency that settled in the chest rather than the ears. “There’s a difference.”

Valerian, across the table, caught my eye and said nothing. Just lifted his glass a fraction.

I looked back at the floor.

Harper wanted to know where I was from. I told her the north, which was true enough—Liam had grown up shuttling between care homes from Manchester down to Leeds before the system deposited him in London. I let the geography do the work and didn’t elaborate. Rose asked what I did. I said I’d spent years doing work that looked boring from the outside and was, in fact, boring from the inside too, but it paid well and I’d been good at it. Julian laughed. Eleanor’s new companion tried to catch my eye and I gave him a half-second of attention, just enough to be polite, then looked elsewhere.

Valerian circled the edges of every answer I gave, probing for the gap between what I said and what I meant. He had a century and a half of practice reading people across a table, and he was using all of it.

“You speak about your life as though it belongs to someone else,” he said.

“It does, a bit.” I turned my glass on the table, one slow rotation. “People change. I changed. The version of me that did all that—she’d barely recognize this.” I gestured at the room, meaning myself in it, meaning all of it.

That was the truest thing I’d said all evening.

Valerian looked at me the way he’d been looking at me for the better part of two hours—like I was a lock he hadn’t found the right pick for yet. I didn’t mind. I’d spent thirty-five days learning to sit inside a body that drew this kind of attention, and somewhere in the last few weeks I’d stopped bracing for it. It landed differently now. Useful. Interesting, even.

The booth’s ambient noise dipped for a moment, the crowd shifting the way it does when someone with mass enters a space. Not size—presence.

Medric settled at the table’s edge without quite sitting, a posture that said he’d only stay a moment while making clear he’d stay as long as he liked.

“I hope I’m not interrupting.”

Valerian straightened slightly. “Medric. An unexpected pleasure—do join us.”

“Just briefly.” Medric’s pale eyes swept the group once, then settled. “I’d like to say I came down to enjoy your company, Valerian. But I’ll be honest. Your companion has been occupying my thoughts.”

Valerian glanced between us. “So you’ve met.”

“Briefly. In passing.” Medric’s expression didn’t shift, but something in it sharpened. “It’s a rare thing, in my experience, to attempt a courtesy and find it simply—” he paused “—not received.”

A moment of silence.

Valerian looked at me. Whatever he’d expected, it wasn’t that—I could see it in the half-second before he recovered. “She ignored your charm?”

“Completely.” Medric inclined his head in my direction. “Forgive me, it’s poor manners to discuss a guest as though she isn’t present.”

Valerian cleared his throat. “Of course.” He turned to me, and there was genuine curiosity behind the courtesy now, the kind that didn’t perform itself. “Would you indulge me? How did you manage it, if I may ask.”

I let a small smile settle on my face. “A girl has to have her secrets.”

I’d heard that line somewhere—some film, some corner of Liam’s memory—and had never in my life imagined deploying it sincerely. Yet here it sat, perfectly weighted, and the worst part was how naturally it had arrived.

“Of course,” Valerian said. “Though that won’t stop me trying to find them.”

“You’re welcome to try.”

Medric watched this exchange with what looked like mild amusement, the way someone watches a game they’ve already seen the end of.

Inside, something recalibrated quietly.

Two of them now. One century and a half, one God-knows-how-many centuries, both having decided I was the interesting problem in the room. The pragmatic move was probably to simply tell them what I was—succubus, infernal, First Circle, very sorry for the inconvenience—and watch the dynamic reorganize itself around that information.

I filed the thought and left it there. Not yet. I had nothing concrete to gain from it and potentially quite a lot to lose, including whatever it was that made me interesting to Medric in the first place. Once the mystery resolved, so did the leverage.

I let my attention drift as Valerian drew Medric into a separate thread of conversation, my gaze settling on the main floor below. The crowd moved and regrouped, faces catching the light and losing it again.

Somewhere in that churn, if Medric was right, she would surface sooner or later. Wearing my old face with an expression I’d have to recognize from the inside out.

I kept one eye on the room and reached for my drink.

* * *

Medric left without ceremony, a slight inclination of his head toward Valerian, nothing toward me—and the booth settled back into its natural rhythm.

Valerian watched him go, then turned his glass once on the table.

“In the better part of a century,” he said, “I don’t believe I’ve seen him come down to the floor for a guest.”

“There’s a first time for everything.”

“You’re being modest.”

“I’m being accurate.” I tilted my head. “I impressed you. That was enough to make him curious.”

A smile, unhurried. “That’s part of it, I’m sure. Though it’s not quite that simple.”

I filed the qualifier away and let the subject drop.

The thing was, Medric hadn’t given me anything concrete to work with. No tell, no slip, no moment where his attention sharpened in the specific way that meant recognition rather than curiosity. Just interest—the focused, settled kind that came from novelty rather than identification. He was an ancient vampire in a room full of ordinary entertainment, and I was the variable that hadn’t resolved yet.

The glamour was perfect. Professor Moira had spent the better part of two lectures making that point with the particular emphasis of someone correcting a mistake before it happened. If someone found out what you were, she’d said, looking at no one and everyone simultaneously, the fault lived with you, not the spell. The spell didn’t fail. People failed the spell.

So Medric didn’t know.

Probably.

And even if he did—I ran the scenario out to its end and found nothing that changed. He hadn’t done anything with the information except come down and sit at a table and watch me decline to explain myself. Which, by the evidence available, was exactly what he’d wanted out of the evening.

I let it go.

The practical problem was Aria. Whatever I came back with this weekend, she’d have done more with less, and she’d be absolutely delighted to explain that in detail. Isabella at least hunted with some dignity. Aria treated the whole thing like a sport she’d already won and was playing for personal records.

Last place, though. That I could probably avoid.

Probably.

The thought of whatever punishment she’d construct for last place surfaced briefly—Aria’s imagination ran in specific directions and none of them were boring—and I felt something adjacent to anticipation, which was not the appropriate response to being potentially at someone else’s mercy, and yet here we were.

A month ago I was a bloke from London who’d needed three days of internal negotiation to consider kissing someone in this body.

Now I was sitting in a vampire den running calculations on a sex competition I’d entered.

The distance between those two points, measured in weeks, was genuinely funny if you looked at it from the right angle. The distance measured in everything else was something I didn’t examine too carefully, because the honest answer was that it wasn’t bothering me the way it should. The body knew what it wanted, and at some point in the last month the line between its wants and mine had slowly become more difficult to locate.

The laugh escaped before I decided to let it.

Valerian caught it. His gaze moved from the middle distance to my face. “Something?”

“Nothing.” I set my glass down and met his eyes. “Where were we?”

* * *

“Mm.” Valerian refilled my glass without being asked. “We were discussing whether mystery is a strategy or a personality.”

“Both, in the right person.”

Eleanor leaned across from the adjacent seat, her chin propped on one hand. “You’re still looking.”

I hadn’t thought it showed. “I can multitask.”

“Clearly.” Her gaze moved across the room and back. “It’s a little distracting, watching you.”

“Then watch something else.”

She didn’t.

The conversation shifted the way these things do in places like this, incrementally and without any single moment you could point to as the turn. Someone said something about appetites. Someone else laughed. Valerian’s hand found the back of my chair and stayed there, not quite touching my shoulder, present in the way a question is present before it’s asked.

Then Eleanor kissed me.

It was unhurried, curious, and I kissed her back the same way. Her mouth was cold and tasted like good wine. When she pulled back her eyes were brighter than they’d been a moment ago.

After that the geometry of the booth rearranged itself.

Hands first—that was how it always started, the slow migration from somewhere safe to somewhere less so, pausing at each new border long enough to confirm it. Valerian’s fingers traced up my spine. Silas had Rose in his lap and one hand free, which found Eleanor’s waist. Julian said something I didn’t catch because Eleanor’s mouth was at my jaw and it was difficult to prioritise.

The conversation didn’t stop, exactly. It just became less verbal.

Eleanor’s lips moved toward my throat, and I felt the exact moment her intention sharpened—the slight change in how her mouth pressed, the breath held before the next.

I put two fingers under her chin and tipped her face up.

“No biting.” I wasn’t unkind about it. Just clear.

She blinked, pupils blown wide. “Why not?”

“Because I said so.” I smiled and kissed the corner of her mouth. “Everything else.”

She accepted this the way people in a certain state accept most things—immediately and without further argument.

I had a passing thought about what a vampire’s system would actually do with succubus blood, and decided firmly that this was not the night to find out.

Valerian’s laugh was low against my ear. “Are you always this particular?”

“Are vampires always this—” I paused, considering, as his hand settled somewhere that made consideration briefly difficult, “—motivated?”

“A century of boredom does something to one’s restraint.” A pause. “Though usually only somewhere like this.”

* * *

The booth dissolved around us by degrees.

Eleanor’s hands at my waist, Rose’s shoulder warm against mine, Harper’s fingers finding my hair—and somewhere in the rearrangement I stopped tracking who was where and started tracking only what was immediate, which was considerable. The music from below had a pulse you felt in the sternum rather than heard. The leather of the seating was warm now, body-warm, and the air had changed the way air does in a room when everyone in it has reached the same quiet agreement.

I found myself on my knees without registering the transition.

Eleanor was to my left, Rose to my right, Harper a breath behind me, her lips at the back of my neck. Julian stood in front of me, Silas to one side, and Valerian—patient as stone—at the other.

My hands moved before I’d finished thinking about it. One at Julian’s hip to angle him, fingers curling into waistband, and then his cock was in my mouth and everything narrowed to the immediate work of it. The pressure of Rose’s shoulder against mine told me she’d done the same for Silas. Harper made a low sound that might have been encouragement.

I didn’t hurry. There was nothing to hurry toward. Julian’s hand settled in my hair, not directing, just present, and I took my time until his breathing changed enough to mean something.

Valerian waited. He was good at that.

When I turned to him Eleanor was already there, and I let her take the first moment before I pressed close beside her, cheek to cheek almost, and then we were sharing the task in a way that didn’t require coordination because the geometry handled itself. His fingers moved through both our hair at once. I felt Eleanor’s mouth brush mine around him and didn’t pull back.

When Julian came Rose turned toward me and kissed me with her mouth full of him, and I’d had one half-second of something braced—and then there was only the taste, salt-sharp and strangely clean, and I kissed her back with the same interest I’d have brought to anything unexpectedly good. Harper’s laugh was low and approving somewhere near my ear. She turned and kissed Rose from the other side, and then me, and the three of us stayed there for a moment in a loose, unhurried arrangement while Valerian and Silas exchanged a look I didn’t bother decoding.

Then the couches.

The transition happened the way the first one had—incremental, no single moment. One of the men settled on the floor. One stayed seated. We arranged ourselves across the upholstery in overlapping configurations that made efficient use of available warmth and available hands.

Rose’s head was in my lap. I had my fingers in Harper’s hair while Silas worked his way down her inner thigh, her breath shortening in increments. Eleanor lay across from me, one leg hooked over Valerian’s shoulder, one hand pressed to her own mouth, watching me watch her.

Julian’s mouth found me and I stopped watching Eleanor.

I kept Harper’s hair in my hand. She’d angled herself so she could reach me too—fingers tracing patterns on my thigh between Julian’s movements, pressing at moments he didn’t, filling the spaces. Rose turned her head from where she lay and kissed the inside of my knee with intent.

Three separate sources of sensation, none of them working together or needing to.

Harper came first—a full-body shudder that pulled her shoulder into my hip. Then she pressed her face against my ribs and breathed and kept her hand moving, which was thoughtful of her.

Julian adjusted the angle and I felt it in my teeth.

Rose kissed higher.

There was a sound building in my chest that wasn’t coming from any conscious decision, and I let it come. My hand loosened in Harper’s hair. My hips moved toward Julian’s mouth without consultation.

When it hit it hit clean and total, no build-down, just the edge and then over it—my free hand finding the back of Julian’s head and pressing once, reflexively—and I rode it out against his mouth while Harper’s fingers and Rose’s lips held every surrounding inch of me accountable.

I lay back into the warm leather.

The room continued around me. Eleanor’s voice somewhere, Valerian’s quiet answer, Silas’s hands already elsewhere.

I looked at the ceiling for three full seconds.

Then Rose climbed up beside me, propped her chin on my shoulder, and said, “Ready?”

I turned my head and looked at her.

“Yes.”

* * *

Rose’s mouth was still on mine when Silas’s hands settled on my hips from behind.

He took his time with the angle. I felt the blunt pressure of him at my entrance and then he was inside me, and I exhaled against Rose’s lips, and she made a small approving sound that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with Silas, because he’d shifted forward and brought us both onto him—first me, then withdrawing enough to press into Rose, her breath catching sharp—and he found a rhythm that alternated between us so the one waiting felt the other’s movement through shared warmth and pressure.

Rose and I stayed forehead to forehead. Her eyes were closed. Her fingers found my jaw.

It should have felt stranger than it did. It didn’t feel strange at all.

Silas found a particular depth inside me and my vision blurred pleasantly. Rose kissed my throat when I tilted my head back, and I brought her mouth back to mine because I wanted it there. The rhythm built. Her hips rolled against mine, the two of us moving in counterpoint to Silas’s alternating thrusts until the timing collapsed into something less organized and considerably better—his hand gripping my hip, mine on Rose’s waist, hers in my hair.

I came with my face pressed into Rose’s shoulder. She followed thirty seconds later, her teeth at my collarbone, Silas’s groan somewhere behind me.

We stayed in a heap for a moment. Silas’s hand moved up my spine in what might have been gratitude.

Then the room expanded.

I wasn’t tracking it in sequence afterward. It came apart into impressions—a man with broad shoulders I’d noticed nursing a drink near the far wall, who turned out to be called Thomas and who picked me up off the floor like I weighed nothing and pressed me against the wall with my legs around his waist, and the leverage was extraordinary. A woman whose name I never caught, dark-haired, who bent me forward over a cushioned arm and did things with her fingers that made me grip the fabric until it creased. A vampire couple—male and female, both so symmetrically beautiful they looked printed—who took turns with me in an arrangement that required all parties to maintain communication through touch alone, which they were excellent at.

I fed from the humans I was with. Not aggressively, barely intentional—the contact was already so saturated that essence transferred almost incidentally, a warm undercurrent beneath everything else. None of them noticed. They just looked a little pink-cheeked afterward, pleased with themselves.

Thomas came back a second time. I was flattered.

There was a stretch where I was on my knees and occupied on both ends simultaneously, some combination of people I’d sorted out by their hands, and my body handled the geometry without requiring instruction. A succubus’s instincts run deeper than conscious knowledge. I kept discovering things I knew how to do without having learned them, and I stopped being surprised by it somewhere around the second hour.

The crowd thinned gradually. The room settled into a lower register—quieter, slower, the sharp edges of new contact gone and replaced by something warmer and more deliberate. People drifted back toward their own.

Valerian was in the booth.

Rose was already there, Harper beside her, Silas against the far cushion looking thoroughly finished. Julian stood and offered me his hand as I approached, which was unnecessary but not unwelcome.

I let him keep it as I climbed onto Valerian’s lap.

Valerian’s hands settled on my waist without ceremony, and I reached between us to position him, and then sank down slow, watching his face do almost nothing except for the fractional tightening at the corners of his eyes. I rolled my hips once to settle the angle.

Julian pressed close behind me.

I felt the deliberate pause—him reading the set of my shoulders, the position of my weight—and then his hand at the small of my back, and I understood what he was asking and arched forward slightly to answer. He worked his way in with patience I hadn’t entirely expected from him, one hand braced on my hip, the other at my shoulder. The fullness was considerable.

I stayed still for a moment and breathed.

Then I started to move.

Rose angled herself beside me, close enough that our arms touched. Harper’s head disappeared between her thighs and Rose’s hand found mine on Valerian’s shoulder and squeezed once. Behind me I could hear Silas rousing himself, the shift of cushions, and then Harper made a muffled sound into Rose that indicated Silas had found his second wind after all.

Valerian’s thumb traced a slow line along my hip.

I moved in a rolling rhythm that served both of them, Valerian beneath me, Julian behind, and found the angle that made all three of us useful to each other. Rose’s grip on my hand tightened. She was watching me with her mouth open and her free hand pressed to her own jaw, and I kissed her because she was right there and because I wanted to. She kissed back immediately, no hesitation.

The heat built in layers. Julian’s grip tightened on my hip. Valerian’s chest rose and fell faster. Rose broke the kiss to press her forehead to my temple and breathe.

It started somewhere in my lower back and spread.

My hips stuttered. I caught the rhythm again, then lost it properly—Julian’s groan at my ear, Valerian’s hands dragging me down hard, and the orgasm rolled through me like something structural giving way. My whole spine locked. I heard myself make a sound I didn’t plan.

Valerian went first, a sharp exhale through his nose, both hands clamped to my hips. Julian followed half a second later with his mouth pressed to my shoulder.

The secondary wave hit me before I’d finished with the first.

I knew this body could do that, but it still surprised me nontheless.

I stayed folded forward against Valerian’s chest for a moment. His arms came around me, which I hadn’t expected. It was comfortable, so I stayed there.

Rose tucked herself against my side. Harper was sprawled with her head in Silas’s lap, one arm thrown over her own face. Julian sat back against the cushions and stared at the ceiling.

The booth looked like a small, elegant catastrophe.

I was tired in the specific way that follows a long swim—muscles pleasant and heavy, nothing aching, just thoroughly used. My mind was the clearest it had been all night.

Somewhere down the road there was a version of myself that would look back at this month, at all of it—the taxi driver, the strip club, the feeding, this place, all the things this body had done and wanted and taken—and that version would have opinions. Strong ones, probably. Filed under things that needed to be examined carefully and at length.

But that version felt very far away tonight, and the booth was warm, and Rose’s hair smelled like something expensive.

I’d deal with it later.