A shudder of pleasure vibrated through me, making me tighten around him, and his eyes closed reflexively. I was usually the one taking charge in bed, but tonight he was claiming me, and I wanted to let him. He released my hair, but I kept watching him. Grabbing my hips with both hands now, he pounded into me like he was taking my challenge seriously. Whatever part of me had been marked by Lucas, Desmond was trying to fuck it out of me.

As his thrusts grew fast and frenzied, he withdrew suddenly, causing me to cry out from the unexpected emptiness, pulling me back from an edge I’d been about to plummet over. He turned me over so I was looking up at him properly, relieving the kink in my neck, and lowered his mouth, claiming my nipple with lips and teeth as he drove into me again. I moaned with the sensation of both actions at once, and he resumed his previous efforts.

When I was panting desperately and forming words that weren’t English, he released my nipple and seized my mouth in a hot, needy kiss. His tongue slid over mine, coaxing it into his mouth, and he nipped at my lips with his teeth before caressing each bite with his tongue. Each time I tried to scream out from the feeling of him inside me, he deepened the kiss, until we were reduced to frenzied mingling, parts of each other seeking ownership over bodies that weren’t our own.

He won the battle when his hand slid down my stomach and he circled my clitoris with his rough thumb, turning my whole body to liquid heat. I tried to tell him I was coming, but I simply yelped. I was melting under him, and just when I thought I might disappear completely from the intensity, he bit down on my nipple hard while his thumb continued to work me and his thrusts reached a fever pitch.

I was aflame, every part of my body too hot to touch, too burnt to be contained by skin.

I bit down on his shoulder. I had only meant to anchor myself to something solid, but when I broke skin and tasted blood, everything blew. My vision shattered in bright flashes of green, and the lost flavor of lime filled my mouth, carried on his blood. We came in the same moment, and my bite drew the orgasms out past a second or two and into several uninterrupted minutes of sensory-dulling pleasure.

When I forced myself to pull away and lick the wound to seal it, Desmond flopped down on top of me. He was breathing so hard he might as well have just finished running a marathon. I might have been breathing hard myself, but it was impossible to tell since my breath seemed mingled with his.

It took another five minutes before either of us were able to speak, and when Desmond opened his eyes, there was a ring of bright green around the outside of his iris.

“Your eyes,” I whispered.

“Your eyes. They’re practically gold.”

“Yours are green.”

“Is that what it’s like…? Biting?”

I tried to shake my head, but it still felt heavy. Instead I took his hand and wove my fingers between his. “Not always. But sometimes.”

“Was it like that with Lucas?” He knew I’d bitten Lucas before, but I’d never told him I’d bitten Lucas during sex. I guess it was a fair assumption for him to make.

I kissed his fingertips, and his skin burned under my lips. “No,” I replied honestly. “It’s never been like that with anyone but you.”

Chapter Thirteen

I was probably reading too much into things when I noticed Desmond’s bedroom didn’t have any windows. The pity of it all was that even without windows, I wasn’t going to be able to sleep over. I also wasn’t stupid enough to believe that one hot night would be all it took to fix our fractured relationship.

Baby steps, though. And this one had felt like it was in the right direction.

“Where are you going?” he asked, his voice still lazy and raw from our romp in the sack.

After I’d retrieved my clothes from the living room and hunted around his dark bedroom floor for my missing underpants, I sat next to him and brushed a kiss over his cheek. His skin remained hot to the touch.

“Oh, you know. Find a missing heiress. Figure out if my fairy godmother is a psycho killer. The usual.”

“Let me help.” He sat up, the sheet covering his lower body slipping away, and he swung his legs off the side of the bed. Any resolve I had to leave began to fade with every new inch of him made visible. I swallowed hard.

“Help me how?” I tore my gaze away from his crotch and looked at his face instead. It didn’t help my plans any. He could wear a parka and I’d still get woozy looking at him. Love drunk. That was the best way to describe it.

“You need to find Kellen. Lucas threatened you with banishing me, but he never said I couldn’t help you, did he?”

“No.” I was willing to bet Lucas didn’t think I’d tell Desmond about his threat.

“I can help you find Kellen.”

“What makes you think you can find her when no one else can?”

Desmond gave me a sardonic smirk. I knew perfectly well why he was being so cocky about his odds. Kellen herself had confessed to me once about her teenaged crush on Desmond. He was banking on her former lusty feelings to give him the upper hand in the search.

Sad thing was, he was probably spot-on in his logic.

Kellen was, after all, a simple creature.

And Desmond had only gotten better with age.

My phone rang shortly after midnight, and caller ID informed me I should expect some sort of tongue-lashing from Keaty when I picked up. I hit the answer button on the touchscreen and braced myself for yelling. I wasn’t sure why. Keaty wasn’t a yeller, nor had I done anything to deserve being yelled at. All the same, I was getting pretty accustomed to people shouting at me lately.

“Keaty?”

“Am I interrupting anything?”

I gave Desmond a surreptitious glace, worried Keaty could somehow tell what I’d been up to recently. At the moment, however, Desmond was driving us towards Kellen’s apartment complex on Central Park West, and I wasn’t actually up to no good.

“No.”

“A shame. I thought perhaps you might be working.”

“Oh, my bad. I thought you meant anything important.” My pause gave me plenty of time to imagine Keaty’s humorless scowl. “I’m working. Don’t freak out.”

“Good, then you have time to hear about a call I got from a young woman named Becca Trout?”

Becca? It took me a second to remember the bubble-gum-snapping girl from Papa John’s. The card I’d given her last night had been a number for our office line, so it made sense Keaty would be the one around to get the call rather than me.

“What did she say?”

“Do you have a pen…? Oh, wait, you won’t need one. She listed a few dozen regular customers. A cursory background check on them turned up little of interest, just some obese families and a fraternity house. But I think the one that will prove to be unsurprising to both of us was the regularity with which a certain coffeehouse called for pizzas.”

“Calliope’s Starbucks?” I asked, not like I needed confirmation.

“Indeed.”

A heavy sigh slipped from my mouth, making Desmond look over, his brows arched in concern. He knew the story, so my words had to be helping him put the pieces together on his own.

“We have to be careful with this one,” I told Keaty.

“Because our suspect now knows we suspect her?”

“I’m still not a hundred percent convinced she did it. Once I’m sure, I’ll figure out how to confront her. But the thing is, we can’t kill her.”

“Can’t, or won’t?”

“No, I mean can’t. She’s half-god, Keaty. True immortal. She doesn’t even live in our reality. If she’s killing humans, I don’t honestly know if we can stop her.”

My partner made a sound that was awfully close to a laugh, except there was far too much cruelty in it to consider it the same thing. “Secret. There’s no such thing as immortality.”

“I—”

“No. Everything that lives can die. Even your half-fae friend. Remember, Jesus was the son of God. Look how far it got him.” The line went dead.

“That sounded…ominous,” Desmond said.

Slipping the phone inside my pocket, I tried to fake a smile. “Isn’t it always?”

We were at Kellen’s apartment building, and Desmond found a spot a few blocks down. On our walk from the car, an awkward silence hung between us. Funny how someone can fuck you five ways from Sunday, but then you don’t know how to make small talk anymore. Thankfully we didn’t have far to go.

Since Desmond and I were both on the guest list at Kellen’s apartment, we should have had no problem getting in. Too bad we had the Gestapo version of a doorman to deal with tonight.

“Miss Rain is not in,” Herr Doorman told us.

“Oh, we know. We’ll just wait for her upstairs.” I flashed him my sweetest, most innocent smile. Based on his response it was about as convincing as a pit viper saying I’ll make a great nanny.

“I’m afraid that will not be possible.”

“I have a key,” Desmond volunteered.

This was news to me. Interrupting my staring contest with the chubby real estate gatekeeper, I looked at Desmond out of the corner of my eye. He didn’t miss it, judging by the sweet, apologetic smile he gave me. The look was telling. Just go with it.

Herr Doorman huffed and rubbed his belly thoughtfully.

“Why don’t I call Mister Rain,” Desmond suggested, whipping out his cellphone.

Genius. I hadn’t considered bluffing with the big-brother card, because if I was called on it, I’d actually have to talk to the son of a bitch. The doorman’s eyes bugged, and he scrambled to get the interior entrance open for us. “My apologies. It won’t be necessary to bother Mr. Rain at this late hour. Please go in.”

I didn’t speak until we were in the elevator. “A key?”

Putting his arm around my shoulder, he gave me a friendly squeeze. “You think you’d be able to tell by now when I’m lying.”

“Either I never could, or you’re getting better at it.” I wasn’t sure if either sounded like a winning option.