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She believed every word he said about Miriam, that much was clear.

“What’s your name?” Miri asked her gently now.

Black found himself straining a bit, wanting to hear the answer.

He felt Nick’s attention on the two of them, too.

“Aura,” the girl whispered. “Aura…” She stared at the trees outside the front door of the Pacific Heights mansion. “…Woods.”

“Aura Woods?” Miriam asked carefully.

The girl nodded.

She seemed to curve most of her waif-like body towards Miri’s as they spoke.

Black got the impression, from her body language and her light, that she would have preferred to meld into Miri’s side altogether. The fucking kid needed a mother. She seemed to see Miri and project that need immediately onto her, as soon as Nick told her it was safe.

The way those large eyes looked up at the doc, wistful and shy and filled with longing, felt like a punch to the gut.

Poor kid.Gaos.

Black definitely understood why Nick wanted to take apart the garbage human who’d done this to her. He couldn’t help but be touched that the girl gravitated so easily to his own mate. Miriam, because of course she did, enveloped the cub entirely in her light. She wrapped heraleimiaround the underfed form and smothered her with warmth and safety and affection. She cocooned the kid in gold and violet and blue and green clouds.

Gods, he loved that damned woman.

He’d been struggling like fuck lately to talk to her, to not have bizarre emotional reactions around her, to notunintentionally be a prick to her, but nothing at all in his feelings towards her had changed. If anything, they felt stronger lately. Unfortunately, they often felt stronger than he could entirely control.

Now, he only wanted to be alone with her.

Gaos,he really wanted them to get past this weirdness since they’d been “normal” seers again. He wanted to go to the beach, go hiking and look at waterfalls, or hell, dust off his yacht and tool around the Mediterranean. Hell, maybe they could even bring it back across the Atlantic and park it in Mexico, use it to go to Costa Rica and Hawaii.

“Fucker got off too easy,” Nick muttered.

“There’s nothing we can do about it now,” Miriam broke in, a touch sharply.

She clenched her jaw as she glanced over her shoulder at both of them. From her expression, she was impatient with their argument, and possibly with both of them, and wanted them focused on the girl, not on getting vengeance on a man who was already dead.

She wasn’t wrong.

Then again, she was rarely wrong.

“And we can’t report this, Nick,” Miri added, turning her gorgeous eyes on her ex-cop friend. “We’re not reporting this to anyone. Agreed?”

It struck him that the cub’s eyes were a different combination of the same colors that made up Miriam’s. Maybe that was part of the reason he wanted to break things with his bare hands every time he looked at the girl’s drawn face. Maybe he wasn’t reacting to this as differently to Nick as he was pretending.

Maybe he and Nick were exactly on the same page.

“…You know we can’t,” Miriam was saying now. She darted a warning look at Black. “Not given what she is. The last thing she needs is to be processed through the system, anyway. Evenapart from her race, it’s definitely not the best thing forher.Child Protective Services doesn’t have the resources to help someone like her, and it would be an absolute nightmare after this kind of trauma. Would you really want to see her thrown into foster care, Nick? A halfway house for trafficked youth? You saw the track marks on her arms… what if they decide she’s an addict and throw her in a state-controlled rehab? Areyougoing to explain to them how seers react differently to narcotics than humans do?”

She shook her head, her eyes fierce.

“No,” she said, adamant. “We should look into experts from that world, but I’m not leaving heranywhereshe might be subject to more abuse.”

Nick gave Miriam a faintly startled look.

The ex-homicide detective obviously agreed with all of her points, but Black also found himself thinking it had never once occurred to Nick that they would institutionalize the girl. Nick assumed all along Aura would be coming with them.

All three of them had assumed that, without ever voicing it aloud.