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“I’m not sure I’ll be able to after that.”

“Try,” he said, and he rolled me off him. He looked at me, then. “Tomorrow”

I felt like a brat. I wanted to argue, to protest, but I didn’t. Instead, I turned onto my side and curled back into a ball, keeping my frustrations inside and resigning myself to trying to sleep. Lucien, meanwhile, got up, grabbed our covers, and pulled them back onto the bed.

A moment later, he slid in… behind me. When he was in position, he pulled me toward him, fitting my body perfectly against his. I was still half naked, and even though he still had his briefs on, I could feel the impression of his cock against my ass.

“This is not the way to get me to sleep,” I said.

He wrapped an arm around me, then, and buried his face into the back of my head. “Sleep, Beatrice.”

I paused. “It’s… Bee.”

“Bee?”

“That’s what my friends call me.”

Silence. “Goodnight, Bee.”

“Goodnight, Lucien,” I whispered.

Whether I liked it or not, the day’s excitement had been wild, and my body was exhausted. It didn’t take long before I drifted off into sleep, with Lucien Diaboli behind me, his arm wrapped around me.

Chapter

Twenty-Two

When morning came, both of us pretended like last night hadn’t happened. Whatever spell Lucien had used to kill the electronics in our hotel room had worn off and recasting it during the day would definitely be noticed, so we went about our day as normal.

Well, maybe not exactly normal.

Neither of us were talking much. We took it in turns to surveil the Recondite temple, and when breakfast arrived, we ate in silence. Several tedious hours had gone past when we finally spotted something; a freight truck pulling into the alley we had been making out in last night.

It was the first real movement either of us had seen since last night. Not once had anyone used the building’s front doors, and besides the robed man in the alley, we’d seen no one else even near it.

Lucien pressed his eyes to the telescopic camera, and I watched the laptop for the photos that popped up. The truck had backed in ass first, so it was impossible to see what was being moved from it to the building itself, but something was, and they were using that side entrance we had seen last night.

“Run the license plate,” said Lucien.

“Run it?” I asked. “How?”

“Note the number down and enter it into the police database. It should be on the screen somewhere—just don’t close it.”

I zoomed in on the picture Lucien had taken of the truck, wrote down its license plate, and keyed it into the police database just as he had asked. I was pretty sure we weren’t supposed to have access to this database, but I decided not to question it.

“What am I looking for?” I asked.

“Anything that stands out or seems unusual,” he said.

I checked the readout that came up on the screen. Having had no previous experience here, I couldn’t say I had spotted anything weird. Massachusetts registry, the truck’s official owner was some packaging company I had never heard of, and it didn’t flag up as wanted, stolen, or suspicious—assuming that was a thing that would have come up on the database I was using.

“Looks… normal,” I ventured. “Nothing weird.”

“What about the people driving it?” he asked. “Is there anything weird about them?”

I pulled up Lucien’s photo of the truck driver. He hadn’t stepped out to help unload it and was just sitting at the wheel, eating a doughnut or a sandwich or something. “Honestly, looks like a regular delivery guy.”

“And I can’t see what they’re unloading from this angle.”