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Sometimes forget how brutal Dare is, how fierce he can be behind the smiles and winks and flirtations.

The brutality that lurks beneath his marble skin, it growls out in the threat of his voice, “Then perhaps I should pay her a visit.”

Eamon slumps into the hutch. The glass door creaks under his weight. “You could do that. I would kindly ask you don’t harm her.” The crockery in the cabinet rattles as he pushes away from it. “She is a good friend of mine. And it isn’t her fault that you were bested by someone you saw as a nice ass and nothing more.”

“You could go back to her dwelling,” Rune manages through a mouthful of contained laughter. “Bet she’ll have you on your back in seconds, your gold in her hand.”

Aleana hides behind her hand, as though the creases of a smile don’t wrinkle around her eyes.

“You met your match,” Daxeel adds and runs his thumb over his mouth, “or at least the female edition of you.”

“That settles it,” Samick says over the sizzle of the stove. “We now know what Dare would have been if he was born female and kinta.”

Aleana snorts, but she’s quick to mask it with a false cough and she rubs her chest soothingly.

Dare’s glare lingers over her for a moment before he lifts it to the slim window that looks onto the street. I don’t think he sees anything through that window, but rather his mind is away on this torment that has his hands fisting.

Dare takes no humour in any of this. His face is as severe as his eyes are lethal. The violence of his thoughts is shown in his normally short greyish fingernails, as they start to shift into claws sharp enough to tear a spine clean out of a body.

It snaps in my mind like clicked fingers.

‘…someone you saw as a nice ass and nothing more.’

It isn’t true.

Dare wasn’t just tricked and bested.

Darelikedher.

Likes her still, maybe, beneath the betrayal.

Perhaps he feels just like any other male Bee has done this to.

What he might have thought special, what he thought might have meant something, was just another target to her as his targets are to him.

Maybe, on a less hopeful note, he just feels that empty longing for the sun in his dreams all over again.

“Why not ask her out?” I suggest with a small shrug. “On a date or something?”

Dare’s eyes flicker to mine, gleaming with a spark of outrage.

But before he can gut me where I sit, I add, “Play your own game with her. Isn’t the chase part of the fun for you? She’ll be a challenge.”

He grunts something of a hum, but a heckled one.

Across the kitchens, Eamon fixes his smile into his chalice of water. His eyes glitter at me. He winks once before he turns to help Samick crack open the griffin egg to fry it.

And, as I lean my side into the warmth of Daxeel, and I look around the varied moods of the kitchens, I find I very much like it here at Hemlock House.

I like the folk I am with.

And I adore that, as though he doesn’t notice at all what he’s doing, Daxeel still strokes his shadowy fingertips down the nape of my neck.

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Aleana’s slender fingers thread through mine.