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Nimue had followed them home to ensure there were the most modest of protections on the safe house and to be sure Grayson could make it through the beginner exercises to help him manage the flow of The Plain.

Jay had asked if she could quiet the projection of the piano before she’d left. He’d so badly needed to play, but it had been almost midnight and his mates were weaving on their feet. “I can stop.”

“Not too loud out here; in here.” He rubs over his heart, where Nix says Jay has been, even before he was Were.

“Sorry.” He doesn’t know what else to say.

It’s stupid—it feels ridiculous.

All those years and protestations about his parents. About being done. About not needing closure. Being his own man to spite his father, not because of him.

So fucking stupid.

Because now he’s up into the wee hours of the morning playing melancholy songs, like a by-the-hour pianist in a cocktail lounge, because those very same parents are dea—

Fuck.

His fingers slip again, a jangle of discordant notes that seem to echo the jumble of thoughts in his tired, grieving brain.

“You don’t have to be sorry. Not to me, and never for your feelings. I’m the one who should say I’m sorry.”

“What? No.”

“Jamie! They were your parents. Doesn’t matter that they did terrible things, because…well…fuck them for that. No way around it. But your dad taught you to play ball, right? Your mom used to sing that song? The sunshine one?”

“Stop,” Jay begs.

He can’t think about them like that right now. Can’t remember any of the good. Not right now. Maybe never.

The pack’s asses are hanging in the wind, and they have no fucking plan. He’s sinking under guilt and grief, and he can’t handle regret, too.

“Please.”

“Okay.” Nix nods and kisses his shoulder. “Do you remember that song you taught me when we were kids?”

He uses his pointer fingers to tap out the first few off-key notes of the theme for an old, old movie—Love Story.

Jay had learned it for a recital when he’d been eight to impress his piano teacher, and when Nix had shown interest at school one lunch hour, years later, Jay had shown him how to play the basic right-hand melody while Jay had played the left.

“It was calledLove Story, right? Not the popular one now, but the older one?”

“Mmmhmm,” Jay murmurs, thinking about the hundreds of freckles on his love’s cheeks, just like he used to do back then.

“Like this?” Nix plunks out the beginning, still half an octave too high, and Jay shifts his hands to the right position.

“Oh, that sounds better. Want to try it with me? Like old times?”

Jay smiles. “I’ll try to keep up.”

“You do that.”

They manage to stumble through it horribly the first time, but the second and third times go better; when the final chord plays, Nix throws his arms around Jay’s neck, and he’s transported again, for just a few seconds, back to his senior year.

“We did it,” he whispers into Nix’s cheek.

“We did. Like we always do, right?”

“Like we always do.”