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“So, you don’t know?”

“I know what I am, but science doesn’t know what I am. I can tell you all about my snake, but I can’t give you a name so you can look it up.”

“Are there many of you?”

“As far as I know, all shapeshifters with my snake are also of Indian descent. I can’t tell you whether there are a lot of us, or only a few.”

“Which means there are probably a whole lot of you, and your people don’t want that information widely known.”

When he didn’t respond, she told him, “You’re one of the biggest men I know.” Once the words were out of her mouth, she realized it sounded like a non sequitur, and she rushed to say. “Mostly, the other people I know from India are more compact. And I realize that sounds bad, but it’s the truth.”

“It is. The average Indian is something like six inches shorter than the average Northern European. I’m an outlier, kind of like that basketball player from China.”

“Are the other snake shifters all tall?” She shook her head. “Don’t answer that, because you’re only going to say you can’ttell me.” Genie took a breath and started again. “It isn’t just that you’re tall, it’s that you’re so muscled. You’re beautiful. I want to run my tongue over every inch of you, and maybe you’ll let me do that someday. I guess I know better than to ask to give you a blow job, now.”

Fuck, this conversation wasn’t supposed to be about sex.

Dev reached across the car’s console for her hand, and he lifted it to his lips and kissed it.

“I honestly don’t know whether to thank you for that or not,” she told him. “It was a lot.”

“For apex predator shapeshifters, part of staying in control is knowing what is likely to test your control. For me, oral sex flips a switch and brings out my inner beast. I was as careful with you as I could manage. I haven’t fucked the boys faces around you, and I probably will now, when the situation calls for it. I’m not saying I’ll never take your mouth again, because it was fucking heaven and I’ll probably want to, but I plan to reserve it for special occasions, unless you take it off the table.”

“No, it isn’t off the table. I trust you. If it becomes a problem, we’ll talk about it, but if you don’t plan on doing it often, or plan to only do it when you need to put an extra feather in your cap, that sounds…” She blew out a breath. “Not nice, the opposite of nice, but it’s the way it should be.”

They were both silent a few seconds, and he told her, “If and when you feel comfortable telepathing with me, you’ll be able to tell me things the twins shouldn’t be privy to. I’d prefer to get safewords from you that way, once you have the ability.”

“Unless there’s an emergency and I can’t be reached by phone, I’d prefer you to never telepath me when I’m at work. I can’t have other people in my head when I’m working because I have this mental list of things to do constantly ongoing and…” She shrugged. “I know Brooke can speak to me like that at any time, but she mostly doesn’t. I need to know you won’t either.”

“Then I won’t. Does this mean you’re open to doing it now?”

“Yeah. With you. Not with the twins yet.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

Ezra woke in a bed instead of a cage, and looked across the bed to his brother, who was still sleeping. Since arriving, they’d been assigned television shows and movies to watch. Today, they were supposed to watch what Aldrich had called The Matrix trilogy.

Some of what they’d watched had seemed so peculiar.The Big Bang Theory, full of smart young human men who were concerned with the most bizarre things. They’d been assigned to watch the first six and the last six episodes of a show calledFriends, and Elijah had expressed an interest in knowing how the friends had gotten from A to B, but Ezra couldn’t bring up enough sentiment to care.

He’d enjoyed the Fast and Furious movies, but Julien had explained it was mostly entertainment and his favorite parts weren’t terribly close to reality. To prove his point, he’d had them watch the first season of True Blood, a show about vampires and shapeshifters. But that just made him sad, because the waitress at the vampire bar hit way too close to the truth — her memories wiped so many times she was no longer truly sentient the way humans are supposed to be. He’d seen it happen with humans more times than he wanted to remember, especially with specific vampires who overused the ability. Shapeshifters, thankfully, were better at healing the damage to their brains, but Ezra had always wondered what hadreallyhappened when he was with those particular vampires, knowing his memory couldn’t be trusted when he’d been with them.

Ezra now understood why television and movies were forbidden to Concilio slaves. He’d assumed it’d been because they didn’t have the leisure time for it, and that was probably part of it, but not all of it. He and Elijah had been mostly happy with their life because they hadn’t understood what they were missing. TheMike and Mollyshow had seemed so ordinary when compared to, for instance, theFast and the Furious, but it seemed like a life Ezra could enjoy — a job with friends, a woman to share his life with, and no one telling him what he could and could not do. Though, he’d understood that a boss would still give orders, but they were limited in the scope of what it took to do the job.

“You’re thinking too loud,” Elijah said. “We should let them know we’re ready for breakfast. Also, since we apparently have to talk to Aldrich about our understanding of this first movie before he decides if we have to watch it again, or whether we can move to the second, I suppose we should actually pay attention to it.”

“We should be paying attention to all of them. We’re supposed to be learning cultural norms as well as picking up how to look normal when we’re allowed to go out into society and interact with strangers.”

“It seems like a lot of work. We were trained to fuck. Why don’t we just tell Brooke to use us as rentboys and let us pay our way with our dicks and asses.”

“And mouths?” Ezra asked, his voice sharper than he usually spoke to his brother. “I don’t think I want to be a male whore, if I have the choice.”

“What else are we going to do?”

“People make money driving cars,” Ezra told him. “You’ve asked about learning a couple of times.”

Elijah sat up and reached for the cat treats. Ferocious was on top of the perch they’d made him, and the kitten made hisway down the seven-foot-tall cat scratcher, ran across the room, climbed up the bed, and ran to Elijah for the treat.

“That’s true,” Elijah said. “Mikael told us he used to call for a taxi from the city and give the driver an address in the middle of nowhere, have a nice drink from him, and then have the driver return him to a house a few streets over from where he lived. He said he can’t do that with Uber now because so many of the drivers have cameras in their cars. I looked up Uber, and all you need is a driver’s license you’ve had for at least a year, and a decent car with four doors.”