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She liked working, she’d explained. She didn’t mind.

Anyway, she wanted to show him around the cool digs.

Nick had to admit, it was beautiful.

Kit showed him the breeding stables, the labs, and all of the cute little baby foxes and bunnies and birds and wolves. She showed him cougars and snakes, and even a place for breeding spiders and bats and ants, all of which apparently needed to repopulate.

Kit seemed almost bummed she had to leave that day to go back to New York.

Of course, that probably had a lot to do with Mal, her new boyfriend, who was up at the chateau with St. Maarten too, doing his own kind of work for Archangel.

And okay, that might have been the real reason Nick was annoyed.

The chefs at the French-style chateau had been pretty damned amazing though, even Nick had to admit. He couldn’t taste much, but the foodlookeddelicious, and it smelled delicious as Kit ate it, and they brought him blood so disturbingly fresh Nick joked about the place having its own underground dungeon.

Well. He’d hoped it was a joke.

Nick remembered his lame attempt to ask Kit how things were going with Mal.

He remembered Kit being evasive.

He remembered pressing her more.

He also remembered the point where Kit’s face turned bright red in her mortification that Nick was even asking. She burst out in some teenaged-style rant about how Nick was being too overprotective, that Mal was a sweetheart, and Nick was just going to have to shut up and get over the fact that she was old enough to have sex.

Internally and externally, Nick cringed.

He also sighed, once again feeling like the old man everyone accused him of being.

Since that aborted attempt at a “talk,” Nick hadn’t worked up the nerve to bring the subject up again, with Kit or Mal. Wynter heard about it and gave him endless shit, so that didn’t help, but Wynter seemed to find the whole thing amusing.

It only occurred to Nick a day or two later that maybe he wasn’tonlyworried about Kit. Maybe he was also worried about Mal. He knew Kit dated around a fair bit, both men and women, hybrids and humans. She even dated a vampire once.

Nick had serious doubts whether the socially bizarre Mal had done the same.

Then again, maybe he had.

After all, at one time Nick suspected the prescient seer was sleeping with Lara St. Maarten. Maybe Nick was just making the wrong assumptions about everyone. Maybe Mal had been fucking people all along, and just keeping that information to himself.

Malek wasseer,after all.

Seers, like vamps, weren’t exactly known for their restrained libidos.

Nick just didn’t want Mal to get hurt.

He didn’t want Kit to get hurt.

He didn’t want anyone to get hurt.

He hadn’t articulated any of that gracefully to either of them, though. The one time he tried to talk to Mal had gone spectacularly bad. He couldn’t remember how he’d put his questions to Kit exactly, but that had gone even worse.

Fighting the memory out of his head now, Nick bit his tongue.

He could feel it now.

He could feel what the other Nick had been hiding from his mind.

He could feel the newborns Wynter told him about.