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“Do you?” he asked me again. “Because to me they mean that I’m not going to walk out thatmaltidadoor just because everything isn’t sunshine and rainbows, okay?”

I was pretty sure that nothing in our relationship had ever been sunshine and rainbows, given that it had started with him stuck as a dog in a dumpster and progressed to dating while a fucked-up neo-Aztec cult was trying to murder canid shifters and almost did murder me. But I wasn’t going to point that out right at this moment for a whole number of reasons, including because emotion had blocked my throat.

So I just nodded, pulling him back so that I could bury my face in the side of his neck.

“Hombre estúpido, I am not going to leave you, okay?”

I nodded into his neck, my fingers spread against the heat of his skin.

“Val.”

I made a noise against his skin.

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

18

I staredup at the ceiling, trying to drag my brain out of the fog of sleep. Taavi wasn’t in the room, and I assumed he’d gone to shower and left me to try to get some sleep, since sleep and I were not really on speaking terms at the moment.

I hadn’t had another epic nightmare like the one I’d had a few nights ago, just a regular little nightmare that had jerked me out of sleep with my heart racing and sweat making my t-shirt cling to my skin. And then I hadn’t wanted to gobackto sleep for a good three hours because I didn’t want it to get worse.

I’d finally managed to fall asleep around five with the soothing pulse of Taavi’s heart under my ear, but that didn’t amount to a good total in terms of sleep-hours for the past two nights… on top of several more weeks of relatively shit sleep. The sun still wasn’t actually up, although it was that kind of just-dawn grey, which told my very foggy brain that it should absolutely be able to go back to sleep in the nice warm blankets. But this was winter in Wisconsin, which meant it was probably later than it felt.

I reached over and flipped my phone so I could see the time, and let out a slight groan. It was just about seven-thirty, which meant that I really should be thinking about getting up so that we could eat breakfast with my parents. And then do whatever horrifyingly festive thing my mother had planned that may or may not have included Elliot. I’d find out over breakfast.

Smith had texted me the day before, letting me know that he was chasing things down and would update me if he found anything—or if there was anything I could do to help—in a couple days. I didn’t like it, but I also knew that he couldn’t just drag some random-ass elf around with him. Shawano is a small fucking town, and people would notice fairly quickly if one of the two detectives was bringing a civvie—and an elf civvie at that—around with him.

It wouldn’t end well for either of us.

So I was trying to be patient, which was absolutely not my strong suit, and was even less my strong suit when I was sleep-deprived and subjected to my mother’s tireless attempts to make this Christmas inappropriately merry.

Don’t get me wrong—I got that she was trying to make sure that Elliot didn’t feel lonely or unloved. She wanted to make sure that the holidays weren’t God-fucking-awful for him or for her and my dad, or for me and, since he was here, Taavi. I even admired the tenacity of my mother’s drive to make the people she loved happy.

I just could only take so much of it before I wanted to strangle someone, usually her, even though I do really love my mom.

I’d managed to transition from lying in a nest of blankets to sitting on the side of the bed by the time Taavi slipped back into the room, his wet hair brushed back, wearing a long-sleeve wine-colored t-shirt I didn’t recognize and a pair of fuzzy snowflake socks he definitely hadn’t owned before we came out to Wisconsin.

“Did Mom take you shopping?”

He snorted. “A couple times,” came the answer. “It is apparently a travesty that you brought me out here without winter clothes.”

I reached out and hooked a finger in one of the belt-loops on his jeans—those weren’t new. They were my favorite dark pair, because they were just a tiny bit tighter than his other pairs, which meant they hugged his ass and upper thighs just a little bit more. I pulled him to stand in between my legs, and he tossed his toiletry bag onto the bed next to me, a smile curving his lips as I leaned forward to press a kiss to his stomach through the cotton of his shirt.

“You’ll still be cold if you go out in just this,” I told him.

“That’s why I’m stealing another of your old sweaters,” he replied.

I snorted. “You can have all of them, as far as I’m concerned. They come down to my forearms and show my stomach.”

“Oh, they’re already mine,” he informed me, his mismatched eyes sparkling.

“Is that so?” It felt nice to banter, and I pulled him a little closer, enjoying the warmth radiating off his body.

“Well, you weren’t using them.”

“Nope,” I agreed.