Page 52

Another sigh. “Not anymore.”

Oh. Oh, fuck.

I put the wet pot on the counter and pulled him into my arms, not caring that his hands were also wet with dishwater.

He let me, turning to press his cheek against my chest, another heavy sigh slipping through his lips.

“I—”

“Don’t.”

I had been about to apologize again. But I didn’t know what else to say. Iwassorry. I was sorry that he didn’t feel comfortable in his own skin anymore—because he was scared or because he’d been stuck as a dog or whatever. I was sorry that I’d had my head up my ass and I hadn’t figured it out sooner without having to make him tell me. And I was sorry that I’d dragged him into this shitshow.

“How do I help?” I asked, instead.

“I don’t know,” came the answer, soft and sad.

“Since last year?” I asked after a little while of just holding him.

He nodded.

“What about—” I cut myself off. I’d been going to ask him about the time he’d shifted—with a broken arm—when we’d been harassed while walking back to the apartment by some jackoffs in a car… not long after he’d been run down by someotherjackoffs in a truck. But asking him to explain that was an asshole thing to do.

He answered me anyway. “Icanshift,” he murmured. “I just hate it.”

I felt like that probably wasn’t healthy. A sign of trauma or shifter PTSD or something. But I’m not a psychiatrist, so what the fuck do I know? Even if itwasshifter PTSD, I certainly wasn’t qualified to provide any kind of actual support beyond being a dumbass jerk who sometimes managed not to stick his foot in it.

I tightened my arms around him. “I love you,” I told his hair, resting my chin on the top of his head.

“Te amo, corazón,” he answered. I knew enough Spanish now to know what the first two words meant, and they were the important ones. I probably could have looked up the last one, but I was a little afraid he was calling me an asshole, so I hadn’t.

I felt guilty as fuck about the fact that he was clearly unhappy, but I tried to think about what Elliot had said.

Yeah, he was unhappy. Anybody would be in this fucking mess of a situation. He was scared, I’d been leaving him functionally alone, and someone had killed another shifter, and I’d have bet anything Taavi was seeing the same news stories I was about shifters being pushed out of public service jobs, like Janice Butcher from the Shawano School Board. We’d been through this helltwicebefore, and he’d ended up bloody and battered both times.

“I’m sorry—”

“Valentine.” He was getting annoyed with me.

“No, let me have this one,” I argued. “I’m sorry you have to go through this allagain. But I’m going to be better about being there for you.”

His hands fisted in the back of my sweater. “Promise me you won’t get yourself almost killed again,” he rasped.

“I’m going to try really hard not to,” I replied. “But if that fuzzy jerk out there doesn’t get back in like four hours, I’m going to have to go out after him. And he’s almost impossible to find cuz the bastard can tunnel.”

“I can find him,” came his answer.

“Yeah?”

He leaned back—not out of my arms, but enough that I could see his face. He tapped his nose with one finger. “I can find him,” he repeated.

“I thought you hated shifting?”

“I do.” But he’d do it anyway, if he had to.

“Let’s hope Elliot is less stupid than I am, then.”

That got me a little laugh.