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It was so fucking good. So unbelievably fucking good. I could feel a tightness in the back of my throat, that burst of adrenaline like when you crest the top of a rollercoaster.

God. Fuck.

“Val—Dios—move.”

I did, but I couldn’t move much without losing it, so I pulled back only the tiniest bit before pushing back into him. The next time, a little more. Breathing deeply, trying to control myself. Then a little more.

Taavi moaned, long and low, sweat beading on his forehead, one cheek pressed into the bedcover, his brown eye looking back at me, the pupil blown wide.

“Harder,” he rasped out, a growl edging the tone.

“I won’t… last…” I gasped.

“Please.Hard.”

I couldn’t deny him.

I pulled all the way out, my fingers gripping his hips hard enough to bruise as I fought to hold on. And then I slammed home once, twice, a third time with a gasping cry as every nerve ending I had flooded with electricity as I came into the heat and tightness of his body. Taavi arched his back again, throwing his head back with a whining growl as I reached around him, pumping him only once before he spilled into my hand with a wail, drawing another gasp from me as his body spasmed around my softening cock.

I wrapped my other arm around him, then rolled to the side, pulling him with me, cradled against me, my nose pressed into his still-wet hair.

He sighed, then pulled my arm tighter around him.

“I’ll get you sticky,” I warned him, whispering against his ear.

“I’ll take another shower,” he murmured back.

“Mmmm.” I nuzzled against the back of his head, breathing him in.

How the fuck had I ever thought I could live without this man? How the fuck had I thought I could possibly give him up because… I couldn’t remember why I’d thought that was a good idea. Why I’d thought for even one fucking second that I could so much as breathe without Taavi Camal in my life.

“Taav?”

“Si?”

“Thank you.”

He turned in my arms so he could look at me. “For what?”

I kissed his forehead. “Being you.”

14

I broughtmy laptop into Elliot’s house—my brain had now decided that it was Elliot’s house, not Gregory’s house, although I wasn’t sure how I felt about that—and sat at the kitchen island while Taavi and Elliot kept working on sorting the basement.

I was trying to learn everything I could about Janice Butcher.

She was a fox shifter, married, had two kids, one in junior high, one in high school. Jesus. Those poor fucking kids. It was probably hard enough to grow up with a shifter mom who was in the public eye, much lessnow.

I wondered if any of the rest of her family had gotten Arcana and, if they had, become shifters. That would probably make this whole thing so much worse.

I wasn’t in a position to justify talking to her husband or kids—not that I particularly wanted to do that, anyway—so I had to go with what little had already hit the news. Most of it was about the controversy over the fact that she hadn’t disclosed being a shifter at the time of her election to the School Board.

It also looked like this was going to lead to some local legislation, if the talking heads could be believed, about disclosure of one’s Arcane status in order to hold public office. Andthatmade me nervous.

Not for me, personally, since anybody who looks at me can tell I’m not human, but because if you had to start disclosing that you were an Arc or a shifter, that was really only one step short of you being refused a job because you were an Arc or a Nid, and that was another step short of that sort of discrimination being codified by law.

Vampires and ghouls already couldn’t hold certain positions in healthcare, because it was believed—rightly or wrongly—that they couldn’t control themselves in a situation where they might be exposed to blood.