Page 38

“Dahlia, this is Eleri. Eleri, Dahlia is my wing-second alongside Jacques.”

Dahlia’s smile was big and open, a thing that had gone missing for too long after her failed wedding. She’d found it again—but it remained far too rare. Adam hated knowing that his generous, courageous clanmate was hurting, but being unable to fix it for her.

“I hear you’re the magician who broke Jacques out of semi-shift jail.” Dahlia lifted her glass of iced tea in a toast. “I’d kiss you if I could.”

Eleri stirred the nutrients into a glass of water, her voice ice when she replied. “Don’t. Js are taught to break arms and other body parts as part of our training.”

Dahlia’s laugh was a huge thing, her eyes ringed by falcon yellow. “Oh, I like you. Especially since you have the best poker face I’ve ever seen—I can’t tell if you’re dead serious or if you’re messing with me.”

Adam had the instinctive sense that it was the latter.

Eleri acting as the girl she’d once been?

The girl who’d had within her the ability to feel the entire rainbow of emotions, from amusement to anguish.

That girl might’ve joked this way with a young Dahlia—and Dahlia, being as tough and blunt as she was, would’ve appreciated such a friend.

“I,” Eleri replied as he sat back and let the two women talk, “once read the memory of a poker player who murdered her partner after said partner colluded with external forces to throw a Las Vegas match for money. Unfortunately for the partner, he underestimated her passion for the game.”

Dahlia poked her fork into a piece of honeydew melon but didn’t bring it to her lips. “Fair enough. I can’t stand cheats, either. How’d she do it?”

“Poisoned his whiskey. Nothing easy, either—a drug that took three days to kill him, all the while making him so sick that he couldn’t get out of bed. She, meanwhile, kept on playing throughout. She was what the media termed a ‘knockout blonde.’?”

Dahlia whistled. “I think she fits the definition of ‘tough broad’ like in those vintage movies Jacques likes to watch. Can I ask what it was like? Being in her mind?”

Adam stiffened, his protective urges rising to the surface. He knew he should keep his mouth shut—his grandmother would rise from the ashes and slap him upside the head any moment now, but he couldn’t stop himself. Not when Eleri’s face had been a mask of blood so recently.

Then Eleri shot him a look as he went to part his lips.

And he wanted to grin. Yes, she was his mate all right; they might not have bonded yet, but she’d known exactly what shit he was about to pull and had called him out on it without saying a word.

He shut up…and imagined a lifetime of such piercing knowing between them.

Fuck, he couldn’t wait to live life with her by his side.

There’s no coming back from this, no future road.

Adam’s falcon released its talons inside him. He’d meant what he’d said; he wanted her exactly as she was, exactly as the years had shaped her to be, not some image of perfection—and he planned to make her see that, understand that.

Mates were for always, through every season of life.

“Not all Js like to talk about the minds in which we’ve walked,” Eleri told Dahlia. “But I don’t mind answering about the poker player—her mind was pristine, a house with not a single item out of place.

“She didn’t have obsessive thoughts about murdering and torturing people, would’ve never committed murder if not for her addiction to the game. Even the torturous murder of her former partner was, to her, a fair punishment. She didn’t revel in it. To her, it simply had to be done.”

Dahlia narrowed her eyes as she chewed, swallowed. “That’d be me,” she said at last. “If I were to murder my hypothetical cheating partner. Gotta be done. Nothing personal.”

“No, you have too much passion in you,” Eleri responded. “You’d go into a frenzy. No premeditation.”

Only Adam saw the wistfulness in her gaze, heard it in the voice that seemed to give away nothing. Far from judging her, Eleri envied Dahlia for her ability to feel with such violent depth.

“Well,” Dahlia said after a pause to drink her iced tea, “I did track down my ex and sat there on his balcony at midnight deciding whether or not I wanted to rip off his balls with my talons, so yeah, it’s possible you’re right.”

“Use a knife. Talons would make it obvious it was you.”

Dahlia almost snorted the tea out of her nose.

Grinning, Adam slapped her on the back.

When his second recovered, she said, “You and me, Eleri. We’re going to be best friends.” She glanced at Adam, then at Eleri again, but whatever suspicions she had, she didn’t voice them.

Instead, having finished her meal, she got to her feet. “Time for me to take a short flight to wind down, then rest up for an afternoon shift. We’ll talk about the exact knife later.” A wink aimed at Eleri.

After they were alone, Adam touched his mate’s booted foot with his own. “You like her, don’t you?”

Eleri was overwhelmed in ways she’d never experienced. By this place full of sunlight and warmth. By the man whose legs now bracketed hers, and whose big body sat in a relaxed sprawl that did nothing to hide his deadly core. By the falcons who sunned themselves only feet from her.

By this glimpse at a life she could’ve had.

“Yes,” she managed to say through the emotional deluge strong enough to penetrate the gray wall. “She reminds me of a friend of mine. He can be hot-tempered, too, but he’ll never let you down, always have your back.”

“Bram Priest?”