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He let out a small, soft whimper, then pulled back just far enough to rest his forehead against mine.

“God, I love you,” he whispered, his breath brushing my lips.

“I love you, too,” I replied, just as quietly.

“Remind me how I lived for forty-one years without you?”

I laughed softly. “Going through one man after another?” I suggested.

“Ugh. Clearly, I can’t be left to fend for myself. I make terrible decisions.”

“Clearly,” I agreed, teasing him.

He let out a sigh. “Fuck, I missed you.”

I’d missed him, too. “I saw you less than twenty-four hours ago,” I pointed out, as much for my benefit as his. There were days I’d worked longer than that, and while he was definitely happy to see me after that, I didn’t get greeted with a kiss like the one he’d just given me.

“I know,” he replied, his voice almost wistful. “But I just kept thinking about how they tried to kill you…”

I didn’t point out that the one they’d actually tried to kill was him. Because they’d thought it was me.

“I had Hart with me, remember?”

“I know,” he repeated. “But that stupid dickhead gets himself stabbed often enough that having him around is no guarantee that you aren’t going to end up bleeding.”

I grimaced. He wasn’t wrong, although I wasn’t really certain whether Hart or I was the greater liability in this partnership. “No guarantee that isn’t going to happen anyway,” I remarked, holding up my scraped palm from my tumble on the mountain.

Elliot took my wrist and turned his head to kiss the scabbed heel of my hand. “I’d rather you not, but if you’re going to end up bleeding, I suppose I’d rather it be hiking than because somebody attacked you.”

“Me, too,” I agreed.

He kissed my hand again, his lips gentle, like the brush of butterfly wings. “I wasn’t sure you’d let me,” he said, his voice almost swallowed.

I almost asked Let you what? but then remembered that the last time he’d tried to touch me in this kitchen, I’d shied away from him, and I felt a flush of shame creep up my neck.

Elliot ran his fingers through my hair, cradling my skull in his hands. “Not what I meant, baby,” he said softly, sounding upset. “I just?—”

I leaned into him, bringing our foreheads back together. “I know. I’m still sorry.”

Elliot gave me another gentle kiss. “Don’t be.” He pulled back, pressing one more kiss to my forehead, then settled on the other side of the table. “What can you tell me about the case? Or isn’t Val talking?”

I drew in a long breath, then let it out again. “He spent most of the morning on the phone trying to convince Raj Parikh to claim jurisdiction. He managed to get him to agree to make the case to their boss, but he wasn’t sure whether or not it would work.”

Elliot grunted, unhappy with that news. “What does it fucking take?”

“A dead shifter,” I replied grimly. “Which I’m personally quite happy that we don’t have.”

He grimaced. “Attempted murder isn’t good enough?”

“Sadly, no.”

“He’s harassing the Sheriff’s Department anyway, though, isn’t he?”

“Oh, yes.” I snorted. “And they hate him.”

Elliot groaned. “So he’s gonna get fucking stabbed again .”

I wasn’t happy about it, but I had to say it: “He’s more likely to get shot, given the circumstances.”

“Fuck. Thank you for that observation.” He shot me a look.

“Sorry.”

Hart drove back up to the house with a giant bag of vegetarian Thai food, which we ate in my parents’ kitchen off the same plates that we’d used when Noah and I were kids.

White, with a pattern of little brown leaves around the edges.

It was weird. Not the Thai food—that was good.

But being in the kitchen and eating again.

Especially eating something as indulgent as Thai —since I’d never once eaten restaurant food growing up, and since we were supposed to eat only for sustenance, my mother’s cooking had been pretty basic.

The closest thing to indulgence we’d gotten in our house was having snacks for two growing kids who spent most of their free time outside in the mountains—a basic trail mix of nuts and raisins, crackers with either peanut butter or cheese, raw fruit.

And even that my father had often disapproved of, calling it gluttony if he saw us eat what he deemed too much.

If he was dead—which I doubted—he’d be rolling over in his grave. But I was pretty sure I didn’t have that kind of luck.

“Val, what the fuck were you doing all day?”

The elf snorted. “Being given the most fucking epic runaround about Mays’s car.

” He put a bite of curry noodles in his mouth and spoke around them as he chewed.

“They’ve impounded it, and were refusing to let me actually see the damn thing.

Refusing to even state whether they were running chemical tests.

” He gestured at Elliot with his bamboo fork.

“Claiming the body is too damaged for an ID through DNA as though I don’t know they’re so full of shit it’s coming out their nostrils. ”

“Are they saying anything about Seth’s mother?” Elliot asked.

“Supposedly unrelated,” came Hart’s bitter reply.

Which meant that even if the FBI got interested in the attempted murder of a shifter, they weren’t going to be able to intercede in the murder of a human woman, even if it had been perpetrated by a shifter.

“Shit,” is what I said out loud, poking at the cubes of tofu in the pad thai on my plate.

“Bullshit,” Hart said. “A load of stinking, fucking bullshit.” He grabbed a spring roll out of the little brown paper box and bit the end of it. “They’re fucking covering for a murderer. The only thing I can’t fucking figure is why ?”

“Why does it matter?” Elliot asked.

“Means, motive, opportunity,” I said. “You have to have all three to make a case.”

“We know why they pushed you off the road, but their argument is that they happened upon the scene after the car was on fire,” Hart explained. “Could have been a freak accident.”

“The scene itself says otherwise, though,” I pointed out.

“The scene they almost certainly didn’t document and definitely didn’t fucking investigate,” the elf countered.

“You did, though,” I reminded him. “ You have documentary and physical evidence that Elliot was driven off the road.”

“You do?” Elliot looked up. “That’s something, then?”

“Yeah, but without being able to inspect the department car that did it—and you can bet your sweet ass they’ve already repaired it—all I have is evidence that someone ran El off the road. Not who. Not why.”

“But we know why,” Elliot objected.

“But we can’t prove it,” I told him. “And if it’s what we have to say against the entire Augusta County Sheriff’s Department, who do you think the DA or a judge is going to listen to?”

Elliot growled.

“Which is why,” Hart continued around the rest of his spring roll, “I have to figure out a way to get this punted to the Bureau. I’ve ostensibly got a dead shifter—you—which should let me justify federal intervention, but I don’t have a ruling of vehicular homicide, just a load of bullshit about a possible accident.

And I’ve got a murder, but while the perp is a shifter, the victim isn’t, which leaves me up shit creek with no fucking paddle. ”