“Asshat.”
“Apt.” He tilted his head slightly to the side, his mouth soft.
“You’ve been cozying up to him.” It came out as an accusation.
Lee frowned. “Not for fun,amore.”
In the close quarters of the heat and the steam, he was suddenly more Italian, more exotic, the way he had seemed so long ago when we were young and together.
“I came home. To find your heart wounded byil vampiro. I was wounded as well, in my heart and in my spirit. We both needed time to heal. Therefore, as always in my life, I waited.” That Italian shrug again, as much an open palm as a shoulder lift. He fell silent.
I thought about that as the water heated me and an itch was added to the tingle in my hands. A throbbing ache began, deep in my finger bones. “I’m…no longer wounded. I’m pretty sure I’m healed, heart and soul,” I said.
Eyes closing, he smiled slowly, joy spreading from the edges of his lips up and over his face. “As are my heart and my soul. Perhaps you will forgive this.” He opened his eyes, his blue onesmeeting mine. He leaned over and took my chin between his thumb and forefinger. He tipped my face up, slanted his to the side, and his lips descended. The kiss was sweet for about ten seconds. And then it deepened.
I wrapped my arms around his neck, my dead, agonizing hands hanging against his spine protected from the pounding water, but the pain ratcheting into agony.
He gathered me and held me so close it was hard to take a breath. I sighed into his mouth. He breathed in my breath.
The kiss was everything I remembered and a lot more. Villetti had practiced while he was gone. Or maybe I had learned a few things from the randy vampire I had married.
A knock came on the door and Walter called, “Your scents have changed. I must attempt to heal Angelina or it will be too late.”
Leandro broke the kiss and rested his forehead against mine. “Well. Despite the danger of saying so, fuck.”
I laughed. “Maybe later.”
“It’s a date.” Economically, he pulled off his wet clothes and then mine and tossed the soggy mess out of the shower and into the sink to drain. Turned off the water. And tied a bath sheet towel around me above my breasts. Another, smaller one, went around his waist.
He called, “Walter, come get her. I’ll feed you after.”
The door opened and I stood, walking out to be healed with vampire blood. Again.
The blood healing tied me to the royal life I had walked away from. The guards in the workout room tied me even closer to those royal connections. The queen’s banner on the roof, the attack on EJ, Walter, and me, tied usallcloser to the queen and placed our independence further out of reach.
The pain in my hands was bad enough. The knowledge that without the help of the queen’s people, we would likely be dead—or possessed—dragged at me. With every step I was ensnared deeper, tighter, into the tangled and layered web that was the queen’s protection and the queen’s will.
Chapter Seventeen
EJ
Beneath anobfuscation, EJ slipped in, closed the door, and studied Angie’s apartment.
Walter was healing his sister. The dark-skinned vampire had slathered his own blood on the flesh of her hands and forced her to drink more of his blood than was safe for her, even in these times when binding a human or a witch to a vampire’s will was difficult. Her head lolled drunkenly against a pillow. Blood-drunk.
Angie, wrapped in a big towel, a smaller one around her head, was stretched out on the sofa, healing amulets all over and around her: stones; cuttings from a rosemary plant; a silver pot that had been purified under the full moon and filled withhealingmoonstones; wood disks carved with trees; feathers sung intohealingworkings by their father; others. Angie hoardedhealingas if shesawa time in her future when they would be the only things that kept her, or someone she loved, alive.
Villetti, who had once broken Angie’s heart, was in her kitchen, preparing a pesto hollandaise sauce for salmon and asparagus. His hair was wet too, but he was dressed, wearingcomfortable-looking sweats and socks, but no shoes. Despite being nearly sucked into an alternate universe with a bunch of demons, he looked younger. Happy. The cop turned his head over his shoulder to see Angie, his eyes drinking her in, as if the sight of her kept him alive, kept him breathing, kept his heart beating.
EJ knew that look. It was what his mother would refer to assmitten. Angie had once been smitten with Villetti too.
EJ’s fingers played over the keys of a piccolo in his jacket pocket, silently running through a riff. Hidden in the shadows of subdued lighting, he put things together.
During the attack, they had raised the Dark Queen’s flag over the apartment building. The queen had been prepared and had planned ahead for various attacks. Aunt Jane was good at politics. Vampire good. With her standard, she had set her protection and herclaimingon the building and its people, a claiming in the vampire way, a claiming tantamount to a declaration of war against all enemies. The queen was stating that our response to attack was also hers.
Their vampire clan Blood Master, in the guise of plain old Jane Yellowrock, would also have to respond to attack.
Edmund—the Emperor of Europe, and Angie’s Dark Knight—would have to respond to any attack on the child he was sworn to protect. Respond or lose face in a way that could result in a serious challenge to his leadership.
