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“It’s always the part where it’s a prank.”

“Not tonight.” And he means it. I can hear that he means it, which is exactly the problem with men like this. They commit so hard to the lie they start believing it, and then you can’t tell them apart from the truth. “I’d tell you. Out of all of them, I’m the one who’d tell you. That’s sort of my whole job.”

“Your job is HR?”

“Something like that.”

I lift a hand to my neck. Two small punctures, slick. I look back at Enzo over my shoulder. Fangs rest against his own lip now, a bead of red clinging to one.

My blood.

“Oh.”

“There’s a reason you’re not afraid,” Leif says.

“Yeah. It’s called good drugs I didn’t take and a great orgasm I did.” Maybe I should have gotten that antidepressant refilled.

“No.” He crosses to me, cups my jaw, tilts my face like he’s reading the back of it. “There’s a reason. You’ll find it on your own. I can’t hand it to you, you wouldn’t take it from my hand anyway. Some things a person has to walk up to herself.”

“That’s very fortune-cookie of you, Leif.”

“It’s the truest thing anyone’s said to you in thirty-two years.”

How could he possibly know that?

For half a second my chest constricts at his words. Most people never give me the truth, they give me a lie they believe will make me feel better. It never does.

Leif brushes his thumb across my pulse, and I file his words and his fangs away, because a man this beautiful is allowed one creepy line a night.

Enzo hasn’t said much, this whole time. He watches me the way the others talk, with his whole attention, and right now he’s looking at my throat like it’s saying something my mouth isn’t.

“What,” I say.

He meets my eyes. Holds them.

“You’re not running,” he says with this odd observational tone that almost disconnects from the moment. “Everyone runs.”

I do run. Yet, he’s right. I’m not running. I should be running. I have spent a career reading a room and knowing the exact moment to leave it, and every instinct I own is screaming door, door, where is the door. And I am not moving toward the door. I don’t even clock where it is.

Is that me?

Or is it the thing they keep almost saying, the thing Davi swallowed, the thing Leif won’t hand me?

I file it under after. The way I’d table a donor’s grabby hands until the check clears. Tonight I would rather have this than know the answer, and that, not the fangs, not the blood, is the most dangerous thing about me.

I turn in Enzo’s arms and kiss him, because the compulsion is louder than the logic and I need to taste myself on his mouth more than I need my next breath.

He crashes into me like he’s been waiting all night to stop being polite. Enzo is all leashed control, all bodyguard stillness, right up until his mouth is on mine and then there’s nothing controlled about him at all. Copper and pepper and me, all of it on his tongue, and every thought I had goes out the window after it.

He lifts me like I weigh nothing and carries me to the showers, sitting on the tiled bench with me astride his lap, my knees framing his hips. The pepper of him is everywhere now, in my mouth, my lungs.

But he’s still in his pants, and the need to drop onto him is the only coherent thought I’ve got left.

The vampire problem can wait until I’ve come again. I have priorities, and they are stacked in a very clear order.

A zipper rasps somewhere close. Hands land on my hips, urging me down, and I pull back, because Enzo’s hands are already on me and these are not Enzo’s hands.

Davi.