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I said his name and he turned.

He was not cold. That’s the thing I remember. In the dream his hands on my face were warm, and his mouth, when it came down on mine, was warm, and I heard myself make a sound I’ve never made in my waking life, a low, broken, hungry noise, as if I’d been holding it in for years. He kissed me slowly. He kissed me like I was something breakable and something he’d waited a long, long time for. His hands slid down my sides and I shook. His mouth found my throat, and I tipped my head back and let him, and there was an edge of teeth, and I said, “ Yes, “ without knowing what I was agreeing to.

Not scared. That’s what I keep coming back to. In the dream I wasn’t scared at all.

He said something against my skin, in that ocean voice, in a language I didn’t know, and it went through me like heat through metal. His hands were under my shirt. My hands were in his hair. The whole world had narrowed down to the weight of him and the taste of him and the sound my own voice made when he said my name.

Lex.

I arched, and I gasped, and I came apart.

And woke up.

It was light. Gray, early morning light, thin as paper, coming through the gap in the curtains.

I lay very still, and took inventory.

My heart was racing and my breathing was ragged, and my face was hot. The sheets were wet and sticky and clinging to the inside of my thighs, and I was hard again already, or still. I could feel it, a tenting, shameless proof between my legs of everything my brain had just done without me.

A wet dream.

At twenty-six.

About a man.

About that man.

I put both hands over my face and made a noise of pure despair. “No,” I said into my palms, “no, no, no. This isn’t happening, it’s a mistake. It’s the Jäger. It’s a Jäger thing.”

It was not a Jäger thing.

I lay there hating myself, staring up at the ceiling, and I didn’t hear the key card until the lock clicked.

I froze.

I couldn’t get up. I couldn’t get the sheet over my lap fast enough. All I could do was lie there with my face burning, knees drawn up, blanket bunched at my waist, and watch the door swing slowly open.

He was tall and dark, with snow on his shoulders.

He stopped just inside the threshold.

I heard him inhale.

I saw his face change.

Chapter 9

MAKSIM

Let Go

Iknew before the door was open.

I had come up the stairs at a quarter past six with the taste of a long, useless night in my mouth: Tamsin’s office, a bottle I did not finish, an hour on the roof of the Sable in the cold, and two more spent driving in slow circles around the black edges of the city with the radio off. I had come to change my shirt. I had come to be quiet and steady and ordinary, for whatever was left of the morning.

Then the corridor outside 214 filled my head like smoke.

I smelled honey and warm bread, and under it, threaded through it, something else, something dark and sweet and unmistakable, that I had smelled on other men in other centuries and had never once smelled on him.