Page 33

“Fine.” I huff, and I turn away from him, pulling back the covers.

The sheets are cotton, slightly worn, and the mattress is warm from the ambient temperature, which is…

Actually, that’s the problem.

The Aldridge house is an old New Orleans coven house that doesn’t have central air. Normally I’m fine with heat—I’m a fire witch, after all—but the heat emanating from Kieran’s body is enough to make even a fire witch sweat. And I can’t sleep when I’m sweating.

So, I pull my sweater over my head.

The moment it’s off, I see that Kieran’s eyes are open and tracing the line of my shoulders, moving from the curve of my neck down my bare arms like he’s committing the route to memory. His breathing is controlled and measured, but his heat doesn’t lie. Heat is the one data point that can’t be faked, and right now, his data is screaming.

“It’s hot in here,” I explain as I fold the sweater, which takes me three tries, because my fingers aren’t cooperating under the weight of his gaze.

“I noticed,” he says, his voice lower than it was thirty seconds ago.

Forcing myself to look away from him, I place the sweater on the nightstand, situate myself under the covers, and reach for the lamp to click it off.

In the dark, my magic sharpens, compensating for the loss of visual data by amplifying heat signatures until Kieran’s body on the floor is a bright, pulsing outline of gold and white against the cooler blue of the hardwood.

He’s burning hotter than ever. Plus, the sheets are warm. The mattress is warm. And my jeans are trapping heat against my legs in a way that turns the lower half of my body into a contained oven.

I need to take them off. And I need Kieran not to know.

So, underneath the sheets, I unbutton my pants, ease the zipper down one tooth at a time, and slide them down my legs and off my feet. I fold them under the covers—an absurd thing to do, folding pants in bed—and set them on the nightstand with my sweater.

Then I settle back in bed and close my eyes, but my magic keeps scanning.

Kieran’s resting output is holding at 106.3 degrees. It’s elevated for sleep. Elevated for rest. Elevated for a man who just told me to go to sleep and then closed his eyes like it was a switch he could flip.

Stop tracking him. Sleep.

I try to regulate my breathing—four counts in, and seven counts out. It’s a technique Eleanor taught me when I was twelve and couldn’t sleep before exams. I catalogue the ambient sounds: the creak of old wood settling, the distant murmur of the street, and the hum of the protective wards the Aldridges have woven into the walls of this house for generations.

Kieran’s heartbeat is sixty-two beats per minute, which is far too steady for someone who’s asleep.

He’s not sleeping, either.

But I don’t open my eyes. I just lie here, tracking his thermal output in the dark like a research project I can’t put down. The sheet has slipped to my waist, and I’m aware of every inch of my bare skin—my legs, my shoulders, and the strap that’s fallen off one of them.

At some point, the edges of consciousness start to blur. It’s not sleep, exactly, but the gray space before it, where thoughts lose their structure and sensory data softens into white noise.

His heat is at 105.8 now. Dropping. Good. Maybe he’s actually⁠—

The floor creaks, and my eyes snap open. Because Kieran’s thermal signature is no longer horizontal. It’s vertical and moving, over six feet of radiant gold pacing from the window to the door and back in a pattern so precise it could be measured with a metronome. Four strides to the window. Pause. Four strides to the door. Pause. Repeat.

His heat is climbing again, pushing against the walls of this twelve-by-ten room in waves that I can feel on my bare legs under the sheet, each pass of him dragging warmth across my skin like a touch he isn’t taking.

He’ll settle. He’s trained to operate on minimal sleep. He’ll run through whatever checklist is happening in his head and lie back down, and this will be fine.

Instead, there’s a soft scrape of metal, followed by the rhythmic whisper of a whetstone against steel. He’s sitting against the wall by the door with one of his daggers in his hand, sharpening it in the dark.

He keeps going for one minute. Two. Five. Then the pacing resumes. More sharpening. Then pacing again.

I sit up and switch the lamp on.

Light floods the room, and Kieran freezes mid-stride, a dagger in his right hand and the whetstone in his left. His eyes land on me, and his thermal output detonates before he can bank it, a spike so sharp my scanning stutters. He forces it down within a second, his expression smoothing into instructor-neutral, but the residual heat keeps rolling off him in waves.

“You need to sleep,” I say.