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“Fuck. Taavi.”
“Harder,” he growled out, the fingers of his good hand gripping my hair and his legs pulling my hips into his.
I moaned again, drawing out until the strength of his legs drove me home again as I buried my face in the side of his throat. Spice and musk filled my lungs, electricity ran through my blood, and heat pooled in my groin as I thrust into him again and again, each push driving me closer and closer to the brink.
Beneath me, his back arched, the muscles of his legs tightening and his body clenching around me as he came between us, slippery heat pulsing against my stomach and sending me spiraling over the edge after him, my heart pounding through me as Taavi’s body wrung my release from me.
Taavi’s legs held me against him, so I let my weight settle into his body, turning my head so that my nose pressed against the shaved side of his head. I inhaled, enjoying the scent of his body with just a hint of soapy shampoo. One hand ran up my spine, sending tingles through me, and I shivered a little.
“Cold?” he murmured against my forehead.
“No,” I answered, nuzzling against him. “Just… sensitive.”
He ran his hand down my back again, this time pressing a little harder. “Better?”
“Perfect,” I mumbled.
I wanted to just breathe him in, let my body sink into his until there was no sense of where he ended and I began.
But the real world intervened as I felt Taavi shift under me, a slight hitch in his breath telling me that something was getting pinched, crushed, or was otherwise causing him pain. I pushed myself up, and Taavi let me.
I pressed a kiss to his knee before making my way to the bathroom to clean myself up and bring back a washcloth for Taavi.
Then I climbed back into bed and wrapped myself around him. “Okay?” I asked.
He snuggled into my chest, his braced arm resting on my side as he tucked his face against my neck. “Perfect,” he replied, echoing my earlier answer.
I let out a long breath, cradling his body against mine. The world was going to absolute fucking hell around us, but right now, with Taavi in my arms, I didn’t want a thing to change.
23
I’d successfully gottenan appointment with David Garcia by calling his office at Deepwater Quarry, explaining that I was an investigator working on the death of Vito Landa, and I had a few follow-up questions. I’d very intentionallynotclaimed to be working for the RPD, but I also hadn’tnotsaid so, which was rather more sketchy than I usually liked to be—but I’d reached the fuck-it point on this whole case. I was sick of the Ordo getting away with killing people under the all-but-tacit-authorization of the RPD, I was sick of the Culhua murdering both dogs and canid shifters, and I really wantedsomeoneto be fucking held accountable forsomething, goddamnit.
I hoped that my willingness to make an appointment meant that I would be seen as nonthreatening—generally speaking, if the cops think you’re a perp, they don’t bother calling ahead. So I was crossing my fingers and toes that I might actually get something out of talking to Garcia.
Preferably something that would give me a name of someone in the Ordo.
Let’s be perfectly clear. What I was doing—haring off to meet with a businessman who had ties to a sacrificial cult—was fucking stupid. What was even stupider was the fact that I hadn’t told anybody where I was going, mostly because I knew that Ward would try to talk me out of it and, when that failed, would either magically bind me to a chair or make Doc do it.
What I had done—because while I might be stupid, I’m not completely lacking in brain cells—was set up an automatic email to send to Ward, Doc, Raj, Kurtz, Drew, and Dan if I didn’t come back within four hours. The message I sent to Taavi was different.
I’d felt like an absolute dumbass setting up that email, because either I was going to be in very, very deep shitorI was going to come back after a chat with some businessman and feel all sorts of silly for having been extremely paranoid. I was really hoping for option B.
I parked in an underground ramp, then took the elevator up to the floor listed for Deepwater Hephaestus, trying not to look at myself in the polished brass of the elevator walls. I know it’s been a decade, but I still get a little weirded out at what I look like. Not the body anymore—that I see pretty much all the time. But the face.
Like, IknowI have sharp cheekbones and pointed ears and these big-ass eyes that are an absolutely inhuman shade of lilac… but it still freaks me out every single time.
Yes, every time. I’ve gotten really good at braiding my hair or pulling it back into a ponytail without looking in a mirror.
So I looked up at the ceiling tiles and down at my scuffed dark grey wingtips—fake leather, because I can’t afford the real shit—and the navy blue cuffs of my pants, and everywhere but at myself on the ride up, trying to slow my pounding heart and convince myself that this wasn’t, in fact, going to be the biggest mistake of my life. Or the last.
But I couldn’t just let Garcia, if he was in fact involved with the Culhua, keep on sacrificing canid shifters. We’d failed Hector Dimas. We’d known the Culhua was going to kill another canid shifter, and we’d failed to find them and stop them from ending his life.
Fuck all if I was going to let them do it again.
The next Itzcuintli day was November 20—11 Itzcuintli-Xochitl-Tecpatl. I’d pulled out Taavi’s little chart. Twenty-three days. I didn’t know if anything would happen in twenty-three days—if they would kill a dog or another shifter or if they had finished the cycle for about a year and nothing and no one would die at their hands until next October. But I wasn’t willing to take that chance.
Hell, for all I knew they killed something else on other days—we just hadn’t figured out what.
