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“Icarus.”
Adam’s sharp bark of laughter was enough to break the mantel’s hold over him. He turned and focused all his attention on the bare-chested Devil moving around the kitchen, a towel around his neck, another around his injured arm. Icarus was tempted to see color again but resisted the urge, already too shaken by the emotional tides of this place.
“Okay, not really.” He stood on the other side of the island from Adam. “But let’s just say I have a way of fucking up and getting myself into shit. Family nicknamed me Icarus.”
“King of crash and burn?”
“All my life, until I became a courtesan, but by then, the name had stuck.”
Adam pulled a bottle of vodka out of the freezer and two shot glasses from a cabinet. “Your family back in Portola?”
Icarus diverted his gaze. Talk about a fuckup. “Your name?” he asked, diverting attention from himself to a question he wasn’t supposed to know the answer to.
“Adam.” He nudged the med kit toward Icarus. “Could use that help now.” Not waiting for a reply, he carried the vodka and glasses with him down the hallway.
Med kit in hand, Icarus followed the man supposedly called “Adam” to the bathroom at the end of the hall. He peeked into the bedroom on his way there—a lonely bare room with a cot, several books on the floor, and a single chest of drawers. There was another room to the right of the bathroom, but its door was closed. Judging by the lack of scuffs and the layer of dust on the floor beneath the door, it had been that way for a while, no traffic over its threshold.
“In here,” Adam called.
Icarus shook off the melancholy he’d gotten mired in again and squeezed into the bathroom. The room was too small for two men their size, but Adam didn’t give him a choice, sitting on the closed toilet and sliding the med kit from his hands. He opened it and unpacked items onto the ledge of the tub—a tube of antiseptic skin glue, a strip of butterfly bandages, and a large square of gauze. “Why did you follow me tonight?”
Icarus rolled off his gauntlets, shoved them into his coat pocket, and washed his hands in the sink. “To finish what we started.”
“We didn’t start anything.”
“You wanted to.”
Adam bobbled the vodka bottle he’d picked up, spilling a little over the side of the shot glass he’d filled for Icarus.
Icarus didn’t call him on it, just accepted the shot, clinked the glass against Adam’s, and tossed the alcohol back, confirming his senses were as dulled as he could make them. He set the glass aside next to Adam’s empty one, then stepped between his spread knees and unknotted the makeshift tourniquet around his outer shoulder. His skin was warm, as if it burned from the inside, and the muscles under the skin were lithe and strong. Icarus removed the hastily slapped-on bandage, and dark liquid welled in the open cut, a metallic tang teasing the edges of his senses.
His fangs threatened.
Until Adam loosened the knot of his trench, pushed aside the coat’s lapels, and ran a callused hand up the back of Icarus’s thigh, under the lace strap of his dangling garter.
Instincts rushed in a different direction, arousal overriding the urge to bite, giving Icarus just enough headspace to treat the wound on Adam’s arm quickly and efficiently.
“You’re good at that,” Adam said, voice low and rough.
“I was going to be a nurse.”
“You still could be.”
Icarus didn’t answer, didn’t breathe for what would be a minute too long for a human. If he did, it would be the last minute the not-quite-a-human in front of him lived. And that was the last thing Icarus wanted right then.
He finished patching the cut, tossed the capped tube back on the ledge, and snagged the matches from the windowsill above the toilet. He struck one and dropped it into the sink, the used bandage and towel catching fire. Standard operating procedure for erased persons.
Smoke filled the air, and Icarus could breathe again. He blinked and saw the world in color once more, just in time as Adam tipped forward, resting against him and exhaling a heavy breath. He inched his hand higher, rough fingertips brushing the curve of Icarus’s ass.
Icarus gasped, in pleasure and desire, in chest-aching hope that he could give the same to the man nuzzling the bottom edge of his corset. He threaded his fingers through the strands of Adam’s dark hair—coarse, uneven, self-cut. Icarus could happily run his hands through it all night. “What do you want?” His own voice was raspy, naturally so, not a performance.
Palming his ass, Adam nudged him closer, and his lips skirted the edge of the garter, his hot breath skating through the dips and valleys of Icarus’s groin like the fog through the Gap.
Making Icarus hard, the evidence right in Adam’s face.
Similar evidence making itself known behind the fly of Adam’s jeans.
“What do you need?” Icarus urged.
