He held her stare. “Yes, it is. And you’ll change the enchantments so I can get access—”

She bit into the croissant. “Isn’t it exhausting to be an alphahole all the time? Do you guys have a handbook for it? Maybe secret support groups?”

“An alpha-what?”

“Alphahole. Possessive and aggressive.” She waved a hand at his bare torso. “You know—you males who rip your shirt off at the slightest provocation, who know how to kill people in twenty different ways, who have females falling over themselves to be with you; and when you finally bang one, you go full-on mating-frenzy with her, refusing to let another male look at or talk to her, deciding what and when she needs to eat, what she should wear, when she sees her friends—”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Your favorite hobbies are brooding, fighting, and roaring; you’ve perfected about thirty different types of snarls and growls; you’ve got a cabal of hot friends, and the moment one of you mates, the others fall like dominoes, too, and gods help you when you all start having babies—”

He snatched the croissant out of her hand. That shut her up.

Bryce gaped at him, then at the pastry, and Hunt wondered if she’d bite him as he lifted it to his mouth. Damn, but it was good.

“One,” he told her, yanking over a chair and turning it backward for him to straddle. “The last thing I want to do is fuck you, so we can take the whole Sex, Mating, and Baby option off the table. Two, I don’t have friends, so there sure as fuck will be no couples-retreat lifestyle anytime soon. Three, if we’re complaining about people who are clothing-optional …” He finished the croissant and gave her a pointed look. “I’m not the one who parades around this apartment in a bra and underwear every morning while getting dressed.”

He’d worked hard to forget that particular detail. How after her morning run, she did her hair and makeup in a routine that took her more than an hour from start to finish. Wearing only what seemed to be an extensive, and rather spectacular, assortment of lingerie.

Hunt supposed if he looked the way she did, he’d wear that shit, too.

Bryce only glared at him—his mouth, his hand—and grumbled, “That was my croissant.”

The coffee machine beeped, but he kept his ass planted in the chair. “You’re going to get me a new set of keys. And add me to the enchantments. Because it’s part of my job, and being assertive isn’t the first sign of being an alphahole—it’s a sign of me wanting to make sure you don’t wind up dead.”

“Stop cursing so much. You’re upsetting Syrinx.”

He leaned close enough to note gold flecks in her amber eyes. “You have the dirtiest mouth I’ve ever heard, sweetheart. And from the way you act, I think you might be the alphahole here.”

She hissed.

“See?” he drawled. “What was it you said? An assortment of snarls and growls?” He waved a hand. “Well, there you go.”

She tapped her dusk-sky nails on the glass table. “Don’t ever eat my croissant again. And stop calling me sweetheart.”

Hunt threw her a smirk and rose. “I need to head to the Comitium for my clothes. Where are you going to be?”

Bryce scowled and said nothing.

“The answer,” Hunt went on, “is with me. Anywhere you or I go, we go together from now on. Got it?”

She flipped him off. But she didn’t argue further.

29

Micah Domitus might have been an asshole, but at least he gave his triarii the weekend off—or its equivalent if a particular duty required them to work through it.

Jesiba Roga, no surprise, didn’t seem to believe in weekends. And since Quinlan was expected at work, Hunt had decided they’d hit the barracks at the Comitium during lunch, while most people were distracted.

The thick veils of morning mist hadn’t burned off by the time Hunt trailed Bryce on her way to work. No new updates had been delivered to him on the bombing, and there was no mention of further attacks that matched the kristallos’s usual methods.

But Hunt still kept his focus sharp, assessing every person who passed the redhead below. Most people spotted Syrinx, prancing at the end of his leash, and gave her a healthy berth. Chimeras were volatile pets—prone to small magics and biting. No matter that Syrinx seemed more interested in whatever food he could swindle out of people.

Bryce wore a little black dress today, her makeup more subdued, heavier on the eyes, lighter on the lipstick … Armor, he realized as she and Syrinx wound through other commuters and tourists, dodging cars already honking with impatience at the usual Old Square traffic. The clothes, the hair, the makeup—they were like the leather and steel and guns he donned every morning.

Except he didn’t wear lingerie beneath it.

For whatever reason, he found himself dropping onto the cobblestones behind her. She didn’t so much as flinch, her sky-high black heels unfaltering. Impressive as Hel, for her to walk on the ancient streets without snapping an ankle. Syrinx huffed his greeting and kept trotting, proud as an imperial parade horse. “Your boss ever give you a day off?”

She sipped from the coffee she balanced in her free hand. She drank a surely illegal amount of the stuff throughout the day. Starting with no less than three cups before they’d left the apartment. “I get Sundays off,” she said. Palm fronds hissed in the chill breeze above them. The tan skin of her legs pebbled with the cold. “Many of our clients are busy enough that they can’t come in during the workweek. Saturday is their day of leisure.”

“Do you get holidays off at least?”

“The store is closed on the major ones.” She idly jangled the tri-knot amulet around her neck.

An Archesian charm like that had to cost … Burning Solas, it had to cost a fuck-ton. Hunt thought about the heavy iron door to the archives. Perhaps it hadn’t been put there to keep thieves out … but to keep things in.

He had a feeling she wouldn’t tell him any details about why the art required her to wear such an amulet, so he instead asked, “What’s the deal with you and your cousin?” Who would be arriving at the gallery at some point this morning.

Bryce gently pulled on Syrinx’s leash when he lunged for a squirrel scampering up a palm tree. “Ruhn and I were close for a few years when I was a teenager, and then we had a big fight. I stopped speaking to him after that. And things have been … well, you see how things are now.”

“What’d you fight about?”

The morning mist swirled past as she fell quiet, as if debating what to reveal. She said, “It started off as a fight about his father. What a piece of shit the Autumn King is, and how Ruhn was wrapped around his finger. It devolved into a screaming match about each other’s flaws. I walked out when Ruhn said that I was flirting with his friends like a shameless hussy and to stay away from them.”

Ruhn had said far worse than that, Hunt recalled. At Luna’s Temple, he’d heard Bryce refer to him calling her a half-breed slut. “I’ve always known Danaan was an asshole, but even for him, that’s low.”

“It was,” she admitted softly, “But … honestly, I think he was being protective of me. That’s what the argument was about, really. He was acting like every other domineering Fae asshole out there. And just like my father.”