Page 138 of Bitten & Burned
Not to him.
Maybe not to any of them. Not forever. But in this moment, I didn’t feel like a problem to solve. Or a duty. Or a consequence.
I felt… quiet.
And gods, I wanted to stay there.
Just for a little while longer.
Twenty
INTERRUPTIONS
Kravenspire, Sol, Verdune
26 Ebry, Year 810
Three sharp raps.
And then nothing.
“Can we ignore it?” I asked, curling deeper into Dmitri’s side.
“Let’s see,” he said, glancing towards the door expectantly.
The knock came again. Louder this time.
I groaned. “Oh gods, we can’t ignore it.”
“Don’t worry,” Dmitri murmured, stretching. “I’ll get rid of them.”
He rose like a man with no shame and even less urgency, feline and unhurried as he strolled across the room, still fully nude. I sat up, tugging the sheet higher over my chest because I wasn’t nearly as shameless.
Whoever it was, they’d better have a gods-damned good reason for interrupting what had been the most stress-free evening of mylife in ages.
He opened the door mid-knock. Quil stood there, hand half-raised. Vael loomed behind him, arms crossed.
Neither flinched at the sight of Dmitri’s bare skin. Of course not. They’d seen it before. Living together for centuries meant you stopped being scandalized by bodies.
But they both looked past him. Straight at me.
Wrapped in a sheet. Hair tousled. Still in Dmitri’s bed.
Their faces didn’t change much—but they looked.
So that’s why they were here. To apologize. To patch it all up.
Too late.
“Found her,” Quil said.
“Didn’t know I was lost,” I muttered.
He winced. “We’ve been looking for you. We wanted to?—”
“We need to speak with her,” Vael interrupted, voice clipped.
Of course. No apology, then. Just marching orders.
