Page 58 of A Subtle Scar
“Fuck,” he mumbled.
“Just a tiny little fuck, but yes. I just fucked you in the staircase, and you were so well behaved, doing just what I told you so I could have you the way I wanted to. So well done.”
The kiss I pressed to his slack lips had no fire. It was the first real kiss we had shared, and I would have liked it to be a burning one, but Chandler didn’t need only fire.
With a surety I couldn’t account for I was more confident than before that Chandler needed coddling and cuddling a lot more than he needed to get bent over every available surface so one of us could rail him. I would have to explain this to Hermes in small words, or while I hadhimbent over a surface.
“Fuck,” Chandler said again, and this time, he sounded…half drained, half regretful.
I combed my fingers through his hair and tucked his head under my chin. “I have you, Chandler. I told you I do.”
As if there were a need to prove it, the door behind me opened.
“What in the hell is going on out here? Chandler?”
His name from the necromancer’s lips made Chandler pull away from me, although he did it reluctantly. I could accept that and let him go.
“Nothing’s going on here,” Chandler said, and to his credit he didn’t sound like a man who had just blown his load in a stairwell. I grinned.
“Okay then,” the necromancer said. He sounded not at all like he thought finding me and my boyfriend joined in an embrace was okay. “Should we head to the morgue?” He looked at me. “This one isn’t going to teleport us there, is he?”
“I cannot actually do that,” I said. “But we could all take the bus together.”
Chapter Fifteen
Idecidedthatthereason all of this was happening was pretty clear: vacation time. Julia, the HR enforcer, and her insistence that I take a week off had gotten me into this mess. If she’d sent me to the other side of the country for a case instead, I’d have had to promise Lucifer to stop by a few days later to congratulate Lionel, but no. I’d been made to taketime off. And now, I was behind the wheel of my car, an immortal in the passenger seat, a necromancer in the back, and my dick twitching every time I glanced over to Charon.
In one word, this was not good. It was at least a medium-sized catastrophe, as far as my peace of mind was concerned.
We stopped at a red light, and I glanced over to Charon, opened my mouth. I had to make sure Hermes wasn’t doing anything stupid on my behalf, like scaring away more mail personnel, but confronted with the immortal’s boundless attention, I remained silent.
“Did Detective Rice sign off on this? On outside people—immortals—intervening in the case?” Marc asked from the back. Clearly, he was bitter and projecting. Or just bitter. Poor guy needed to get laid.
“She did, as a matter of fact,” I said.
“We are happy to assist our boyfriend in whatever he may need assisting with. We are happy to swallow any…unusual situation.” Charon lowered his voice for the last bit, and the sneaky fuck was definitely getting me to turn slightly red in the face. I was about as far removed from being a prude as the sun was from the earth, but I drew lines and circles around work life, around club life, around hookup life, around lots of things. My circles and lines didn’t overlap or cross, ever. They stood apart neatly, and that’s how I liked it.
“Oh, referring to yourself in the plural, your majesty? Classy,” Deacon said. I wondered whether he was being as ballsy with Lucifer.
“No, I don’t consider myself any more royal than any other divine creature. Chandler has two boyfriends, Hermes and myself. It’s just that Hermes is out and about, attempting to catch this murdering group of humans while I am seeing to Chandler’s needs.”
“What the fuck?” I said, and pulled over, right next to a laundromat. I turned my full attention to Charon. “Are you serious? What is that idiot thinking?”
For a second, Charon had a wide-eyed bunny look. Or no, a guilty puppy look. It was…very attractive on him. It made me wonder whether he’d look at me like this if I tied him up a little, which was utterly confusing, because while I liked switching, I didn’t play with the same person when I did, and Charon…well, he had sucked me off, and it was still hard to engage the thinking parts of my brain, if only it were a pun.
“Do you not want the human murderer or murderers?” Charon asked.
I took a deep breath. Empathy. I was good with empathy and understanding how other people thought. Shaking Charon wouldn’t get me anywhere. “Yes, we do. But we also want to convict them, and some immortal dragging some person into the station doesn’t exactly help with that. Even if we could get them to talk, any half-decent public defense attorney would get whatever they said thrown out on account of an immortal scaring the pants off them. If Hermes actually finds the individuals responsible for this, dragging them anywhere won’t do any good.”
Charon processed this calmly. Then he said, “We didn’t know that.”
“You could’ve asked,” I said.
He shrugged. “Darling, you snuck out of our hotel room before we had a chance to do anything much. Which is in no way to say you are to blame. This was our way to offer you a surprise that would please you.”
“You…took two immortals to a hotel?” Deacon asked from the back.
This was getting better and better. I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Where is Hermes now?”
