“You’re awake.” Dimitri’s rough murmur comes from behind me—a caress of his breath on the nape of my neck. “You always breathe different when you’re awake.”
I sigh as his hand moves down to the hem of my shirt, wiggling beneath it to rest against my ribs. “It feels late.”
He hums into my skin, fingertips skating over my belly. “Almost dark out. We were fucking beat.”
The police were crawling all over the brownstone for hours after the incident. Dimitri and Tristian had followed Ms. Crane to get checked out at the triage, while Killian dealt with the local authorities. I suspect it was his first flex as King, because when they told him we’d need to find somewhere else to stay for a couple days, he’d flashed them a card and a stiff smile, and then casually ushered me back inside.
‘Beat’ doesn’t even begin to encompass the exhaustion.
“What do you think will happen to her?” I ask, dreading the pause that comes after. I know I shouldn’t care. My mom tormented me for years. She murdered Jack. She wove me into a plot to steal South Side from the men I love, and she hurt them—Killian most of all, but Dimitri and Tristian, too. If things were black and white, I could have let Killian put that bullet into her head.
But they aren’t.
She’s a murderer, but she’s also the woman who used to brush my hair and call me her little storybook. She terrorized me over and over again, but she also sacrificed for me—for my health and safety. Nothing about this is simple or easy.
“I sent the detective the video.” Tristian. He’s on the other side of Killian, reaching over him to feather the tips of his fingers down my closed eyelids. They’re puffy and sore from crying last night, shut up in the downstairs bathroom until I saw the faint shadow of feet beneath the crack of the door.
Killian didn’t ask to be let in. But I did anyway.
Tristian sighs, adding, “That was really smart, you know. Turning on the camera on your dresser?”
I hadn’t known it was my mom at the time. I figured it’d be a Royal woman, or someone from the Hideaway, like Augustine or Lavinia. “It’ll put her away for a long time,” I note, cracking my eyes enough to see Dimitri’s hand moving beneath the fabric of my shirt. After a suspended moment, I bring myself to ask the question that’s filling my head like a rain cloud. “Are you mad that I couldn’t—”
“No.” Killian’s voice rumbles beneath the ear I have pressed to his chest, ringing with finality. “I know how complicated it can be, Story. I could have killed my dad a hundred times, but I didn’t.”
I exhale, finally letting myself look up at them.
Tristian is the first one I see. Even after so many hours of sleep, he still looks sapped, a bruise blooming on his temple. I extend a hand to push my fingers through his hair, straightening it up, but it doesn’t calm this agitated need buzzing in the pit of my chest. This is why I push up, meeting him over Killian’s chest to press a slow, grateful kiss to the bruise. It’s better then, feeling him against me, so warm and alive.
When I turn to look at Killian, I’m relieved to find him mostly uninjured. He has some bruises on his neck, his chest, but his face is perfectly whole, making it easy for me to lean down to brush our mouths together. Killian takes it greedier than Tristian had, tangling his fingers in the back of my hair to hitch me closer, chest vibrating with a ragged, hungry sound.
He doesn’t hold me, though, letting me get an arm beneath me to turn to Dimitri.
My heart twists painfully at the sight of him. His eye is a swollen mass of hurt, and the edge of his jaw has every shade of purple covering it. He took out his piercings last night due to the swelling, so he looks strangely bare, vulnerable. I reach out to touch him, but wince and pull back.
Dimitri stares at me. “That bad, huh?”
Killian glances around my shoulder to say, “You look like you got hit in the face with a dick-shaped hammer.”
“Fuck off.” Dimitri grabs my hip, pulling me flush. “I’ve had worse, baby. Don’t sweat it.”
“It looks painful,” I argue, carefully kissing his jaw.
“Pssh.” He turns to catch my lips with his. “I woke up three hours ago and raided Ms. Crane’s pill stash. I feel like a million bucks.”
I pull back, searching his eyes, and—yeah, now that he mentions it, he is absolutely sporting that lazy, glazed look. Ms. Crane isn’t even here. She’s staying overnight at the hospital for tests, because the hit she took over the head was worrying for someone her age. “She’s probably going to need those, Dimitri.” The chide is half-hearted, but it springs me into action.