If Malachi wasn’t quite healed yet from the mental anguish of the battle in Vienna, someday he knew he would be.

His mate—his wife—had told him so.

She spun as if she’d known he was thinking about her and captured the smile he couldn’t hold back.

“Gotcha, handsome.”

HE rolled her to her back and moved down the bed.

“Yes,” she panted.

“Yes?”

“Mmmm.” Ava arched back, unable to say another word because the thing Malachi was doing should have been illegal. It probably was illegal in some countries.

He smiled against the inside of her thigh. “You have to be quiet.”

“When you say you want to take a break from work, you really mean a break.”

“I was feeling tense.”

“Oh yeah? How’s that going?”

“Better.” Malachi’s tongue circled her belly button and she groaned. “Much better now.”

“I live to help work out your tension.”

“Such a supportive mate.”

He laughed quietly and bit her thigh before he lowered his head again. Then his arm wrapped around her leg and his hand pressed down on her belly and Ava wanted to move, but she couldn’t and he—

The door crashed open. “Malachi, did you borrow the—Gabriel’s bloody fist!”

Ava screamed, and Rhys spun around to face the open doorway as Malachi roared and came off the bed, throwing a blanket over Ava’s body as she curled into a ball.

“What are you doing?” he shouted.

“Haven’t you heard of locks? Locks, Malachi!”

“Try knocking, you bloody—”

“Get out of our room and close the door!” Ava yelled.

Malachi shoved his brother out of the room and slammed the door shut. Then he locked it and leaned against it for good measure.

She pulled the covers over her head again and tried to get the image of Rhys’s face out of her mind. She pulled a pillow over her head too. It didn’t help much.

Malachi sat on the edge of the bed. “I’m sorry.”

She burst from under the covers and battered him with the pillow. “You. Forgot. To. Lock. The. Door!”

“I’m sorry!” She could tell he was trying not to laugh. “I’m so sorry. I was just… distracted. And there were a couple hundred years when privacy wasn’t an issue.”

She fell back on the bed and covered herself with the blanket again. “I live in a supernatural fraternity house.”

“It’s not that bad.” He peeled the covers away and spooned her from behind. Ava tried to hide her head under a pillow, but he stole it. “Canım?”

“What?”

He kissed the back of her neck. “Does this mean you don’t want to—”

“Go back to work before I stun you.”

Chapter Thirty-one

Germany

HE WOKE WITH A START, the face of the child in the front of his mind. He sat up and put his head in his hands. This time when Malachi had caught the small body, the boy hadn’t dissolved. Instead, his eyes had opened and he’d lunged toward Ava, leaping on her and tearing into her throat before Malachi could catch him.

“Babe?” her sleepy voice asked at his side.

“I’m fine.”

“Come here.”

“I’m fine.”

“Come here anyway.”

He lay down next to her and gathered her into his arms.

Maybe it was the winter wind that echoed outside the house, reminding him how it had shrieked through the Stephansplatz. Maybe it was the way the snow fell outside. He hadn’t had a dream of the boy in months.

“Kiss me,” she whispered.

“Canım—”

“It’ll make the bad dreams go away. Promise.”

Ava smiled up at him, so he kissed her, sinking into her mouth in relief.

She was here. She was alive. No one was after her, and Volund was gone.

His hands ran down her sides, cupping her hips as he brought her closer. And while the cold waves crashed outside, he made love to her. Long and slow with deliberate strokes that drew her pleasure out and forced his mind back to the beauty that was Ava and their union.

“I love you,” she gasped as she came. “I love you so much.”

Her mating marks shone on her skin and he read the words he’d written there.

I am for Ava.

Not for nightmares and death. Not for guilt and recrimination.

“For you,” he said into her mouth. “I love you.”

She held him after the pleasure wracked his body. Wrapped her arms around him and held on.

For Ava.

He was for Ava.

Chapter Thirty-two

“YOU’RE BETTER,” AVA SAID, smiling at her grandmother.

The woman looked more like her sister than her grandmother. The staff didn’t ask questions, but she could see their inquisitive looks.

“A little more every day,” Maheen said.

She’d asked Ava to call her by her new name the first time she’d visited after Jaron’s death.

Why Maheen?

Someone called me that once. I liked it.

Ava didn’t ask more. If her grandmother had chosen a new name for a new life, it was more than understandable.

She still lived in the hospital. Ava guessed she would live there for some time.

“You don’t look like me,” Maheen said.

“No. The eyes. I think that’s the only thing.”

“Grigora are more beautiful than human women,” she said, her eyes drifting. “It’s good you look human.”

Maheen was not an easy person to talk with. Brittle pain leached into the air around her, though Ava could occasionally see echoes of the woman she might have been before her rape and binding to Volund. She hated Malachi’s presence, and it had taken more than a little persuading to let her visit Maheen alone.

Malachi didn’t trust her. Neither, if Ava were completely honest, did she.

The hospital said she hadn’t been violent since the night almost a year ago when she’d started screaming and collapsed. She’d beaten her hands so badly they’d required surgery. She still struggled to hold one of the paintbrushes she was now allowed, but she was healing.

Ava hoped it was more than her hands.

“Is the scribe with you?” she asked.

“Yep. Waiting in the living room downstairs.”

She nodded, rocking back and forth a little in her seat.

“He won’t come up.”

“They were the monsters in the night, you know?”

“Who?”

“Irin scribes. My brothers would tell me stories. If I saw one in the market, I had to run. They never let me go anywhere alone.” She laughed. “Except…”

Ava waited for a long while, but Maheen had drifted again. It was a pretty common occurrence.

“Grandmother?”

“You shouldn’t call me that.” Her head jerked toward the door. “You know they watch me.”

Did they? Ava made a mental note to check. She couldn’t see any cameras, but you never knew. Maheen was highly paranoid.

“Is he here again?” Maheen asked. “Did you bring him?”

“Jasper?” Ava hesitated to say. Maheen had refused to see Jasper the other two times they’d brought him. Ava kept convincing her father to give his mother another chance, but she could see him spiral each time his mother rejected his attempts to speak with her. According to Maheen’s doctor, Jasper paid the bills, but he hadn’t visited since Ava—Maheen had attacked him three years before.

“Yeah,” Ava finally said. “He… He’s waiting with Malachi. If you want—”

“Not today.”

Not today.

Not no. Not never.

Not today. Which, in Ava’s mind, meant there was still hope. Maybe it was a small hope, but that was better than nothing.