“You have pretty teeth.”

“Thank you.”

Bitty’s eyes returned to the cardboard box. “So she’s really in there.”

“Her remains are.”

“What happens if I don’t bury her right now? Does she . . . is that wrong? Is it bad?”

Mary shook her head. “There’s no rush. Not that I’m aware of, at least. I can double-check with Marissa, though. She knows all your traditions inside and out.”

“I just don’t want to do anything wrong. I guess . . . I’m responsible for her now, you know. I want to do the right thing.”

“I totally understand that.”

“What do humans do with their dead?”

“We put them in the earth—or at least, that’s one option. That’s what I did with my mom. I had her cremated and then buried.”

“Like mine.”

Mary nodded. “Like yours.”

There was a pause and she stayed quiet so that Bitty had the space to feel whatever she was feeling. In the silence, Mary took a good look at the girl, noting the reed-thin arms and legs, the tiny body beneath the layers.

“Where did you put her in the ground?” Bitty asked.

“In a cemetery. Across town.”

“What’s a cemetery?”

“It’s a place where humans bury their dead and mark the graves with headstones so that you know where yours are. From time to time, I go back and put flowers by her site.”

Bitty tilted her head and frowned a little. After a moment, she asked, “Will you show me?”

“I did not expect your call.”

As Assail spoke, he pivoted around and smiled at Naasha. “Not so soon, at any rate.”

This eve, Naasha had chosen to receive him at her hellren’s abode in a dark and dramatic study full of leather-bound volumes and furniture that reminded him of humans’ private gentlemen’s clubs. Tonight, and she had dressed herself again in red, perhaps to match the velvet curtains that hung down like arteries from the ceiling—or perhaps because she believed he enjoyed her in the color.

“I found myself bereft of your company.” As she spoke, she enunciated the words with deliberation, her glossy lips pursing and releasing the syllables as if she were giving them a blow job. “I could not sleep this day.”

“From checking on your mate’s health through the hours of sunlight, no doubt.”

“No. From aching.” She came forward, crossing the thick red carpeting without making a sound. “For you. I am starved.”

When she stopped in front of him, he smiled coldly. “Are you now.”

She reached out and stroked his cheek. “You are quite an extraordinary male.”

“Yes, I know.” He removed her touch, but kept hold of her wrist. “What is curious to me is why my absence is so troubling, considering that you already have a cock under this roof.”

“My hellren is infirmed, if you recall,” she said in a remote tone. As if he were the last thing on earth she wished to speak of.

“It was Throe to whom I referred.” Assail smiled again and began to rub his thumb o’er her flesh. “I beg of you, what is your relation to him?”

“He is of distant blood to my mate.”

“So you have taken him in out of charity.”

“As is proper to do.”

Assail put his arm around her waist and drew her to his body. “You are not very proper sometimes, are you.”

“No,” she purred. “Does that turn you on?”

“It certainly turned you on two eves ago. You enjoyed my cousins very much.”

“And yet you did not participate.”

“I wasn’t in the mood.”

“Tonight?”

He made a show of looking over her face. Then he stroked her long hair back, moving it over her shoulders. “Mayhap.”

“And what would it take for you to get in the mood.”

As she arched her body against his, he pretended to find her captivating, closing his eyes and biting his lower lip. In truth? He might as well have been stropped by a dog.

“Where is Throe?” he asked.

“Jealous?”

“Of course. In fact, I am consumed.”

“You lie.”

“Always.” He smiled and bent to her mouth, running one of his fangs across her bottom lip. “Where is he?”

“Why do you care?”

“I like threesomes.”

The laugh she let out was husky and full of a promise he had no interest in. What he did care about was getting back down into that basement of hers—and that would be literally, not figuratively. Although if he had to fuck her to get there, he would.

She had clearly not wanted him to explore the other evening. And that made him wonder if she hadn’t something to hide.

“Alas, Throe is not in this evening.” She turned about in Assail’s arms and drove her ass into his pelvis. “I am by myself.”

“Where has he gone?”

She glanced over her shoulder, a sharp look in her eyes. “Why e’er do you focus on him so?”

“I have appetites that you cannot service, my dear. Much as your wares appeal.”

“Then mayhap you shall call your cousins in?” She resumed rubbing herself against him. “I should like to welcome them again.”

“I do not fornicate with my blood relations. However, if you should like to?”

“They do have a way of filling a female up. And mayhap I am too much for you to handle alone.”

Doubt it, he thought. But his cousins herein was a good idea.

Keeping an arm around her, Assail spun her back to face him, took his phone out, and a split second later, a discreet chiming sound from the front of the mansion was heard on the far side of the closed study doors.

“Ask and you shall receive,” he murmured as he kissed her hard and then disengaged her from him, giving her a push toward the exit. “Answer that yourself. Welcome them properly.”

She hurried off with a giggle, as if she liked being told what to do—and God, he couldn’t help but think of Marisol. If he had ordered his lovely cat burglar around like that? She would have castrated him and worn his balls for earrings.

A burning in the center of his chest made him reach for the vial of coke in the inner pocket of his Brioni suit jacket, but it wasn’t actually his addiction calling his hand to home for once.

The extra dose made his head hum, but that was going to work for him.

He had a lot of ground to cover tonight.

“Okay, where are you, where are you . . .”

As Jo drove ever deeper into Caldwell’s main, mostly failing, industrial park, she leaned into her VW’s windshield and wiped the sleeve of her jacket on the glass to clear the condensation. She could have cranked on the defroster—except the damn thing wasn’t working.

“I need another month before I can pay for that,” she muttered. “Until then, I’m not going to breathe.”

As she thought about Bill confronting her on her parents’ wealth, she had to laugh. Yes, it was true that principled stances were laudable. They rarely paid the bills, however—or fixed broken blowers that smelled like an electrical fire when you turned them on.

You did tend to sleep better at night, though.

When her phone started ringing, she grabbed for it, checked the screen, and tossed the thing back to the seat. She had other stuff to worry about other than Bryant’s after-hours demands. Besides, she had left his dry cleaning right where he’d told her to, on the front porch of his condo.

“Okay, here we are.”

As her headlights illuminated a flat-roofed, one-story building that was long as a city block and paneled in gray metal siding, she entered its empty parking lot and continued down toward its unadorned entrance. When she pulled up to the glass doors and the sign that had the name of the factory blackened out with layers of spray paint, she hit the brakes, killed the engine and got out.

There was yellow police tape in a circle all around, the fragile barrier whistling in the wind . . . a seal plastered on the door crack with the words CRIME SCENE in big letters on it . . . and evidence of a lot of foot traffic having been in and out, a path carved in the leaves and debris by shuffling feet and equipment that had been rolled or dragged along the ground.