Just that easily, after those assholes got their money back, there was never another issue.

With the mafia, with the Reapers, or with my father.

The same father that had never made another appearance in my life, or any of my brothers'.

And I could easily say I hadn’t felt an ounce of guilt over what we’d done on that trip even years later. It also helped that we never did find out what the money had been for. By the end of it all, I didn’t care. At all.

"Ready?" Sonny called out again, tapping the roof of the car with his palm.

"Chill the fuck out," Dex yelled back. Well, their friendship had taken a few months to get back on track but they were fine now.

You know, after they got into a fist fight at Mayhem. And then got into a second fight in Luther’s backyard . Yeah. I missed witnessing both, but I didn’t miss the swollen noses, black eyes and busted lips afterward. Yet I couldn’t help but feel a sense of completion that these two caveman-esque idiots were mine. My proud, loyal morons.

I pulled away from him and slowly turned around, tipping my head back to look at his face. God, he was so good looking. So incredibly perfect. I could see the tip of Uriel's tentacle on one side of his neck, and the multicolored burst of a rainbow on the other side of his neck. The rainbow was my tattoo. The blue dragon Slim had been hounding me about getting for weeks.

Only Dex had beat me to it, weaving my name through the colors in violet, in a way that only Slim was capable of.

My own little blue dragon, a fraction of the size of his, had finally found a home on the inside of my wrist shortly afterward.

Going up to my tippy toes, I kissed the underside of the neatly trimmed beard he'd been growing in over the last few months. "Love you."

That slow, seductive smile crawled over his features. Brilliant and more affectionate than it was possible for me to handle, it sucked the breath out of me. When he palmed my cheeks and kissed each of my cheeks and nose and forehead, slowly like he was savoring the pecks and the contact, I ate it all up. Like always, and just like I always would.

"Fuckin' love you," he breathed against my ear, an arm slinking around my lower back to press us together. "More than anything."

The damn car horn honked, long and low. Friggin' Sonny.

I smiled up at Dex and threaded my fingers through his. "You ready?" I asked him. The question was broad and reached in a dozen different directions.

And he answered the way I knew he would every single time I asked him from them on, the way that told me he would never let me down. That he was an immovable object. That he'd always be there for me to battle the demons we could see and the invisible ones we couldn't. "Iris."

* ~ *

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About the author:

Mariana Zapata lives in Texas with her longtime boyfriend and two oversized children—her beloved Great Danes, Dorian and Kaiser. When she’s not writing, she’s reading, cursing the gym or pretending to write. Or burning experiments in the kitchen.

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