Page 48

Right now, Kieran’s been doing what he’s here to do—sparring with the pack’s alpha.

I’m sitting on the porch of the pack house with my crossguard dagger across my knees, tracking the fight through thermal data.

The alpha’s name is Fang. I don’t know if that’s the name he was given at birth, or if he chose it when he took his place as leader of the pack. He’s the largest shifter I’ve ever seen, and he fights with a controlled ferocity that would be impressive against any opponent on the planet.

Against Kieran, he lasts about ninety seconds.

“Again,” Kieran says, and Fang gets up to resume his starting stance. “Three against one this time.”

He rolls his neck once, and the three throwing knives strapped to his forearms unsheathe themselves. They rise into the air behind his left shoulder in a tight formation, points outward, orbiting him in a slow rotation without him showing any visible effort.

Fang and two other wolves charge from three directions. Kieran’s swords handle the alpha while the floating knives engage the flankers, firing outward to redirect charges and slamming handle-first into exposed openings.

For the first minute, the coordination between his hands and the telekinetic blades is seamless.

Then Fang catches one of the knives out of the air.

Kieran’s thermal signature stutters, and the other two knives falter in their orbit before he locks them back into formation. One of the flanking wolves uses that half-second to land a claw strike across Kieran’s forearm. It draws blood, and the crowd of shifter onlookers releases a low, collective rumble.

Kieran’s eyes flick to the blood on his arm, his thermal output jumping three degrees.

He adjusts. His swords come up faster, his footwork sharpens, and the two remaining floating knives move in unpredictable patterns instead of clean geometric arcs. The shift catches both flanking wolves off guard, and within seconds, one of them is on the ground with a knife handle pinned against his sternum.

Fang charges with Kieran’s captured knife in his fist, and Kieran meets him head on, swords crossed. They strain against each other for nearly an entire minute. Then the knife in Fang’s grip is glowing white-gold, the metal sears Fang’s palm so much that I can smell his burning flesh, and he drops it with a snarl.

The knife rises back into the air and returns to Kieran’s orbit as if it never left.

The last flanking wolf goes down three seconds later. Fang follows, and Kieran’s standing in the center of the yard breathing slightly harder than he was before, which is the equivalent of a full cardiovascular workout for anyone else.

His gaze travels around the ring of shifters who were observing the fight, the amber flecks in his eyes glowing brighter than usual.

“Who’s next?” he challenges, the knives around him rising slightly.

None of the wolves step forward.

I don’t blame them. Kieran looks like the statues I’ve seen in textbooks of ancient Greek warriors—except those statues didn’t have tattoos of their kill count running down their ribcage and daggers floating in a steady orbit around them. They definitely didn’t make my heat sensing stutter every time they shifted their weight.

His eyes find mine across the yard, and my crossguard dagger heats in my lap, all three zones spiking simultaneously instead of holding their individual temperatures.

Knives keep orbiting his shoulder. Blood runs down his forearm. The look on his face is the same focus he gives a blade before a killing strike, except it’s aimed at me, and being on the receiving end of Kieran Cross’s full attention while he’s standing in a circle of defeated opponents with blood on his arm and floating knives around his shoulder is an experience I don’t have a clinical category for.

Before I can melt into a puddle on the porch, the air behind me crackles, and the sharp smell of fire cuts through the bayou humidity.

Lenore materializes on the porch with a leather folio pressed against her chest. Her gaze goes to me, then to Kieran.

“I found it,” she says, her fingers tightening on the folio. “Come with me back to the house. We’ll land in the courtyard and go inside from there.”

Kieran sheathes his swords, and the three floating knives snap to his body. He grabs his shirt from the fence post where he hung it earlier and pulls it over his head as he crosses the yard, and I watch the fabric cover the Steel Before Spells tattoo like a… well, like a student with a massive crush on her combat professor.

Except this is more than a crush, right? He feels it too? It’s not just that I’m the only person around, and that⁠—

He reaches the porch, and The 6.1-degree spike in his temperature when his eyes meet mine at close range is the same number as the one from breakfast this morning.

I’m starting to think 6.1 is the specific thermal cost of Kieran Cross looking at me.

But I seriously need to stop. We need to go, and getting lost in Kieran’s amber-flecked eyes isn’t going to help my sense of fire travel direction.

So, I force myself to look away, let my flames rise around me, and picture my destination—the Aldridge manor.