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Kalon smiled. It was not a nice expression.

“Thinking about it,” he said. Someone behind them laughed nervously. The tension sizzled.

Vale shifted his weight. I knew him well enough to know that meant his hand was inching toward a weapon he was absolutely not supposed to draw in a coffee shop.

“Stand down,” I said.

“Lux,” he murmured, “if this escalates—”

“If it escalates, you grab my mate and walk her into the back,” I said. “You do not start a clan war over a latte.”

The feed glitched. Static. A bright smear of color. For half a second, all I saw was motion and the curve of her neck as she turned toward him, my mark pulsing under my skin.

Then blackout.

I stared at the dead screen.

“Vale.”

“Power fluctuation,” he said immediately. “Shop wards. Not mine. I’ll reestablish the connection when I step back outside.”

“Do it,” I said. My voice came out flat enough he didn’t argue. Static hissed in my ear for a beat, then even that cut. Full disconnect. I sat there with my fingers curled so tightly into my palms that my nails bit into my skin.

Some human’s hand on her shoulder. Kalon leaning in close. The bitch at the counter wishing her culled. Liv taking it all in with that raw, haunted look in her eyes.

I wanted to be there so bad my teeth hurt. Instead, I was locked in my tower watching my life like a badly buffered video.

I dragged in a breath through my nose. Let it out slowly. “Get me information on him,” I said. “The big one behind the bar. Kalon. Full pull. And on whoever the fuck said my mate should be culled.”

“Understood,” Vale said. His voice was a little tighter now. Good. Let him feel some of it.

I cut the line before he could say anything else. I didn’t usually make Vale wear a camera. Audio had always been enough. I didn’t need pictures to run a city. The less I saw, the less anyone could rip out of my head later if they got brave.

Now I saw exactly how much I’d been missing without it.

The way she flinched at the word culled, how her smile had cracked before she shoved it back into place. How she shrank into herself when someone reminded her she was powerless, the way she relaxed when that human touched her. The way Kalon’s entire aura shifted when she told him about her stalker.

I pressed my thumb into the mark at my neck until it hurt.

She had no idea who was watching her. No idea there was a line of teeth between her and the rest of the city now. No idea some overpowered psycho had put a ward on her door and roses on her counter and was now sitting in a skyscraper getting irrationally angry about a human hand on her shoulder.

“The Fates are laughing,” I said to the empty room. Fine. Let them laugh. They’d given me a mate who thought she was useless and put her in a shop with a Deathdrinker and a direct line to Vale. They’d let some nobody demon sneer about culling her where half a dozen witnesses could hear. They’d tangled my life with hers without asking.

I sat there a moment longer watching the feed, watching Liv ring up a customer, watching the Deathdrinker behind the bar keep one eye on the room like he was expecting trouble, watching him lean against the counter and talk like the entire situation earlier had been nothing more than a weird moment in an otherwise normal day.

I pushed back from the desk and stood.

Tonight I would correct several problems.

The first was the obvious one.

Her apartment had no real security.

The ward I’d placed on the door was holding, but wards only worked against the kind of idiots who didn’t know they existed, and New Abaddon was not exactly famous for its abundance of polite criminals.

A few cameras would solve that.

Discreet placement, for her protection.