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We stayed standing like that, inches from one another, my heart in my throat, my panties damp with desire.

Who would it hurt? I asked myself.

A kiss?

Maybe a fuck against a headstone. My hands on the cool stone, Dante clutching my hips, plunging into me with wild abandon.

“Hadley?”

I jolted, looking around Dante to where Colton was standing. He wasn’t in uniform, but he was holding a gun. Pointed at us.

Well, Dante, if you wanted to get technical. But Dante and I were standing close. Our mouths were almost touching.

I leaned back, realizing how close my desire had made me to losing all sense.

“Fuck,” I muttered under my breath. How did my life get more complicated by the second?

“What are you doing here?” I aimed my question in Colton’s direction. I had not forgotten I’d kissed him too. I’d been avoiding him for that very reason.

What a fucking shitshow.

Colton kept my gaze. “Got a call from a resident, about screaming coming from the cemetery. Then gunshots.”

Someone was an insomniac, nosy, and a snitch. Just my luck.

“What the fuck?” He shook his head, gun still drawn, eyes wide as he took in the scene.

I didn’t blame him. He was staring at what looked like a homicide. Upon first glance, the corpse of the ghoul did look almost human. Because it was a human. A while ago. But it was dark enough to obscure the decaying flesh from Colton’s point of view. And I was still holding a gun that obviously had killed it.

Dante was just standing there, not holding a weapon or covered in blood, but he had a way of looking plenty guilty simply by existing.

“Colton.” I took a step toward him.

He aimed his gun in my direction. He didn’t exactly point it at me, but he didn’t not point it at me either. “Do not fucking move.” His gaze shifted to Dante. “Neither of you.” I could see his mind whirling, no panic on his face, he was too much of a cop for that, but he was plenty confused. Maybe freaked out. Just a little. Who could blame him? “What happened here?”

I chewed my lip. I’d talked my way out of plenty of hairy situations, even a couple when I was covered in blood and holding the murder weapon. If I couldn’t talk my way out of those situations, violence was usually my best bet. Assaulting a police officer came as part and parcel with the job.

It was too complicated otherwise. If you tried to tell them the whole spiel, monsters being real, me hunting them, etcetera, etcetera, it caused most of them to reevaluate their entire lives, questioning the way they looked at the world and everything they believed in.

People didn’t love doing that. And most of those people pushed back against the truth. Pushing back being calling me crazy and trying to arrest me. It was a difficult concept to grasp, I got it. It was too much to comprehend and much safer to stay in the bubble where monsters existed only in movies and you grew out of being scared of the things that went bump in the night.

In my career, only one cop had been able to swallow the truth I gave her and actually believe me. She was a woman. Of course. Women had to be more malleable about the way they moved in the world and the way they saw it. It was a survival instinct.

She was my one ally in law enforcement, yet she was only a local sheriff in a bumfuck town in Missouri, so she couldn’t do a whole bunch. Believing me went a long way, though. She kept an eye out for strange things happening in her town and beyond, knew how to deal with basic shit herself, and called me or Donny if she needed backup.

From what I understood, there were a decent number of civilians out there like her. Willing to believe, to join the fight, help keep the secret. Some even in the higher echelons. But that’s when the truth got murky. About whether those in power knew about monsters and did nothing to help the public, or worse, the people in power were monsters too.

I tried not to think about big picture shit too much. Staying alive day to day and out of the loony bin was my main agenda.

Facing off with Colton like this was complicated, though. I couldn’t go with my go-to and rush him, knocking him out then boosting it out of town. He knew who I was, would likely try his hardest to find me, and it would make things even more complex.

That and I was close. So fucking close I could feel it. Even though everything felt tangled and confusing and dangerous, I knew if I kept digging, I’d get there. I was not leaving until I got this fucking wolf.

Which left me with an almost impossible option… Tell the truth.

“We should kill him,” Dante uttered conversationally, unaware of everything going on in my brain.

Now the gun pointed in his direction, Colton’s eyes wide, confused, betrayed.