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Nothing.

Her skin’s damp with exertion, aye, but clean. Not a single drop of blood.

Relief floods through me.

She blinks and takes one breath, her chest rising easily against mine.

"Did we..." She swallows, her voice a scrachy croak. "Did we just lose our security deposit?"

A rough sound tears out of my chest, something between a sob and a laugh.

I pull her against me, burying my face in the crook of her neck, inhaling her clean scent until my head stops spinning. My arms lock around her so tight she wheezes, but I can't bring myself to loosen the grip.

"No, lass," I breathe against her skin. "You didn't break a damn thing. You just claimed the throne. And who are you going to be returning a deposit to? Yourself?"

“Is my throne your face?” she asks weakly. “Because I’m gonna sit on it.”

I burst out laughing, amusement and shock burning through the worry. “That could be arranged.”

She reaches up and taps me on the nose. “It better be.”

“Is this you trying to assert dominance?” I ask, grinning as my heart squeezes. Mine. She’s mine.

“As if,” she says with a snort. “We both know I’m the alpha here.”

Another laugh rolls out of me.

Eternity with this woman suits me just fine.

Thirty-Four

Vivienne

My laugh gets cut off before it even fully leaves my mouth.

The floorboards start shaking. It’s violent, like a subway train rattling the foundations at one of the places I lived when I was barely twenty-one. In the walls, the pipes start banging like someone’s taking a sledgehammer to them.

Clang. Clang. Clank-clank-clank.

Beside me, Lachlan stiffens. His head snaps toward the doorway, his nostrils flaring.

"What is that?" I ask, screwing up my nose. "Did we blow a water main? Because if we have a plumbing emergency on a Sunday, the after hour fees are going to be absurd⁠—"

"Quiet," he murmurs, eyes narrowed.

Then the smell hits the room.

It comes rolling down the hallway in a wave of sewer gas.

Kirk bolts out from under the table, wooden paws skittering frantically against the floor. He plants himself at the doorway, his back arched, his carved tail puffed out like a bottle brush, and lets out a high, metallic shriek that sounds like an angry tea kettle.

“We’re under attack. The fucking House must have been overloaded for a split second and⁠—"

"The tunnels," I interrupt, the bottom dropping out of my stomach. "The ones the bookseller sent our stuff through."

"They didn't hit the front of the house," Lachlan says, hauling me up by the arm as he grabs his massive sword off the mantel. "They went through the city runoff. Bypassed the house wards through the water table."

"Can they do that? That feels like cheating."