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I VISITED LILYfor an hour, then stopped by Laurie and Cami’s place to take care of the household chores. Laurie was in the upstairs bedroom, sleeping off what looked like a rough night. I didn’t want to wake her, so I quickly wrapped up the chores and quietly locked up. I finished the rest of the day by getting groceries for the house since I had been gone for three weeks, and met with Joel for a light lunch before I took off again to meet Dorian.

“Are you going to order food?” our waitress asked. She was the same one from the last time we dined, her tone appearing irritated.

“Water and your Cobb salad. No ham please,” I said.

“And I’ll just have a beer, thank you,” Dorian added.

The waitress broke into a satisfied smile and left us to put in our order.

It was nice seeing Dorian again. I missed his company.

“Glad you’re eating this time,” he teased.

“You’re one to talk,” I said. “Howareyou surviving these days without the clan’s supply?”

He looked away as if ashamed to tell me.

“You don’t have to hide anything from me, Dorian; I won’t judge you unless you’re killing people.” I half-smiled, and he didn’t reciprocate.

“Noah, actually.”

My mouth gaped open.

“He’s strong enough to have me drink from him when I need to feed.”

From the first time I met Dorian, he never liked what he was. In the seventeenth century, we didn’t have blood banks like we do today, and no one in their right mind would willingly give vampires their blood. I was too afraid the coven would find out, so I never offered him mine. Which was oddly a good thing because if I did, he would have turned human and wouldn’t be sitting in front of me now. Dorian had to take blood against people’s will back then. Still, he was weirdly polite about it, always apologized, and practically starved himself until he absolutely needed to feed to survive.

After being rescued from Maurice’s clan, and before we went our separate ways, he explained how Maurice would let him drink the drained blood from the victims who were hooked up to the harvesting tank. Maurice would have kicked him out for not blending in with the other clan members, but as a compromise, Dorian offered his services to be one of his bodyguards in exchange for him never having to pierce the skin of another victim. He had also chosen not to own a human or witch and did his best to stay as invisible as possible.

“How does that work, exactly?” I asked, genuinely curious. “Noah isn’t human.”

“On the contrary, Noah’s DNAishuman. He was born a shapeshifter, yes, but when a shifter changes, their DNA changes. As long as I drink from him while he’s in human form, I can survive on his blood,” he explained. Dorian looked at our waitress as she set our drinks on the table.

“Your salad will be right out,” she said, smiling at Dorian. He smirked in her direction but immediately shifted his gaze back to me.

“How are you?” he asked.

His question took me aback.How was I?I didn’t even know how to answer that question without lying or breaking down. I thought after everything I had been through since I found out my purpose here, I would be a lot stronger, but I wasn’t so sure. I’d grown to handlemostthings. Finding out about my father from my past life being alive, Caleb finally letting me go, and now having Dorian back in my life after an entire year, those all had shaken me to my core. Not to mention someone targeting innocents to get to me. It was overwhelming.

“Always fine, Dorian,” I answered flatly.

He narrowed his eyes at me and creased his brows. “Are you?”

“Look, Dorian,” I said, swallowing nervously. There was no way I’d explain to him that though the spell worked a year ago, he still lingered in my thoughts and between my legs whenever I was lonely. “Let’s just stick to business.”

“Business?” he asked in a tone that revealed his confusion with my sudden formality.

I can’t fucking do this.

“I just need to know about Maurice,” I explained as I grabbed my salad bowl from the waitress the second she handed it to me. “Thank you.”

I dug my fork into my lettuce and took a bite as Dorian watched me. “He was last seen on Derby Street. He met with a few of the men I recognize from the old clan.”

“Could you hear anything they were saying? Like, maybe why he’s back in Massachusetts?” I asked after swallowing my bite.

“No, we didn’t want to get too close, just in case they were listening, too.”

I took another bite of my salad as a bell over the restaurant doors chimed behind me. I turned around and spotted Noah walking in, in all his massive, muscular glory. He had a powerful presence about him, that was for certain. Quite a few of the female patrons took notice of him as he walked to our table.

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