The look she gave Ruhn before walking out … It made Hunt glad she wasn’t an acid-spitting viper. The male’s face would have melted.

Gods help them when the prince arrived at the gallery tomorrow.

Bryce’s doorman leapt out of his seat as they walked into the pristine lobby, asking if she was all right, if she’d been in the club. She mumbled that she was fine, and the ursine shifter surveyed Hunt with a predator’s focus. Noticing that look, she waved a hand at him, punching the elevator button, and introduced them. Hunt, this is Marrin; Marrin, this is Hunt; he’s staying with me for the foreseeable future, unfortunately. Then she was padding into the elevator, where she had to lean against the chrome rail along the back, as if she were about to collapse—

Hunt squeezed in as the doors were closing. The box was too small, too tight with his wings, and he kept them close as they shot up to the penthouse—

Bryce’s head sagged, her shoulders curving inward—

Hunt blurted, “Why won’t you make the Drop?”

The elevator doors opened and she slumped against them before she entered the elegant cream-and-cobalt hallway. But she halted at her apartment door. Then turned to him.

“My keys were in my purse.”

Her purse was now in the ruin of the club.

“Does the doorman have a spare?”

She grunted her confirmation, eyeing the elevator as if it were a mountain to climb.

Marrin busted Hunt’s balls for a good minute, checking that Bryce was alive in the hallway, asking into the hall vidcom if she approved—to which he got a thumbs-up.

When Hunt returned, he found her sitting against her door, legs up and spread enough to show a pair of hot-pink underwear. Thankfully, the hall cameras couldn’t see at that angle, but he had no doubt the shifter monitored them as Hunt helped her to her feet and handed her the spare keys.

She slowly slid in the key, then put her palm to the bespelled finger pad beside the door.

“I was waiting,” she murmured as the locks clicked open and the dim apartment lights flickered on. “We were supposed to make the Drop together. We picked two years from now.”

He knew who she meant. The reason why she no longer drank, or danced, or really seemed to live her life. The reason why she must keep that scar on her pretty, sleek thigh. Ogenas and all her sacred Mysteries knew that Hunt had punished himself for a damn long while after the colossal failure that had been the Battle of Mount Hermon. Even while he’d been tortured in the Asteri’s dungeons, he’d punished himself, flaying his own soul in a way no imperial interrogator ever could.

So maybe it was a stupid question, but he asked as they entered the apartment, “Why bother waiting now?”