And when we lay naked on the mats, the smell of sex and sweat in the air, his hand wrapped tightly around mine: I felt the problem of Christy shrink down to a manageable level.

As long as Adam loved me, I was sure I could deal with the worst Christy could throw at us. I pushed aside the nagging thought that the euphoria of Adam’s lovemaking sometimes left me with delusions of invulnerability.

Late that night, long after we’d gone to bed, someone knocked on the front door.

Adam’s arm was heavy across the back of my thigh. Somehow, I’d rolled until I was curled up mostly sideways in the bed. Medea, the cat, lay behind my head, answering my question about why I was in such an odd position. She had a way of shoving me off my pillow while we slept, so she could have the high ground.

Someone knocked again, a polite knock-knock.

I groaned and pushed Medea off my pillow, so I could pull it over my head. Adam stayed relaxed and loose as I wiggled. So did the cat. She didn’t protest, didn’t get up and stalk off. Just kept sleeping where I’d put her.

Knock. Knock.

I stiffened, half lifted myself off the bed, and looked at Adam. Looked at the cat. I shook Adam’s shoulder to no effect: something was keeping him asleep. Since it had taken the cat, too, I assumed it was magic.

I am immune to some magic, and maybe that’s why it wasn’t affecting me, but that persistent knock—

Knock. Knock.

—that was the one, made me think that perhaps my exclusion had been deliberate. Someone wanted to talk to me alone. Or do something to me when I didn’t have Adam to back me up.

I rolled off the bed and grabbed my Sig Sauer out of the drawer in the nightstand, dropped the magazine with silver bullets, and replaced it with copper-jacketed hollow points. No werewolf I knew had the magic to keep an Alpha of Adam’s caliber sleeping this deeply. That meant fae or witchcraft, and both of them could be killed by a regular bullet. I was pretty sure. Witches I was certain of—as long as it wasn’t Elizaveta—but the fae were tricky.

The hollow points would do more damage than silver bullets to any of them, anyway. Silver was too hard to be good ammunition. And armed was better than unarmed when facing an unknown enemy.

I looked in on Jesse on my way to the front door. She was sleeping on her back, her arms wrapped over her head, snoring lightly. Safe enough, for now.

Knock. Knock.