Warmth emanated outward from Memory’s heart. A different guilt cut at her—that she should feel such happiness while Yuri lay dying and Abbot was in surgery, but Yuri himself had told her to embrace life. Freedom is a gift, he’d said to her late one evening. Never take it for granted. Never waste it. Live.

Alexei took a step back and held out his hand. Swallowing the worry lodged in her throat, Memory held her friend’s words close as she accepted the invitation. She and Alexei had only gone a few steps when someone whistled from across the street. “How’d you get such a pretty date, wolf?” a male voice heckled. “Bet you had to wear a cat suit!”

“Go drown in catnip, you flea-infested rug!” Alexei aimed a rude gesture at the other side of the street.

When Memory tried to twist around to see the man who’d started the small fight, Alexei tugged at her hand. “Don’t encourage them,” he grumbled. “Cats think they’re the Casanovas of the world, can prowl their way into any bed.”

“I prefer wolves.”

A slow smile curving his lips, Alexei broke their handclasp to sling his arm around her shoulders, tugging her against the steely heat of his body. “Is that your stomach? Hungry?”

Memory nodded and thus began the most delicious night of her life. She ate everything that looked interesting or smelled good, until she was full to bursting. Then she had sticky, sugary rice-flour sweets that made her moan, and topped it all off with a vanilla milkshake doctored with crushed-up cookies.

“My people are deranged,” she said.

Alexei raised an eyebrow at his E, even as he kept his body between her and the others on the street. They’d made their way back to Chinatown and to the festival, which showed no signs of winding down, hordes of excited human and nonpredatory changeling cruise passengers in unseasonal Hawaiian shirts and sundresses mixing with the locals. “Deranged?”

Memory held up her half-finished milkshake. “We gave this up for nutrient drinks.” Shaking her head, she took another sip. “Deranged.”

Alexei laughed, delighted with her. Memory saw everything through new eyes, made him feel young, too. He was ready to buy her the world—and especially food, but he hadn’t forgotten her fear of being in “debt.” So he’d channeled his protective instincts in another way.

Before hitting the stalls, he’d taken her to a twenty-four-hour automated bank and shown her how to access her Collective-linked account using her palm print. “SnowDancer had that in the system from when I granted you access to the substation. We sent it through to the Collective to fast-track your account. If you want, you can ask their finance person to add an iris scan for greater security.”

Since she’d left her phone in the compound and didn’t have a watch capable of storing financial data, he’d then walked her through how to load money onto a temporary card. Her resulting pleasure in being able to buy him food had melted more hard places in his heart.

He was in a fucking huge amount of trouble—and he didn’t care. Not tonight.

When Memory tugged him into a girly and overstuffed trinket shop he’d usually avoid like the plague, he threatened mutiny—but they both knew he was only playing. Tonight, he was Memory’s.

She came out of the shop with a pair of earrings in the shape of paper parasols. “I need to get my ears pierced like the girl who sold me these.”

Alexei pointed to a sign for an all-night drugstore. “Might find a clerk trained in ear piercing there.” He frowned. “But how about we put off making holes in your body until—”

But Memory was already laughing and tugging him across the street.

Five minutes later, he folded his arms and told himself not to strangle the slender male who was about to hurt Memory.

“Go glare at something else in the store,” Memory ordered with a glare of her own. “Do you want his hand to shake?”

Growling, Alexei turned on his heel and stood by the door.

“Thanks,” the clerk whispered. “I hate it when the dominants come in with their mates or cubs. Half the time I think they want to take the piercing tool and pop a hole between my eyes.”

“Trust me, he’s all growl and only small bites.”

“Um, sure,” the clerk responded dubiously, which pleased Alexei’s wolf and confirmed the clerk was in possession of his brain cells. Alexei would have to talk to his E about convincing people that he wasn’t scary. A man had a reputation to protect.

His muscles locked when she hissed twice.

“Alexei, it’s over,” she called out a second later.

He turned to see her sliding in the earrings while admiring herself in the mirror. Then she looked at him with a huge smile. Walking over, she rose on tiptoe to kiss a line along his jaw. “Thank you for not eating the clerk.”

And his heart, it fell.

Hard.

* * *

• • •

ALEXEI didn’t want this night out of time to end. As long as it didn’t, he could ignore the voices yelling at the back of his head, the ones that reminded him of finding Etta’s torn-apart body. She’d been so slender, so broken. But even magical nights didn’t last forever. Daylight would come all too soon, and with it the history that haunted him.

Reaching his vehicle—still parked down the street from Vashti’s home—he pressed Memory against it and nuzzled the side of her face, taking just another second, just another taste.

She curled her entire body into him. “That feels so good.”

A strange ache in her voice made him raise his head, focus on her face.

The searing hunger in her eyes punched him in the gut.

“You’re touch-starved,” he gritted out, furious with himself for not having caught it earlier. He’d thought she was skittish, getting used to people, hadn’t wanted to overwhelm her.

“It’s better now.” She continued to pet his chest. “My skin used to hurt like tiny things were cutting me, but it hardly does that these days.”

Alexei wanted to yell at her for not telling him of her hurt, barely managed to contain the urge—and was glad he had when she whispered, “I didn’t know.” Eyes going obsidian with shimmers of a dark rainbow, lovely and unique. “I thought that was just the way everyone was, with that need inside them.”

Alexei’s wolf stood motionless, its anger no match for its protectiveness. For fifteen long years, his E’d had no one to ask such private questions. No one she trusted enough to reveal her pain. “Jump in the Jeep,” he said, and because his voice came out harsh, he brushed his lips against hers so she’d know he wasn’t mad at her.

She twisted her lips, her hands fisting on his sweater. “I suppose we have to go home.”

“Not just yet.” Alexei tugged a wayward curl, and the way her face lit up, it made him feel like a fucking god. “Let’s go make a little trouble.”

Memory pointed out myriad beauties of life as he drove: the carpet of stars in the ebony sky, the way the waters of the Bay gleamed like black opals under the moonlight, the glowing windows of homes where families slept safe and warm.

“Will you take me out at night again?” she asked partway through their journey. “I always dreamed about the sun, but I never realized the loveliness of the moonlight.”

“I’m a wolf.” He threw in a growl because his wolf wanted to be part of the conversation. “Howling up at the moon is a favorite leisure activity.”

Memory laughed and, throwing back her head, tried to howl. Shoulders shaking, he gave her pointers on a better technique and was grinning hard enough to crack his face by the time she collapsed into giggles.

He brought the Jeep to a stop in an isolated spot that should guarantee them privacy. It was too deep inside DarkRiver territory to be on any patrol routes, and even if a cat was prowling around nearby, Alexei’s scent was familiar enough that said cat would turn right around and go in another direction.

Wolves and leopards might not be natural allies, but in certain things they agreed. Intimate skin privileges were a private thing, not to be disturbed.

“It’s so still, so quiet.” Memory leaned forward to look out the windscreen. “I can’t see the moon, but the world’s all silver outside.”

A wind rustled the tree leaves at that instant, and he knew it had come from the mountains, would hold the kiss of the ice and the snow. Memory felt the cold. That decided him: playtime in the forest could wait for another day.

“Backseat,” he said, and when she frowned at him in an unspoken question, Alexei realized that he was leading his sweet E astray.

He smiled at her. “Please.”

Eyes narrowing in suspicion, she nonetheless did as he’d asked, crawling back there between the seats. He came around the outside. After pulling the back driver’s-side door shut behind himself, he put his hands on the bottom of his sweater to pull it off over his head. His T-shirt was next. Memory’s sucked-in breath was loud in the confines of the car, but when he threw aside the tee and looked at her, it was to see her shrugging off his jacket, her gaze locked on his chest.

A slow smile creeping across his face, Alexei leaned close . . . and growled at her.

“Don’t you growl at me,” she said, but she was laughing.

He pretended to bite at her while she finished ridding herself of his jacket. He was aware he was crowding her, and was ready to pull back at the first sign of distress, but Memory seemed to soak in his closeness.

Jacket off, she put her hands on his chest, stroking the fine pelt there. “You have fur,” she said, her teeth sinking into her lower lip as her fingers curled into him.

It was actually just a very fine layer of chest hair, but if Memory wanted to pet his fur, he wasn’t going to complain. He wasn’t a stupid wolf. Crowded up against a corner of the backseat, she let him pull one of her legs over his hip, then took her time learning the shape of his shoulders and chest. “Control” had long been Alexei’s watch word, but he’d never been petted with such unabashed delight in his life.