“He’ll call—doesn’t he always?” Ellian leaned against the check-out counter, hands curled over the top of her latest book of historical werewolf lore, which she claimed was for a magazine article she was writing, but which Mallory thought was really for herself. She had the brown eyes and rugged scent of a wolf, and if werewolves were as real as his father said, Ellian would be one.

Not that Mallory could ask her. Humans weren’t supposed to know about magic, and they sure as hell shouldn’t be able to smell it.

“The guy is clockwork reliable. That’s insane! I was lucky if my ex remembered our wedding anniversary, and here Alex is already sending you flowers!” The arrangement of which she spoke—daisies, ferns, and sprigs of baby’s breath scattered like dew over it all—had sat fresh in a vase on one end of the check-out counter since its delivery that morning. For a moment, her eyes softened, and Mallory thought she’d reach out and touch one of the blooms. But she didn’t—just pulled her hand back like she’d planned to smooth down her ponytailed brown hair, then looked back at Mallory and grinned. “He’ll call.”

Mallory flushed. “Yeah.” Six months of being treated like more than a good fuck, like he was worthy of that. Thomas had been telling him that for years, but one’s dad saying so never counts. But then Alex came along, and even with the strangeness in their relationship, and his fear that the bottom would drop out, Mallory couldn’t help the happiness that welled up in him whenever he thought of his lover. “Yeah,” he said again. “I guess you’re right.”

“Of course I’m right,” Ellian said, putting a hand on her hip and picking up her purchase with the other. “I’ll be by in two days to get the one coming in, okay? What day is that, Thursday? Friday?”

Mallory rolled his eyes and got out a scrap piece of paper to write down when she’d be in. “I cannot believe you journal every day, yet don’t know what day it is.”

“I’m a writer—we’re scatterbrained,” she snapped. “See you whenever that is.”

“It’s Saturday,” Mallory called, half laughing, as she stuck her tongue out at him and strode out of the shop. Ellian dressed like a fashion plate librarian, smelled like a wolf, claimed men were fickle and immature … and then did things like that. She was his favorite regular.

She was also the last customer in his father’s small bookshop, which meant he could lock up.

This also meant Mallory could finally give his father hell for being in the back room with Soto since four, and leaving Mallory to man the store alone for the past four and a half hours. He’d long since finished his coffee from the cafe across the street, but hadn’t been able to take a break to piss the dark roast out of his system, much less run upstairs and fix himself dinner. It was with relief that he locked the door, flipped the sign to ‘closed,’ and dashed out of the store proper and into the employees-only bathroom.

Thomas and Soto were still talking. His ears, much sharper than they’d been when he was fully human, easily picked up Thomas over the regular bathroom sounds of peeing, flushing, hand-washing, towel drying. They were haggling over the number of Leeches his father could make on short notice for Soto’s friend. Boss. Whatever. Why “Wrath” needed extra blood-sucking bullets this time, Mallory didn’t care to know. He stepped across the hallway and pushed open the workroom door to glare in at his father. “You’re cleaning up,” he said.

Thomas paused in sliding a box of silver shells at Soto and glared back up at Mallory. “I’ll take care of it,” he said in his I’m Having A Private Conversation voice.

Mallory snorted at that, then sneezed when the stench of too much magic tickled the back of his sensitive nose. His father, who had already let out the blood and magic in those Leech bullets, frowned. “Still too much residue?”

“Nah, just breathed it funny,” Mallory said, wiping his nose with his sleeve. He paused, arm halfway back to his side, when Soto raised an eyebrow at him. “Oh,” he mouthed, wincing at the dark blue smear on his light blue shirt. He would never be as well-mannered as either of the fae at the table. “Uh, I’ll be at your place,” he said, backing out of the room and closing the door.

“Your place” was Thomas’s apartment above the store. It was the one on the left of the stairs, and the place Mallory had lived when Thomas took him in. When he turned twenty-one, Thomas’s birthday gift to him had been to live rent-free in the apartment across the hall—independence within the safety of home, should he need it. In the two years since, Mallory had made good use of a separate place—and a bedroom outside of his father’s hearing range. But lately … well, he’d been sleeping at Alex’s. He had half of the closet, and his regular toothbrush and razor and shampoo over there, among other things.

He just wished he got to see more of Alex. The last thing Mallory wanted to do was cook dinner for himself and his dad on his and Alex’s six month anniversary. Alex’s job took him away unexpectedly—some kind of scouting consultant for the government, though he didn’t like to talk about it. The one time Alex had come home stinking of blood, though he’d clearly taken a shower, Mallory thought he might understand why.

Thomas’s cabinets were better stocked than Mallory’s, as was his refrigerator. Mallory re-tied his lanky blond hair and washed his hands, then started making a chicken casserole for him and Thomas, and dough for butter rolls he could take home later that night.

Home. To Alex’s, really, though he’d stopped calling it that months ago. That made Mallory smile, and for a moment he entertained calling Alex … but he probably shouldn’t. Alex couldn’t take calls while he was working, and he called every night he was out of town anyway. Alex was good like that. So what if Mallory had found absolutely nothing on the internet about his Alexander R. Turner, or any variation thereof, or anything on the government branch for which he claimed to work? It was weird, sure, to type in his name and get nothing, but that didn’t have to mean anything bad. Mallory grew up surrounded by meth labs and drunks—what did he care if his boyfriend might possibly be a drug dealer?

Apparently a lot more than he was willing to admit, Mallory realized, gingerly pulling the knife blade from his finger and sliding the now-bloody piece of chicken breast aside on the cutting board. “Idiot,” Mallory muttered at himself, washing out the cut before it healed full of chicken juice. By the time he’d turned off the tap thirty seconds later, a faint line on the pad of his pointer finger was all that remained of the deep wound. “Pay attention,” he said, returning to the chicken breast. If he weren’t a werelion, he’d have needed stitches for that. Oh well. At least he wouldn’t need to explain his own stupidity to Alex when he got home.

Thomas came in when the casserole was in the oven. “Isn’t it your anniversary?” he asked, a frown wrinkling the forehead of his normally cheerful face. The tall, bookish rail of a man who walked into the kitchen looked like an agreeable, aging professor, albeit one with a long silver ponytail trailing down his back. But of course, Thomas Sheridan was an elf, and while the glamour he wore fit his personality, it wasn’t his true form. Mallory had only seen it once—but his memory of it was hazy at best. “I could’ve sworn it was six months today,” he continued.

Mallory nodded and pulled out the risen bread, but didn’t return the encouraging look that accompanied Thomas’s last statement.

“I see.” Thomas frowned again and started pulling out dishes and glasses and silverware. “Work again?”

“Yeah.” For a few moments, there was only the sound of Mallory kneading bread with a tad of his werelion strength—which was of course more than the poor bread required—and the muted thunk of cutlery placed on the tablecloth. Finally, Mallory turned, dough in hand. “I don’t think Alex exists. His government branch doesn’t exist, and he’s nowhere on the internet at all.”

He could tell that caught the interest of both the scientist and the caretaker in his adoptive father. “Are you sure you used the search terms correctly—”

Mallory glared at his father and turned to slam the dough back to the counter.

His father cleared his throat. “I apologize—I know you’re fully capable of running an internet search. I’d have fired you otherwise.”

Mallory snorted. “You can’t fire me—I’m your son.”

He could hear the pride in Thomas’s voice despite his reply of, “Don’t be so sure.” Thomas came to the counter beside Mallory and leaned against it, arms crossed. “What do you think the big secret is, then? If he’s as smitten as you are, I doubt he would lie without a good reason.”

That was something about Thomas that Mallory had loved immediately: he never told Mallory that his opinions were invalid. Thomas was the first person who’d believed Mallory and believed in him, too. So it was without hesitation that Mallory admitted, “I know he does dangerous stuff. Maybe he works for the mafia? I thought drug dealer, but he never smells like anything, and he isn’t a user … I don’t know.”

“How do you know his work is dangerous?”

“I smelled blood on him once—a lot of blood.” Mallory’s nose wrinkled. He shaped the bread and put it in a pan, then put that in the convection oven. As Mallory washed his hands, he added, “He also gets this look on his face sometimes … it reminds me of how you said I used to look. Haunted, I guess. And he answers his pager like this dealer I knew. Has a private work phone and pager—hell, I don’t even know the numbers. That’s weird, right?”

Thomas idly scratched his jaw, staring into the space above the table. Mallory let him think and poured them water. Then the casserole was ready and they put the food on the table and sat to eat. “Do you think you’re in any danger?” Thomas asked.

“Hm?” Mallory’s eyes widened. “Why would I—oh. Um, not really. He’s still Alex.”

“Yes, but who is Alex?”

Mallory’s shoulders hunched.

His father put his fork down and put a hand on his. “I’m glad you told me,” he said. “It worries me, however, that this person whom you like so much might not be who he says he is.”

“I know.” Mallory bit his lip and stared at his plate. Thomas … cared. Always.

“Hey.” Thomas picked up his hand and dropped it on the table, startling Mallory into glaring up at him. His father smiled. “Life is hard enough without inviting more danger into it.”

“Dad, really.”

“Mallory, really,” Thomas mimicked. “There are Hunters out there just looking for werewolves to kill. What if this Alex—or whoever he really is—finds out about you and decides you’re worth selling?”

“Alex has no idea magic exists! Who would he know to sell me to?”

“I thought it was bad enough when he was just some government drudge who was afraid to ‘meet the boyfriend’s parents.’ The government would kill to get you if they knew you were a werelion! And now he might not work for them. Or he could work for some branch that doesn’t officially exist.” Thomas’s hand clenched on the table. He put it in his lap with the other and breathed. Mallory could hear his heartbeat slowing from the rapid pace it had rushed to when he’d brought up Alex’s possible double life.

Mallory took the opportunity to shovel more chicken and cheesy pasta into his mouth. His father was thinking something he wouldn’t like—Mallory could see it in the way he straightened his shoulders, and in the intensity of his gaze.

“Soto should look into it.”

Mallory dropped his fork. “Hell no.” He grabbed a napkin to clean up the bits of noodle that now spotted the table, looking askance at his father as he did. He swallowed. “You want him investigated?”

“Wrath wouldn’t use Soto as a go-between if he weren’t trustworthy and good at his job.”

“Right, his job as a delivery boy.”

“Soto does much more than that.”

Mallory raised an eyebrow. Thomas ignored the implied question. Mallory huffed. “I’m not hiring some private investigator delivery boy to follow my boyfriend. That’s not okay relationship behavior.”

“Neither is his lying to you.”

“And I don’t lie to him? He doesn’t ask where I go every month, and I don’t ask what he does for work. We have an understanding, Dad. Anyway, he trusts me, and I trust him.”

“Do you?” Thomas crossed his arms and leaned back. “Then why did you run an internet search on him?”

“Why does anybody Google anybody?”

His father shrugged and waited.

“I Googled myself first.”

Still that knowing look.

“Okay, fine, I was worried, but that doesn’t mean anything. I’m not having him followed. You want to know something, you call him and ask—I’m pretty sure you copied his number from store records when we started dating.” Mallory picked his fork back up to stab more casserole and stuff it in his mouth. He chewed pointedly at his father.

“You can never be too careful,” Thomas said. When Mallory didn’t smile back, he sighed. “Well, I’m giving you Soto’s number. Just in case. So you’ll have it.”

“I won’t use it.”

“But you’ll have it.”

Thomas was so insistent, so worried, that in the end, Mallory couldn’t say no. When he left that night, Soto’s pager number was in his jacket pocket.