Chapter 3. Ambrose
The shadows cleared, and I resisted the instinct to let mine caress Blaise one final time.
It was better not to linger. No matter how much I craved him—still craved him, six months after I’d crossed a line I’d sworn I never would—I kept my distance.
Because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t trust myself to stop.
Because it was wrong on every level.
He was my best friend. And somewhere out there, we both had fated mates.
Our witches were waiting—maybe already tonight—lighting candles, readying their cauldrons, unaware that they were poised to change everything for us.
We were never meant to build a life together.
And I certainly wasn’t meant to be so madly in love with my best friend that it physically hurt.
I had spent years burying it. Shoving the feeling down every time he laughed, every time he touched me, every time we fed and he was so lost to pleasure he didn’t realize it was him I was watching, not the mortal between us.
I could handle it, I’d told myself. Even though it was wrong. I was wrong. Something in my brain had confused friendship with love. And it wasn’t as if Blaise, who had let me share this life with him, had ever indicated that he was even remotely interested in me in that way.
But then that night happened.
The night where Blaise was almost taken from me.
Something primal had reared its head and demanded that I protect, destroy, avenge.
And when he’d summoned his shadows and taken me home, a part of me still couldn’t believe he was okay.
I couldn’t tell if it was real, or if I was so lost in bloodlust and grief that my mind was conjuring the image of the torn flesh at his throat healing before my eyes.
Not until he dragged his shirt over his head, buttons scattering across the floor, and scrubbed the blood from his skin.
I reached for him without thinking, needing that final proof he was still here.
But touch alone wasn’t enough, and where my fingers had traced, my mouth had followed. And just like that, every rule I’d put in place to protect my heart melted away under the feel of his skin against my mouth.
It was just a kiss, I told myself. Not even on the lips.
I told myself that I could have stopped then. I’d pulled back, searching his face for something I couldn’t name—permission, maybe. Or an order to stop. For him to pull away, make one of his stupid jokes and shrug it off.
But then Blaise leaned down, pressed his lips against mine, and instinct took over.
He whispered my name like it belonged to him. He clung to me, his breath hitching, a soft, needy sound slipping from him as I guided him back against the couch. And when his fingers fumbled at my clothes, instinct drowned out every warning I’d ever given myself.
I told myself it was fine. That for Blaise, it was just another fuck. That it wouldn’t mean to him what it meant to me.
So I let myself have it. Just once.
I slowed it down. Drew it out. Memorized him in ways I’d only ever allowed myself in dreams. I gave him everything I’d wanted to give him for years, until he was boneless beneath me. Until the world narrowed to just me, him, and his ragged breath.
And when I finally lost myself enough to whisper “Mine” against the back of his neck, I told myself it didn’t matter.
He wouldn’t remember it the way I would.
It wasn’t until long after the rage and lust finally burned out of me that I realized what I’d done.
Blaise hadn’t just been riding adrenaline like me. He’d had a chunk torn from his neck. He’d lost a lot of blood, and what remained of it in his veins had been tainted with vampire venom.
And I’d been so consumed by my own want that I hadn’t stopped to question whether Blaise was capable of consenting to anything at all.
I had untangled myself from him with shaking hands, shoved a pair of sweatpants at him, and fled to the shower before the weight of it crushed me completely. By morning, all I could offer him was an apology and a promise that it would never happen again.
I should have left. Lived out my penance in the Shadow Realm.
But Blaise had just shrugged it off and cracked a joke, like it was nothing more than another night that blurred into all the others.
And because I was a weak demon, I stayed.
I found one of the bloodied buttons from his shirt a few days later and kept it as penance.
Something solid to anchor my shame to. And each night, I rolled it between my fingers in the dark, telling myself that his cardamom and sandalwood scent, clinging so stubbornly in the air, wasn’t for me.
Telling myself that my body shouldn’t respond to it, shouldn’t tighten and ache for him.
Telling myself that I would never trust myself with him again—not now that I knew how his lips felt against mine, how easily my body had fit between his legs, how my name had sounded on his lips when he’d lost himself enough to forget all other words—
A fridge door slammed shut, yanking me out of my thoughts.
I glanced at Blaise, half expecting to find some sign that he’d broken our pact and undampened his senses, that he might somehow feel the lust and guilt I’d let slip loose.
He didn’t.
Instead, he stood in the muted, colorless echo of our mortal apartment, his back pressed to the gray fridge as he tore open a carton of milk and drank straight from it.
Just like he did every morning.
Despite the fact that, as an incubus, it was of no nutritional value to him. Despite the carton being nothing more than a figment of our shared imagination in the Shadow Realm.
Despite a decade of me telling him to use a damn glass.
He let out a satisfied sigh, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and set the carton down on the counter.
Not in the fridge.
Gods, I hoped his fated mate would have the patience for him that I did.
I hoped she’d be able to see past the clutter and chaos and see the demon I saw—the demon who would turn up to what might be the most important night of his existence in a neon-green novelty T-shirt simply because, under any other circumstance, it would’ve entertained his friend.
The demon with a rotating library of vocal stims—most of them from his favorite supernatural soap, Hexes at Noon—that surfaced whenever his thoughts ran faster than his mouth could keep up.
The demon who could forget to do his laundry for weeks, then suddenly spend an entire weekend cleaning the flat so meticulously that if I ate mortal food like him, I could eat it off the toilet seat.
The demon who had, on more than one occasion, gone to a job wearing his slippers—prompting me to start keeping a spare pair of boots in the van, just in case.
“Man, am I glad things don’t go off in the Shadow Realm,” Blaise said, his voice thick with a grin. “Remember when we first got the apartment and it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that mortal food had an expiry date for a reason?”
“I remember cleaning up a week’s worth of projectile vomit,” I replied dryly, resisting the smile that tugged at my lips.
The endless bleaching of the bathroom, I could have done without. But I had enjoyed playing nurse—caring for him, stroking his fevered brow, holding him through the worst of the sweats. At some point, I’d even convinced myself he was doing it on purpose, just to keep me close a little longer.
But like everything with Blaise, the moment he was back on his feet—now armed with a hard-earned respect for expiry dates—he moved on as if it had never happened. As if we hadn’t spent a week entwined on the couch while I passed him a bowl and whispered reassurances between bouts of vomiting.
“I’ll never understand why you insisted on buying mortal food in the first place,” I muttered.
But I knew why.
Everything Blaise had done was in preparation for meeting his fated mate. For the witch who would eat mortal food. For the witch who lived in the mortal realm. For the witch who he would spend the rest of his life with.
A life that did not include me.
My own fated mate rarely crossed my mind. I was sure she would be good, kind, and maybe even everything that I didn’t know I needed. Maybe she’d be the one to finally loosen the threads Blaise had woven through my heart.
But it was hard to imagine her when he was standing right in front of me.
“C’mon, Ambrose,” Blaise said, breaking my spiraling thoughts. His tone was breezy as his gaze flicked from the clock on the wall back to me. “Better make our way to the town hall.”
I gave a noncommittal grunt and followed him out of the apartment, the door clicking shut behind us.
Outside, the Shadow Realm stretched out in muted shades of inky blues and grays—half-formed streets cloaked in shifting darkness, broken only by scattered streetlamps.
Unlike the mortal world, nothing here existed unless someone imagined it into being.
And most didn’t have the energy to conjure anything outside of the essentials.
My gaze trailed after Blaise as he walked ahead of me, his silhouette carving a path of gold through the gloom.
He was half a head shorter than me, yet still imposing at six foot—broad-shouldered, muscular, confident in that effortless way that had always made me weak in the knees.
He stepped into the flickering cone of a conjured streetlight, and my breath caught.
He ran a hand through his golden hair, a habitual gesture that shifted the collar of his T-shirt just enough to reveal the thick, silvery scar at his neck.
I hated it.
I hated the reminder that he’d almost died. Hated the reminder of what I’d done to him that night. But most of all, I hated that it still stirred something dark and hungry inside me—my body’s instinct to sink my teeth into his flesh, to mark him with a bite of my own.
I ground my teeth and forced the thought away.
Your mating bite is meant for your fated mate, I reminded myself. The one you might be meeting tonight.