Chapter 27. Caitlyn
As I stared at the empty sliver of bed beside me and then at the two unopened pairs of earbuds on the nightstand, I winced. Poor Ambrose. I wondered just how early in the morning I’d woken him up.
To my other side, Blaise was miraculously still asleep, my outstretched hand entwined in his. He mumbled something when I slid my fingers free but didn’t stir.
After a much-needed stretch to dispel the stiffness that came with sleeping like a starfish, I climbed out of bed and froze. A pile of fresh clothes sat neatly folded on the chest at the foot of the bed.
I glanced around warily, half expecting Creep to be lurking somewhere, ready to spring out with a silent Gotcha! when the overalls revealed a dead raccoon or something equally horrifying as I picked them up.
But the room was empty.
This new side of Creep was... going to take some getting used to.
Not wanting to jinx it, I hurried into the bathroom for a quick wash and to brush my teeth, then pulled on the clothes and set off to find Ambrose.
He was sitting at the kitchen table, a mug of cocoa cradled in his hands, leaning in and whispering conspiratorially to Creep. She sat perched on the tabletop, looking—for the first time ever—like an ordinary doll rather than something that might require an exorcism.
That illusion shattered the moment her head swiveled a full one-eighty to fix on me.
Instead of flinching, Ambrose smiled down at her. Creep’s painted cheeks seemed to deepen in color before he lifted his gaze to me, his expression softening further.
“Good morning, Caitlyn.”
And just like that, my own cheeks warmed.
Ambrose had an ease about him—a quiet smoothness that contrasted perfectly with Blaise’s rough-edged energy.
Where Blaise would have been on his feet already, itching to do something, Ambrose seemed entirely content to simply be.
To sit in the moment. To spend his morning whispering to Creep instead of searching for something to fill the time.
The dynamic worked for all three of us—and perhaps for Creep most of all.
Where I secretly enjoyed the chaos she caused, and Blaise took endless delight in provoking it, neither of us were especially good at the quieter parts. The stillness. The patience. The unspoken work of listening and interpreting silence.
Watching Ambrose do it so naturally made my chest ache in the best way.
My heart swelled as I realized just how completely he fit into our mating trio.
And then my stomach fluttered when I caught sight of the faint, healed bite mark on his wrist—the one I’d given him last night. Ambrose seemed to know exactly where my thoughts had gone. His gaze dipped to the mark, lingering for a moment, before lifting to meet mine again.
I wasn’t exactly well-versed in mating bites.
My parents had sat me down the day before my first Samhain summoning to explain the basics of summoning an incubus—most of which I’d promptly scorched from my memory, because listening to your parents talk about that kind of thing was deeply and profoundly gross.
But I did remember my dad mentioning the bites.
Most creatures with more primal instincts used bites to seal a mating bond. Incubi did. Witches didn’t. He’d told me not to worry if I wasn’t comfortable receiving one, or if I didn’t feel the urge to give one in return.
I’d always tucked that knowledge away as something theoretical—one of those things that probably wouldn’t apply to me. Because what was so special about a bite, really?
But last night, I’d felt it.
Before, sex had always been an itch to scratch. A way to mentally reset. I enjoyed it, for the most part. But I was quick to embarrass, quick to overthink, and quicker still to retreat once it was over.
Blaise had been so gentle with Ambrose. I could have watched them until the end of my days—not just because it was ridiculously hot (though it absolutely was the hottest thing I’d ever witnessed), but because it was so much more than sex.
It felt like I was bearing witness to something long overdue, to my two mates finally stepping into what they were always meant to be.
They’d been together before, but they’d both been denying the bond then. Seeing them last night—open, honest, fully embracing themselves—was beautiful.
And when Blaise had turned that need on me, I hadn’t felt embarrassed—not even a flicker of it—that Ambrose was watching.
Instead, it felt right. Right to be laid bare, figuratively as well as literally.
Right to feel that shared current of emotion moving between the three of us, to understand, without any doubt, that this was my destiny too.
The urge to claim it and to seal it had been primal. Instinctive. Something that took over as we lay tangled together in a breathless heap of limbs and sweat, the world narrowed down to just us.
My entire body quivered at the memory.
That overwhelming sense of completeness.
And the earth-shattering release that had followed, as if sealing the bond had unlocked something deeper than pleasure alone.
Ambrose let out a gentle cough, pulling me from my thoughts.
“Sorry,” I said, heat flooding my cheeks.
“Never be sorry for feeling that way,” he replied softly. “But I would love to get to know you more today—if that’s okay?”
I nodded, not trusting my mouth not to betray me with a stream of word vomit and an ill-timed “Actually, let’s go wake Blaise and do that again before we have the Q and A.” I might not have been remotely embarrassed anymore, but my mouth clearly hadn’t received the memo.
Ambrose’s smile widened. “Great. And when Blaise wakes up, we can maybe talk about returning to the coven.”
The comment was directed at both me and Creep, and it jolted me back to reality. I’d momentarily forgotten that Ambrose had arrived with a warning about Isadora.
Creep, apparently, had not.
Every object in the kitchen that could be remotely considered a weapon lifted into the air at once, sharp points and blunt ends all angled toward the door as if she’d already decided war was a far better option than retreat.
The air practically vibrated with her lust for blood.
Creep was prone to violence, yes, but it was usually born of mischief. I’d never once believed she truly wanted to cause physical harm.
Until now.
I couldn’t help wondering why Isadora—the mother of Creep’s favorite person in the world—was the one person capable of provoking genuine, murderous rage.
“You can’t actually kill her,” I said carefully.
Creep, sitting rigid, turned her glassy gaze up to me.
“I mean it,” I pressed. “Unless it’s genuinely life or death, you can’t just kill someone.”
The weapons hovering throughout the kitchen trembled once more, then reluctantly dropped back to their places. Creep folded her arms, tucking her chin into the stiff collar of her dress like a child who’d just been told no candy before dinner.
Ambrose—now officially the bravest person I knew—leaned forward and placed a gentle hand on Creep’s shoulder and squeezed.
Creep looked up at him. Something unspoken passed between them, and then, gradually, her small porcelain body eased, the rigid fury draining away.
She hopped down from the table and pitter-pattered out of the kitchen, no doubt off to re-strategize a nonlethal way of disabling Isadora should she ever dare show her face on the doorstep.
“Creep seems to love you,” I said, settling into the chair opposite Ambrose.
He smiled at that, soft and a little private, but didn’t elaborate on how he’d managed to bond with her in a matter of hours when it had taken me months.
Instead of prying—because whatever Ambrose-the-murderous-house-whisperer secrets he possessed were clearly his own—I asked him to tell me about himself.
And what a delight that turned out to be.
He told me about his early adventures in the mortal world, back when the young incubi were encouraged to explore and learn how the mortal world worked.
He told me about Lochran’s near-death experience flying into a storm that had very nearly killed him, and Devlin’s (who I now realized had to be my cousin Jen’s fated mate) ill-advised rescue of a Hell’s Gate pup—and his sheer dumb luck at being allowed to leave the pack with all his limbs still attached.
In turn, I filled him in on my own brief entanglement with the Hell’s Gate pack: the dragon scale sourced from Death on Dark Wings that let me overhear Billy’s magically muffled conversation, and the small, inconvenient detail that the only warlock in our coven, Jake Cole—entirely oblivious—was actually her fated mate.
I told him about my childhood with Jen and Lex. About growing up together, inseparable. And then I told him about Priscilla—about the bullying, the way she’d driven me here with Creep in the first place.
To my surprise, Ambrose went quiet at the mention of her name. He chewed on his bottom lip, gaze distant, as if weighing something he wasn’t ready to share. It irked me, just a little, but before I could press, the conversation shifted naturally, drifting instead to his years with Blaise.
And just like that, Priscilla slipped to the back of my mind.
I loved hearing about the life my mates had built together. The jobs, the close calls, the shared routines. It eased the last lingering flickers of guilt I’d carried for not summoning them sooner. They’d been happy. Fulfilled in every way but one—denying the bond they’d been too afraid to name.
As Ambrose spoke, I could see it happening: the final remnants of his guilt loosening its grip too. The quiet relief of a demon who no longer had to pretend that being in love with his best friend had been wrong.
Just as the conversation settled into the more specific questions of getting to know one another—favorite color, favorite music, favorite show (we had another Nooner on our hands)—my phone buzzed in my pocket.