Benny’s laugh boomed off of the trees. Dropping her back onto her feet, he gave her shoulder a proud pat. “Pretty sure you did do that, grape.”
“Grape?” Camille wrinkled her nose. “…Because I grew up on a vineyard?”
Viktor coughed into his fist, covering up his laughter when his second answered, “Because you’re purple!”
Camille sputtered. “And you’re furry!”
“Only sometimes.”
Making a disgusted sound in the back of her throat, she gave his shoulder a solid punch with one deceptively dainty fist.
Benny stumbled backward, taken by surprise by the sheer wallop even a delicate-looking elf’s hit could pack. “Damn!” He craned his neck to peer at Viktor. Rubbing his shoulder, he exclaimed, “She’s strong as fuck!”
Viktor stepped close to his mate and slung his arm around her waist to guide her into the den. Speaking over his shoulder, he said, “I know! Isn’t it great?”
Unlocking the door with the thumb scanner, he made a mental note to add Camille’s ID code and biometric data to all the pack’s systems in the morning. Now that she was pack, she had access to everything that was his and theirs.
The den was dark and cool when they stepped inside. He closed the door behind them, muffling the sound of Benny complaining about his “pitching arm”.
Viktor felt a pang of regret when he watched Camille walk in ahead of him. “I’m sorry,” he said, sighing. “I had this grand plan to show you the den for the first time, but all that’s ruined now.”
She turned to give him a curious look over her shoulder. “Ruined? How?”
“Well, you’ve seen it all already.”
“Not to make it seem like I don’t care, but honestly, Vik, I wasn’t paying all that much attention last night.” She paused, canting her head to one side. “Or this morning, for that matter. I was a little distracted.”
Viktor set her bag down by the door and, feeling uncharacteristically shy, asked, “That’s— well that works, then.” Swallowing hard, he straightened his shoulders. “Mate, would you like a tour of the den?”
Camille’s smile was absolutely heartstopping. “I would, my consort. Very much.”
Chapter Thirty
“So what happens when the pack moves to the new territory?”
“What do you mean?” Viktor rubbed her knee with one hand, his other busy stirring… something in a pan on the cooker. It smelled salty and tangy, which tantalized her, but one glance at the sodden vegetables in the pan made her firmly rethink trying a bite.
Camille was perched on the countertop beside the cooker, her long legs crossed at the ankles and her feet bare. After the tour, in which he’d proudly showed off every tiny detail of his beautiful, if strangely open den, he insisted on dinner. She had opened her mouth to politely inform him that he was unlikely to have anything she could eat in his kitchen, but he was already miles ahead of her.
Her eyes watered when he presented her with a refrigerator full of elvish food — raw meat marinated in spices or cured with smoke. There were even large filets of fish in the freezer, ready to be unthawed and enjoyed with a drizzle of citrus or soy sauce.
Gifts from our packmates, he told her. To welcome you, you know?
Like the den, everything was prepared for her, as if she had always been part of his home.
Camille watched her shirtless consort as he cooked, her eyes tracing the familiar musculature of his form with a possessive hunger. Swallowing her nibble of peppered salami, she elaborated, “I mean the den. You’ve put so much time and thought into it. Are you going to be okay just leaving it here and starting over wherever the Alliance puts you?”
Viktor smoothed his palm up and over her thigh. Giving her a gentle squeeze, he answered, “Nah. Our homes are modular. We build them knowing that at any moment the pack might need to leave, so everything here can be transported easily to the new territory.”
Relief washed through her. “Oh, good.”
He turned his head to give her a warm smile. “You like the den?”
Camille leaned over to give his bloodied shoulder a lingering kiss. “Yes. Very much.”
It was an exquisite home. The lines were clean and modern, the wood was light, and the windows tall. It looked like a home built to highlight the nature around it, not the other way around.
She especially liked all the touches of purple. There were tiny violet glass tiles in the bathroom. There were deep plum pillows on the low couch. There were lavender curtains, so pale they were almost white, in the bedroom. When he opened a cupboard to pull out a plate, she even spied a handful of mismatched purple cups and bowls, some of them chipped and clearly well loved.
Each little pop of color stood out against the grays and greens he seemed to prefer, and every single one told the same story: He never once stopped thinking of me.
“I’m happy to hear it,” he replied, grin widening as he scooped some of his dinner onto a baby blue plate. “But I’m happy to change anything you want. This is your den too. It should feel like it.”
Her heart skipped a beat. “Maybe someday, but for right now I think it’s perfect.”
Holding his plate in one hand, Viktor turned to rub the pad of his thumb along her jaw. His gaze was intent on her face when he said, “We’ll get your things moved in this week, okay? Not just from the apartment. I want you to get everything you need from Napa.”
Because this is forever, a voice in the back of her mind whispered. The wound on the juncture of her neck and shoulder pulsed, further cementing the feeling of permanence.
She would leave her mother’s estate for good. It was no great loss, really. Although she felt a deep kinship with the land she had helped cultivate for most of her life, Camille felt no real connection to the home itself. Not anymore.
Now it was a shell of what it once was, when she and her brother used to run through the halls together, evading their mother and their beloved houserunner. Even those moments of joy had been snuffed out over time, buried under the strain of her mother’s clashes with Cameron and then her decline.
If she were being honest with herself, Camille would admit that staying in San Francisco for her mourning period and negotiations wasn’t necessary. The real reason was because she found no comfort in the mansion that only reminded her of the years she spent taking care of her mother in secret. The food she ate at their table tasted of ash, and the air smelled of medical grade cleaning solution. Always.
“Cameron comes home with his consort next week,” she told him. “I’ll have him pack everything up and bring it with him when he comes to visit.”
Viktor’s lips twitched. “How is he gonna feel about you mating a shifter?”
“He’ll probably be relieved.”
“Yeah? Why’s that?”
Camille smoothed her palms over the planes of his chest, soothing herself. “Cameron has always hated elvish society. It was half the reason he and our mother fought so much. She wanted revenge, but he just wanted her to let it go and move on. She accused him of being a traitor to our father’s memory.”
“Was he?”
“No, of course not.” Camille shook her head. “He just couldn’t live under the cloud of her grief like I could. Whereas I tried to redirect our mother, he just got angry and shut himself off. After that, they fought about everything. It was all I could do to keep the peace between them.”