“Damn it,” Danil Malashovik growled as he glanced at the time on his car radio. His mother was going to deep fry his ass for being late to yet another Sunday dinner. But, he supposed he didn’t really have a choice. There were only so many Public Defenders in Spokane, Washington.

And when duty called, Danil answered. It was in his genes. He came from a very long line of ridiculously hardworking men. His father had worked the wheat fields in Belarus for ten hours every day of Danil’s young life. Until they’d come to America a decade ago.

Danil pulled his car into the parking lot of the northwest precinct. He hoped he could wrap this up quickly. He was starving and he knew for a fact that his mother was making babka. His barbaric brothers wouldn’t save him a single bite if he wasn’t there when it was first put on the table.

Danil strode into the precinct, straightening his tie and putting all thoughts of potato pie out of his mind. He had a job to do. And he never did anything half assed.

He came up to the front desk so that Freddie could tell him which room his client was in. He checked the folder in his hand. Harry Rourke. No priors. Good. This shouldn’t take too long at all.

“But on the other hand, if you think about it, the first wasn’t a warning. It was more of a passing of information from one person to another. So this isn’t technically a second warning. It’s a first,” said a woman in a silky, flirtatious voice.

Danil glanced up to see who the smooth talker was. His eyes landed on quite possibly the most gorgeous creature he’d ever seen. She leaned up against the front desk in a pair of tight, cuffed jeans and a black leather jacket. Her curves were soft and generous. Her foxy face was sharp in the features and highlighted by a short, stylish cap of dark, glossy hair. She slanted her eyes up through a fringe of dark lashes at Officer Rickford, a personal friend of Danil’s.

Rickford was looking a little pink around the ears, Danil noted. And he could see why. This woman was a stone cold ten and she wasn’t pumping any sort of brakes.

Danil smirked as she reached up and gently readjusted Rickford’s tie, brushed something imaginary off his shoulder.

“So, seeing as I’m new in town and didn’t know the rules, I think everyone would understand if instead of any more police action, I just took this warning very seriously, and promised never to do it again.” She pouted perfect, plump lips and put a very sorry look on her face.

“Be that as it may, Ms. Katsaros,” Rickford said, turning even pinker and clearing his throat. “This is the second time in as many days that you’ve been brought into the station for trespassing on federally protected land.”

“I was lost!” she insisted. “Is that a crime?”

“Yes, actually. It is,” Danil said in his slight Slavic accent, deciding to throw Rickford a bone here. The man was a little out of his depth. Danil leaned across the two of them to hand his file to Freddie at the front desk. Freddie took it and flipped it open, started processing it right away.

Danil leaned back, ignoring the quick tightening of his gut when he realized that this woman smelled like citrus. Light and clean and female.

Frustration flickered momentarily across the woman’s face at Danil’s intrusion before she smoothed her exceptional features back into a flirtatious smile. “Well, in that case, I genuinely accept the warning, Officer Rickford. I’ve taken it right to heart. And you won’t have to worry about me for another second. I swear.”

“Is this your client, Dan?” Rickford asked Danil hopefully. The officer already knew he was sunk. He needed reinforcements.

Danil put his hands in his pockets and surveyed the woman from head to toe. He was lazy in his perusal of her, fully enjoying the opportunity. When his eyes landed on her exquisite face, he noted that she had one eyebrow raised sardonically.

“Well, she doesn’t look like a Harry Rourke,” Danil said.

“Dora Katsaros,” the woman introduced herself drily. “I’m new in town. Though some of us don’t seem to think that matters.” She flicked her eyes toward Rickford, who sweated and scratched at the back of his neck.

“Now, Ms. Katsaros, you know it isn’t anything personal,” Rickford muttered, practically scuffing the toe of his boot on the ground.

“Your defendant’s in room B, Dan,” Freddie said, looking up from his computer and handing the file back across the group to Danil.

“Thanks, Freddie,” Danil said, taking the folder. He nodded solemnly, just the hint of a smirk on his face. “Ms. Katsaros.” He winked at Rickford. “Officer Rickford, good luck,” he muttered under his breath.

And then he was closing the door of the interrogation room behind him, and his entire world was Harry Rourke.

Thirty minutes later, Danil dashed out of the precinct, his world zooming out into a wide lens again. He’d always possessed incredible focus. Even as a young boy in Belarus, running the streets with his brothers. He’d see men playing dice on the corner and stop stock still. Immovable, until he’d learned the rules, the theory, the strategy.

Rules were how he lived his life. He trusted them, understood them. It was how he’d gotten his family American citizenship so quickly when they’d come to America. Even though he was the youngest of the four boys in his family, he’d been the one to learn English first. To seek out an immigration lawyer. To help his brothers find work. He knew the system could chew you up and spit you out if you didn’t understand it. So he’d pledged to understand it. From the moment he set foot on American soil. And now, here he was, a decade later. A public defender, using his knowledge of the system to defend the innocent. And occasionally the guilty.

His thoughts passed back to Dora Katsaros as he slid into the front seat of his car. She’d so obviously been playing Rickford. He wondered if she was currently sitting back in one of those interrogation rooms, or if Rickford had folded and she was wandering free on the streets of Spokane again. He supposed he didn’t have the time to think of any perps except for the ones he was personally charged with defending. His plate was full enough without pretty, little, dark-haired sex bombs.

Except, of course, socially.

He wouldn’t have minded meeting Dora Katsaros in a bar. Or a Starbucks. Or the public library. He had no doubt that a little spitfire like her could keep him very entertained. For a week or two.

As intense as Danil’s focus was for the law, his focus on women was admittedly a bit wandering. What could he say? He liked every flavor of ice cream. What was that Americanism? Variety was the salt of life? No, he corrected himself; he hated it when he messed up stuff like that. Variety was the spice of life. Spice.

He pulled his car into his parents’ driveway and bounded out of the car, sniffing at the air as he pulled open the front door. His mouth watered. His mother was a phenomenal cook.

“There better be some fucking babka left!” Danil hollered as he kicked off his shoes and tossed his briefcase into the closet. He untucked his shirt as he walked into the crowded dining room. His three brothers and mother and father were all around the table, eating and laughing.

“When you snooze is when you lose,” Emin, the second oldest of the Malashovik boys said in his thick Slavic accent. He hadn’t bothered with English for a long time after they’d immigrated from Belarus, so in many ways, he was still learning. Luckily for him, he was an artist, and his clients thought the limited English thing gave him an exotic flair.

“It’s ‘you snooze, you lose,’ Emin,” Danil corrected. His brothers all rolled their eyes, very used to Danil correcting their English at this point.

Danil inched around the table that filled the room almost to the walls, toward his mother and father. Both of them kissed their son square on the lips. Katya Malashovik, dark-haired and short, eyes like a quarter past midnight, slid a slice of babka off her own plate for her son.

“I saved that for you, Danishka,” she told him in Belarusian. His parents understood English, but didn’t often use it in the house, no matter how much Danil insisted they needed to practice.

“Ah, Maciaryszki,” Danil said, using the pet name for his mother. “My favorite parent.”

“Hey!” Ilya Malashovik, Danil’s father, barked, his shock of white hair falling messily into his eyes, his wiry frame puffing up with indignation. “Who birthed you and carried you for nine months before that?” He pounded his chest pridefully. “Oh, wait. That was your mother as well.”

The boys all laughed, as they were intended to do. It was impossible not to have a soft spot for the unstoppable swagger and silliness of Ilya Malashovik. They may not have been able to vocalize it, but all the Malashovik boys were striving to be half the man that their hard-working, soft-hearted father was.

Danil took the slice of babka and took his place in between Maxim, his jovial, oldest brother and Anton, the second youngest, closest in age to Danil. Maxim leaned over to kiss his brother heartily on the cheek, as he had since they were children. Anton, much more sullen and serious, merely smacked Danil on the back.

“Maxim, how is work?” Katya asked. And all her boys found another place to look. It wasn’t any secret that Katya hated that her oldest son was a firefighter.

“Ah, Maciaryszki,” Maxim said smoothly in that easy way of his. “You know I choose to spare you details. Much the way I spare you details of my women. There are some things mothers do not need to know.”

Her sons grinned into their dinners as she raised a skeptical eye.

“All these alleged women,” Katya said. “Yet no grandchildren.”

Four smirks slid from four faces all at once. Ilya hooted from one end of the table. “Not so smart now, are you, boys! You see, I’ve done my part. I’ve made your mother a very happy woman. First I made her very happy. And then I gave her four strapping boys.” Ilya waggled his eyebrows suggestively and had his sons groaning and grinning.

Emin swatted Danil’s hand away from the last roll of fresh bread with the arrogance of an older brother who’d been doing it for years. “After dinner,” he told his brothers, “we go running. I am too stuffy in this skin tonight.”

His brothers all grunted their agreement, knowing exactly what Emin was referring to. Particularly Anton, who scratched at the collar of his t-shirt as if it were a prison uniform. He loved his mother’s house, with its vases of flowers and little glass figurines. Her afghans and Emin’s artwork on every wall. But even here, too long inside and Anton felt as if he could burst through the walls with a hammer. He needed the air. The fresh night sky opening up into forever. Any wall felt like a cage to him. And he’d had enough of cages to last him a lifetime.

Katya looked around at her four boys. So handsome with their light brown hair of varying lengths and their deep brown eyes. All of them so strong, so large. She sighed. She knew that it strained them, to sit still, indoors for so long. But they did it. To please their mother. They were good boys.

“Go,” she told them when the last bite had been eaten. “Go run.”

“We’ll help wash, Maciaryszki,” Maxim insisted.

“There’s nothing to wash!” Katya laughed. “You’ve licked your plates clean again. Go. Before you all come out of your skins. Go and give me some peace and quiet.”

Her boys were about to accept her offer when the doorbell rang. Ilya was out of his seat and racing to answer it as fast as he could. Having grown up in a smaller town in Belarus, Ilya was used to knowing all of his neighbors very well. Answering the door, even for solicitors, and ‘talking small’ as he called it, was one of Ilya’s favorite things to do in the world.

Danil glanced at the gaudy, gilded clock on his mother’s wall. 8:45 on a Sunday night. It was a little late to be selling Girl Scout cookies.

“Look,” Maxim said, slinging an arm around Anton’s shoulders. “Danil is suspicious of our visitor. He thinks Sunday nights are not good time for ringing doorbells.”

Anton gave his characteristic quick-flash smile, here for one brilliant second and completely gone the next, absorbed into his dark, somber face.

“Well,” Anton replied as a woman’s voice floated through the house to them. “Danil does fear strange women.”

Danil lunged for his brother, but froze mid-scowl as the voice he was hearing rang a very specific bell. It was a silky voice, sweet and unassuming. And it was tightening a fist inside his chest that had been tightened only earlier that evening.

Danil ignored his teasing brothers and followed the sound into the living room, where his father sat in his armchair across from a cap of shiny dark hair, a battered leather jacket and eyelashes for days. Jesus Christ, it was that Dora woman.

“Well, I’m new in town. I live just over the way,” she gestured vaguely as she spoke to Ilya, obviously holding him, gleefully, in her thrall. “And I was just wondering if you’d had any encounters with bears. I live alone and I’m a little nervous about them.”

Ilya’s face broke out like a sunrise. He had the secret joy of a private joke written all over him. He connected eyes with Danil in the doorway as he answered the woman’s question. “Da. I know about bears. Quite a bit.”

His father spoke in careful English, but his face spoke of no hesitation. Danil’s stomach turned. His father was not a discreet man and he loved a good story. Danil thanked his lucky stars that he was here to intercept this woman before she got his father’s entire life story.

“Oh,” Dora Katsaros cocked her head to one side, noting Ilya’s accent. “Are you Russian?”

“Belarusian,” Danil answered as he stepped into the room, hands in his pockets.

Dora’s eyes snapped up to his and Danil had the feeling that every single detail about him was being absorbed in the matter of a second. Her eyes lingered for a moment over his untucked shirt, his loosened tie. Her discerning look quickly melted into a winning smile that might have worked, had Danil not seen her use that same look on Rickford not two hours ago.

“Twice in one night,” she purred. “Must be my lucky day. Dan, was it?”

“Sure,” he nodded, crossing his arms over his chest. He could feel his father’s disapproval of the icy way he was treating this guest but more than one alarm was blinking in Danil’s head right now. She’d been arrested for trespassing twice in two days and now here she was at his father’s house, asking questions about bears? Nuh uh.

“You know this woman?” Ilya asked Danil in Belarusian.

“Da,” Danil answered curtly. He could explain everything in a moment, once he’d gotten her the hell out of his house and away from his family.

Dora looked back and forth between them. “Your father was just filling me in about the bears in the area, Dan. I have a little phobia, you see. And I just want to make sure I’m safe.”

“You have fear of bears?” Maxim asked from behind Danil, moving into the room with a grace that belied his large stature of 6’ 4”.

Danil watched Dora’s eyes take in his brother, much the same way they’d taken him in just a moment before. But for some reason it annoyed the shit out of Danil. Was that interest he detected in her little smile? It wasn’t unheard of. Women fell all over themselves for Maxim. And it had never bothered Danil. He had no trouble with ladies. But right now, that look on her face was making Danil want to shove his brother through the plate glass window in the front of the living room.

Maxim went to sit next to her on the couch, crossing his legs and stretching one large arm across the back of the cushions. Dora grinned at the move, rearranging herself so she faced him.

Danil gritted his teeth from the doorway.

“There is no reason to fear bear,” Maxim said, leaning forward to flick an imaginary speck off of Dora’s coat. Her eyes followed his hand with a little, private smile. Danil remembered seeing her pull the same move with Rickford earlier that afternoon. “A bear does not bother you if you do not bother the bear.”

“Brothers?” Dora guessed, asking Danil.

He nodded. “My older brothers, Maxim, and Emin,” he pointed behind him. “And Anton.”

“You’re the baby?” Dora asked, lightly fluttering her eyes.

He heard Anton’s smirking laugh from behind him and ruthlessly ignored it.

“Da,” Danil answered.

Maxim narrowed his eyes at Danil. It was unusual for his lawyerly brother to answer anyone in Belarusian, not when he’d worked so hard to have nearly effortless English. It meant that his brother did not trust this woman. Maxim turned his eyes back to the fragrant little bird sitting next to him on the couch. He cocked his head to one side. She didn’t look suspicious. She looked beautiful. And stylish.

“You are from New York?” Maxim asked Dora, not realizing that he’d interrupted the flow of conversation.

“How’d you guess?” she asked, fluttering her eyes at Maxim in a way he was sure she’d practiced, but he didn’t care. It was working.

Maxim plucked at her coat. “You are stylish and good-looking. Like model. From New York.”

An appreciative smile danced over Dora’s face. Danil noted that she didn’t seem at all flustered by the brazenness of his brother’s compliment. Which must mean that she was used to it. “It’s the haircut,” she replied to Maxim.

Danil watched as Dora turned back to Ilya. She was obviously here for some specific piece of information and she’d realized who she was going to get that information from. Not from scowling Danil, or flirtatious Maxim. She was going to get it from wrinkled, grinning Ilya, thrilled to be speaking to a woman with a model’s haircut.

“Do the bears ever come into people’s backyards?” she asked Ilya. “I’m not normally this scared, it’s just that I heard some rumors from people in the neighborhood.”

“What rumors?” Ilya asked in a soothing voice, obviously wanting to quell the worries of a sweet young woman.

A victorious look swept quickly over Dora’s face. Danil was certain that no one else had noticed it. She knew she’d hit pay dirt in Ilya. Sweet young woman, his ass.

“I’ve heard that there is one bear in particular that’s been spotted in the woods behind the neighborhood. It has scars, and a shock of white hair.”

If Dora noticed the change of tension in the room, she didn’t mention it, her eyes flicking from one brother to the next.

But Danil felt it like a fishing wire pulled tight between the hearts of him and all his brothers. He felt, rather than heard, Anton slip away back down the hall. A moment later the back door slammed and he knew his brother had disappeared into the night. Moments later, Emin wordlessly followed. Even after all these years, they didn’t like for Anton to be alone in moments like this.

Ilya’s smile had saddened. And Danil knew that this was when he had to be the one to protect his family. They were all too sweet. Sometimes Danil had to be the asshole to make sure they were safe. That they were making the right decisions for themselves.

He crossed the room in two strides. He held his hand out to Dora. “Ms. Katsaros,” he said in a tone just teetering on the edge between icily polite and flat out rude.

“Danil!” his mother scolded him from the doorway of the living room, where she’d just entered, drying her hands on a rag. She didn’t like to see him being so abrupt with a visitor. But Danil didn’t care; let her scold him later.

Dora’s eyes narrowed, but she obviously knew that her welcome had officially been worn out. She eyed Danil’s hand for just the breath of a moment, before she wiped the frustration from her expression and gave him a sweet little smile. She rose, taking Danil’s hand as if he were offering it kindly, not as a way of pulling her out of the room.

Both of them froze at the first contact. Something hot and zinging burst between their palms like a child’s Technicolor bubble. Danil’s chest contracted painfully, but it was her breath that whooshed out, between her teeth. She cut it off mid-exhale and covered the noise with a little cough, a bright smile.

“Nice to meet you all,” she said over her shoulder as Danil tugged her from the room.

He’d gotten the feeling back in his hand and he’d remembered that he needed her off his mother’s property as fast as possible. But then they were out the front door into the fresh, fragrant spring air, striding toward her car in the driveway, and Danil knew he’d made a mistake when he’d come outside with her. It was much harder for him to be cool and civilized when he was outside.

Her citrusy scent mixed with the pine of the forest that pressed in on them from all sides. Danil got a flash of what it would be like to peel that jacket off of her like an orange. He wanted to taste her fruit.

“So it’s Danil, huh?” she asked him as she struggled to keep up with his quick pace as he basically dragged her to her car.

“Da,” he replied. “My real name. The men at work call me Dan.”

“I prefer Danil,” she told him as he paused at the driver’s door to her car.

“I don’t care,” he replied.

She cocked her head to one side and leaned up against her car like she hadn’t a care in the world. “You don’t like me much, do you, Danil?”

“I do not care one way or another,” he said, inwardly kicking himself as he heard his accent grow a little thicker. It only did that when he was agitated. But she was just so damn exquisite, standing there in the azure twilight. Her cheekbones were two stunning slashes and her hair fell across her forehead in a jagged chop that highlighted her huge, round eyes.

“I think you do, Danil,” she said, her eyes narrowing a tiny bit. “I think my question just struck a nerve. And I think you care very much.”

Shit. She was right. He’d given away his hand in his urgency to get her out of there. He cursed himself. He needed to throw her off the scent. She was smart. Annoyingly smart. How to make her stupid?

There was one way that he knew how. And it worked every time.

“It wasn’t your question that struck a nerve,” he said, shifting his weight infinitesimally into her space. Her eyes tracked the movement. “It was this face.” He intentionally raised a hand like he was going to stroke her cheek but dropped his hand. She tracked that movement as well. “These eyes. Your legs. I find that they’re striking all my nerves.”

It was a calculated move. He’d meant to discombobulate her, confuse her, get her thinking in circles. But when her pink little lips fell open and the tiniest flash of arousal zipped through her eyes, it was the first honest expression her face had made since he’d met her. And Danil realized that he was as disoriented as he’d meant to make her.

Suddenly he was completely in her space. His hands on the hood of her car on either side of her curvy little body. He could feel the heat her skin was kicking off, he could scent it in the air. Her eyes had fallen to his lips and she wetted her own.

It was just the tiniest little glimpse of her delicate tongue, but Danil felt it like a punch to the solar plexus. He leaned down, their lips both tasting the air between them. Her warmth caressing over him, just a breath away.

“Oh, crap. Sorry, Danil,” a voice said behind them which had Danil straightening up and turning. It was AJ, a family friend who lived a few blocks away. She was 25 years old and like a sister to them. They’d known her since they’d moved here ten years ago. And right now she was looking more uncomfortable than he’d ever seen her. Pink in the cheeks.

“That’s alright, AJ,” he told her in the characteristic sweetness that they all used with her. “Dora was just leaving anyways.”

Before he could turn back to her, get lost in that moment again, Danil reached behind Dora without looking, and opened her car door.

“Oh, okay,” AJ said, obviously still very uncomfortable. “Well, nice to meet you, sort of. I’m just gonna go inside and die now.”

AJ scampered up the front walk and only then did Danil turn back to Dora. She’d obviously regained any composure she may have lost a few moments before.

“Apparently I’m leaving,” she said to Danil, one eyebrow raised.

“Goodbye,” he said, without any more explanation. He stepped back from the car.

“Hmm,” she said to him, her eyes giving him the full up and down as if she were still trying to figure him out.

Right when he thought she was going to slip into her car and drive away, she leaned over the top of the door. The light from his mother’s porch dusted her skin gold. “You hang out at the northwest precinct a lot, Danil?”

His eyes searched hers. “Why?”

“I just want to know where I can find you,” she said, a little half-smile on her face. And then she ducked down, started the car, and reversed away.

Danil refused to watch her taillights disappear into the night. His heart was stupidly clenched, his skin was too tight and he was literally about to scream. The night called to him and he could smell his brothers on the air.

He skirted around the side of the house, pulling off his shirt and belt as he walked. He spotted the pile of his brothers’ clothes on the back porch and he added his. And then he was running, first as a man, on two legs. And then Danil stretched his arms out before him and they just kept stretching. And he tumbled forward, running on four legs as fur sprouted over his skin. His haunches bunched and expanded, his head grew three times its size and his teeth severed the air as he gave an appreciative huff.

Danil lumbered through the woods, quickly leaving the sparse trees behind and following his brothers’ path up the mountain. He could follow their scent easily, but when they were in bear form, he could also hear their voices in his head, as if they were calling out to him.

With a last, galloping run, Danil burst into a familiar clearing, where they often met after they’d shifted. And there they were, his three brothers.

“Did you kiss her?” Maxim asked. His humongous bear was larger than the other three and a light, honey brown. He wasn’t the most vicious fighter, but his weight and creativity made him a formidable opponent.

“Of course not,” Danil snapped.

“Why of course not?” Emin asked. His bear was smaller and darker, and he was the fastest and had the keenest senses of the brothers. “She was a beautiful woman. Why wouldn’t you kiss her?”

“Because you heard her,” Danil said, his patience thin after the almost-kiss with Dora. Not even the running or the shifting had taken that edge off. “She was asking about Anton.”

Anton stood in the shadows. His bear was almost identical to Danil’s. Chestnut brown and big, they were both vicious fighters, ruthless. Except Anton had a series of scars across his back, and a thatch of bone-white fur down one side. They didn’t like to talk about how he’d come by those features. And now there was this woman, come into their lives and stirring it up.

“So what,” Maxim said, sniffing at a tree. “She can ask questions about the white bear all she wants, it’s not like she knows that it’s Anton.”

“Of course she’s not assuming we’re bear shifters,” Danil said, frustrated. “But I don’t like it. I met her for the first time down at the precinct today. She’d been arrested for trespassing for the second time in two days. And now she comes here, happening to ask about Anton? That’s suspicious to me.”

Anton was quiet in the underbrush. He was as still as a statue, absorbing the refreshing, wild calm of being in bear form. He hated when his brothers worried about him.

Emin looked up at the sky, noting the arc of the moon through the clouds. “We should get back. We’re gone too long, and Mama will worry.”

The brothers agreed with him, though none of them wanted to shift back to their human forms on such a beautiful night. Danil knew that Emin and Anton shifted any chance they could, and were often alone in the woods. But Danil and Maxim typically only shifted once a week at Sunday dinners, when they were all together. He cherished that time.

But they didn’t want their mother to worry, so they lumbered back down the mountain. Sometimes chasing and racing. Sometimes pausing to scent something in the wind. For animals of their tremendous size, they moved as quietly as cats through the pines.

They shifted back at the edge of the tree line, under the cover of the shadows. There weren’t any other houses for a few miles in any direction, but just in case, they wanted a little privacy. Although none of them had any problem walking naked back across the lawn, laughing and shoving and snickering.

They pulled on their clothes on the back porch. Anton froze, sniffing the air.

“AJ is here?” he asked in Belarusian.

“Yeah,” Danil replied, remembering her entrance in vivid detail. How Dora had looked in the tense, pulsing seconds before AJ had interrupted them.

Anton whipped his shirt on. “She walked here alone in the middle of the night?”

“It’s 9:30 on Sunday night,” Emin said, raising an eyebrow at his brother. They were all protective of AJ but none more than Anton.

Ten years ago, Anton, in his bear form, had been the one who’d found AJ in the woods, about to be attacked by a mountain lion. Unsure of what to do after he’d scared off the cat, Anton had brought her home to his mother. And AJ had been like a sister to them ever since. She was the only human in their lives who knew they were bear shifters. But her dramatic entrance into his life had always made Anton sensitive about choices she made.

“Yes, but she’d have had to cut through Shear Woods.” Foregoing his shoes, Anton stalked in through the back door of his house, obviously off to give AJ a piece of his mind about walking in the dark though the woods.

Maxim tugged on his own shirt and shook his hair out of his eyes. “He’s too hard on her.” He hurried after Anton to soften whatever harsh words were sure to be thrown AJ’s way.

Emin watched his brothers disappear into the house before he turned back to Danil. “I don’t know what to think about this woman asking questions.”

Danil shrugged. “I’ll figure out what she’s about and I’ll handle it.”

“Just like always.”

“Just like always,” Danil affirmed, a little smile on his face.

“That wasn’t a compliment,” Emin said, before he turned to go into the house himself.

He left Danil scowling out at the dark night, the ghost of a kiss on his lips.