Page 85 of Tracking Snow

"Snow," he growls against my mouth.

"Keep moving."

The arched window above us is cracked open a few inches. Old wood. Warped frame. Perfect.

I hook one boot on the railing, grab the front of his shirt, and kiss him harder as I shove him toward it.

He goes through backward with a muffled curse, catching the sill just enough to keep from crashing.

I scramble in after him.

We're in what's left of a choir loft. Broken pews stacked along one wall, an organ with its pipes stripped out for scrap, and a long blue bar of moonlight laid across the dust from the arched window we came through. Two stories down, through old wood and older prayers, the meeting drones on, the microphone reduced to a hum with the words rubbed off.

The loft has been holding the day's heat for hours. August lives up here, the air thick with old varnish and dust, and then there's Four, crowding me back against the organ case, raising the temperature another ten degrees just by wanting me in it.

His mouth finds my ear. "So I'm your boyfriend?"

"Not every guy would murder for a girl he stalks the city nightly with. I can’t help but think it means something." I try to sound nonchalant about both the boyfriend thing and the murder, which isn't easy when he's nibbling on that spot on my neck that legit makes me go blind.

I'm still not sure how I feel about the murdering of Jimi Dirt-Face, but I've been in situations before where it came down to me or him, and Two believed it had.

"Oh, it means something," he assures me.

He hauls his hoodie and tee off in one yank, both layers together, and the moonlight lands on all that bare skin already shining with sweat, the air above his shoulders going wavy. He unties my leather top with fingers that have stopped pretending to be careful and gets his hot, hungry mouth on me, and my eyes roll back as my fingers claw into his hair.

Sweat slides down my spine and pools at the small of my back. Between August and a fire mage, this loft is going to cook us both, and I cannot find one single part of me that cares.

"You know what it does to me?" he says into my breast, voice gone rough. "Waiting my turn. Knowing our body got to be near you all week and it wasn't me in it. I count the days, Snow. I count the hours."

Heat that has nothing to do with his magic rolls through my belly. Of all of them, Four wants the most unabashedly.

He drops to his knees in the dust and peels my leather shorts down. They cling, sweat-stuck, fighting him the whole way over my hips, and he growls at them, low in his chest, a sound I feel in the backs of my knees. The shorts hit my boots. He looks at my fishnets.

I expect him to drag them down too.

He doesn't. He hooks two fingers into the weave at the crotch and tears, one short brutal rip, nylon snapping in a line of tiny sharp stings against my inner thighs. He leaves the rest of them on me.

"Those were eighteen dollars," I breathe.

"I'll buy you a hundred pairs." Then he goes still. Under the ruined net there's my thong, a thin black string of almost nothing, soaked through and hiding zero of what he's done to me. He exhales like a man in church for entirely the wrong reasons. "You even bothered wearing this? This tiny nothing little scrap?"

"Protection is protection," I quip.

"It won't protect you from me." He hooks the string aside with one finger, pulls my knee over his shoulder, heeled boot and all, and his breath lands hot on bare skin. "Look at you. Dripping for me already. I haven't even licked that cute little clit yet."

"Four," I breathe in sharply.

"I know, baby, but keep quiet. The window's open."

He is not quiet. He puts his mouth on me through the torn-open net and groans like it’s the meal of his life, and I stop having opinions about anything.

His mouth is hot, like the first second of bathwater you should have tested, and every nerve I own crowds down to meet it.

The ripped edges of nylon drag against my skin with every pass of his tongue, and the thong string keeps sliding in his way. By the third time, he pinches it between two fingertips and there's a tiny breath of smoke and the string just isn't there anymore, burned clean through, gone, and the fact that he didn't even pause should not do to me what it does.

"Now you owe me a new pair of panties," I gasp.

He leans back an inch, lips shining, eyes hooded. "Snow. If this is how I die, smothered in this perfect pussy, you let it happen," he says, ignoring my complaint. "You let me go happy. Don't you dare pull me off."