I was stunned, nothing about this crisis was anodyne. Everything felt so entangled, uneasy, and tangerine. Absurd, how fear was suppressed by something surreal bubbling inside me. Not that Veles had me caged between him and Theodore’s legs, draped from the bed as he grasped my shoulders in a tight hold, but the way Ezra’s eyes were sparkling with darkness.

Ezra. The man I had least predicted to make me feel this way.

His toned muscles and chest was exposed to my eyes, a dark ink marking circled his bicep and spread through the upper portion of his chest that was pressed against Theodora’s back seconds ago. His long and...