The first forty-five minutes of the flight found Lauren gripping Kenzi’s hand so tightly until fear bleached the skin around her knuckles white. The thunderous rumble of the jet engines during take off and landing threatened her the most. An inexplicable fear of flying, another reason Dr. Lewis stayed away from airplanes unless absolutely necessary. Funny, she could face down slimy, spiny human reptiles with yellow eyes and horns or green-skinned soothsayers with mist for hair with nary a heartbeat out of rhythm, but she couldn’t steel her nerves on a plane, a simple, every day human invention. Earlier, when the idea of leaving came to her, she had thought of trains (limited distances, couldn’t take them far away enough) and ships (mostly pleasure cruises, and besides, the point of leaving was to put as much distance between her and Bo and the whole lot of them as quickly as possible. Booking passage on a ship required too much paperwork for a spontaneous departure.) These ideas began to pepper her thoughts even before she closed the last buttonhole of her blouse in Evony’s bedroom. Looking around the art deco suite, reveling in The Morrigan’s attempts to hold her panic at bay, Lauren felt a growing claustrophobia—not just in Evony’s compound but also in the Fae world in general. Anything and everything could be taken away from her in a moment’s notice. Dignity? She didn’t even know if she had any left. Fear? Her experiences with it varied, each time escalating the bar of what was defined as scary and delaying the point at which her body would begin to react—the accelerated heartbeat, a tingle on her spine, a cold sweat—it took more and more to get that response. Fear never stopped the fearful thing from coming. It would come anyway, ready or not, just as it did with Bo, the worst of her fears, when Bo chose Rainer over herself, over Dyson, over friendship itself. Bo’s words rattled at her even as she pleasured every inch of Evony. I chose you and you broke my heart.

You broke my heart. Bo had flung the words at her, her voice ringing with anger and hate. You broke my heart, the memory of it louder than Evony’s moans and demands for more. As Evony sank between her thighs, Lauren held her hand down, pumping her sex into her mouth, angrily, wanting her to choke and suck her broken heart away. She felt Evony smile between her legs, perhaps thinking that it was pleasure she was pulling from Lauren’s core. You broke my heart, the words stuck in Lauren’s throat as she came, wet heat spilling into Evony’s mouth as she arched her back, no other sound but Lauren’s labored breath and the triumphant coo of The Morrigan. I’m doing this for you Bo, everything I do has been for you. Even this.