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something else. You didn’t see me anymore. What . . . who were you thinking about while you looked at me?” His face was still almost impossibly handsome; without the hair, the cheekbones that had helped give him the darker skin tone sculpted his face to painful perfection, but the anger was there too now, and that wasn’t attractive. Of all the men in my life, only he’d ever used his rage against me.

“Ma petite,” Jean-Claude said, and his nickname for me was enough. He meant for me to try to fix this. I understood. This was the closest we’d ever gotten with our Richard to something workable. The moment I thought our Richard, I knew it wasn’t my thought. I’d ceased to think of him as mine, but that was okay; we needed this to work the way kids need their fighting parents to make up before the divorce splits the family and the possessions. The problem with the three of us was that the “possessions” included people. More than any child, the vampires and werewolves and other shapeshifters in this city were possessions. We needed to grow up and fix this.

“You, Richard. I was thinking about the first time I saw you. You were in Jean-Claude’s bed in the offices at the Circus of the Damned with the woman shapeshifter beside the bed. You were both nude, and I never asked what you were doing in the bed with a naked woman in the room. I never asked how you ended up there like that.”

The anger began to seep away, leaving his face confused, more real somehow. “What do you want me to say about it?”

“I don’t know. I was just thinking that I never questioned it. I never asked if you and Rashada were lovers. You asked me out the same night, so I assumed you weren’t dating anyone else. Was I naïve, Richard? Was I just that naïve then?”

His face softened, and he smiled. He came to us then, not angry, or arrogant, but gently. I was able to watch his face as he moved instead of staring lower. Point for me, but honestly the look on his face in that moment meant more to me than seeing him nude.

He touched my face, and his skin was warmer than it should have been. A warmth to cuddle against on a cold night, and I moved my face against that touch, and he turned his hand so that I could lay the side of my face in the warm cup of it.

“We both were,” he said softly, and I realized his other hand had reached past me. I turned my head, and his hand was big enough that my face still rested against it when I could see that he was touching Jean-Claude’s hair.

Richard drew us in toward him until our faces were close together. They had to bend down to touch their faces to mine. Jean-Claude’s and my hair mingled, all black curls, so that it was hard to tell whose hair was whose. Richard’s hands were on the back of our heads, fingers worked through the curls so I could feel them on the back of my skull. His fingers moved against my skin as if he were massaging. I knew he was doing the same to Jean-Claude. I could have had the tactile memory to go with it, truly felt what Jean-Claude was feeling, but he knew that freaked me out, so we’d been working on me simply knowing without the whole show. I just knew what Richard was doing.

He pressed our faces together and whispered, “If we’d known what would happen, would we have run from each other?”

I didn’t know what to say to that, but Jean-Claude did. “Ask, rather, mon ami, if we would all be alive now, if we had not had each other to turn to in times of trouble? Ask how many of our vampires and wolves would be dead, or trapped by sadistic masters?”

“Not just my wolves,” Richard said. “Anita and Micah have helped a lot of the shapeshifters in town.” I heard his breath go out in a long sigh. He moved his head enough to lay his lips on my forehead. It was almost too soft to be called a kiss. “If you want to keep Asher as your second, your témoin, and keep the werehyenas in town, we have to tame him.”

“Oui,” Jean-Claude said.

“Define tame,” I said.

Richard laughed, pulling back enough to look at both