Dark Champion (Flirting with Monsters #4) - Eva Chase Page 0,106

twitch. Were they nervous or just eager about whatever they were up to—or maybe a little of both?

Snap jumped up, beaming bright, apparently the ringleader of this particular venture. “We have something for you,” he announced, and held out his hand to take mine.

It’d never been easy for me to deny the devourer, and I had no interest in doing so now. I reached for him, but rather than twining his fingers through mine, he gently folded them all toward my palm except my index finger. In his other hand, he produced a glinting band that he slid down my finger to the root.

The ring was delicate, so light I could barely feel its weight, rose and white gold woven together in a vine-like pattern. “It’s beautiful,” I said, meaning it even if I didn’t totally understand what had sparked this fervor for jewelry.

Ruse had gotten up too. He took my hand from Snap and eased a ring of his own down my middle finger, equally light but this one with a pattern that looked like merging waves. I stared down at the two rings side by side, a fizzy feeling collecting in my stomach.

Before I could say anything, Thorn loomed over me. His broad fingers clasped mine less deftly but with just as much affection as the other two. The band he fit onto my ring finger shone with the same contrasting metals in an intricate spiral.

As Omen stood, the fizzing sensation welled into my chest. The hellhound shifter lifted my hand and guided a final ring over my pinkie. The strands of rose and white gold merged together like flames.

Snap touched my shoulder, leaning in to nuzzle my hair. “You told me before that humans give each other rings to show their highest form of commitment. When they want to be with only that person and no one else, always.”

“Not that we haven’t made our devotion to you awfully clear, Miss Blaze,” Ruse added. “But our devourer here felt a concrete token was in order, and the rest of us could see his point.”

Thorn rested his hand on my back and ran his thumb up and down with a stroke of warmth. “Obviously we wouldn’t require that you wear them, especially when they might interfere with your endeavours. I must say it’s pleasing to see them all together like this on your lovely hand, though.”

I raised my eyes to meet Omen’s. Maybe there wasn’t any literal magic in this gesture, but it was a symbolic binding, one I could feel in the fizzing sensation that had now spread through my whole body. It’d been less than a year since the hellhound shifter had sensed the official severing of his deal with the Highest—no acknowledgment from them, just a sudden falling away of their hold that had made him jump up with a joyfully relieved cry he hadn’t been able to restrain.

Less than a year since he’d won the freedom he’d lost for centuries.

“And you’re ready to commit too, are you?” I said.

All it would have taken was for him to shrug it off or make some disparaging remark, and he could have shattered any meaning the ring contained. Instead, he gazed right back at me, a hint of a smile playing with his lips. “I’m afraid you’re stuck with me, Disaster. Be glad I went subtle—I could have pulled out the chains again.”

Any tension to the giddiness inside me broke with that joke. I knuckled his chest, unable to contain a huge smile of my own. “Hey, chains have their place. Just as long as you don’t mind that you ended up with the little finger.”

Omen tapped Thorn and Snap on either side of him, both of them standing half a foot taller than the shifter’s well-built frame. “I think I’ve amply proven that smaller isn’t necessarily lesser.”

“Hey!” Snap said.

The wingéd let out a rumbling chuckle, and a second later we were all laughing. I closed my hand, admiring my rings shimmering next to each other and reveling in the warmth from the larger circle formed by my lovers around me.

“Thank you. You picked them well. I don’t think they’ll get in the way under my gloves.” I tugged my lovers one by one into a kiss. “That’s to hold you over until I can return the gesture, which you’d better believe I will. Here’s to some good thieving tonight!”

“Scouting complete!” Gisele hollered from where she must have just emerged in the RV’s main room, her melodic voice