Kirby understood why the apartment had been so expensive the instant she stepped into it. Aside from a small private enclosure at the back, there were no internal walls in the space that had to cover half a floor. The entire front wall was crystal clear reinforced glass, the floors a gleaming honey-colored wood.
Above, and to her right was a loft-style space that had to house a bed, while the left part of the central area held an arrangement of sofas and large floor cushions that looked decadently comfortable, an open kitchen on the other side.
The entire place was drenched in light.
“Beautiful,” she whispered.
The lines of stress easing from his expression—and why did that make her heart ache, make her want to kiss him, even as she continued to fight the more primitive urge to bite him—he clasped her hand. Sighing silently at the contact that felt deeply right, she allowed him to tug her toward the wall of glass, and to the door cleverly concealed within it.
There was a generous balcony beyond, with a view of the Bay, the water sparkling like shattered sapphires under the sunshine. Gripping the railing, the metal digging into her palms, she stared at him. “You’re rich. Really, really rich.”
Leaning back against the railing, arms propped on either side, he shrugged. “I’m good at making money, been investing my own income since I was a juvenile. Does it make a difference to you?” Green eyes glinting at her from beneath half-lowered lashes.
Kirby fought the urge to bare her teeth at him. What was wrong with her lately? The thought had barely formed when she moved faster than she’d believed she could. Tugging down his head with a hand fisted in his hair, she nipped sharply at his jaw. “Don’t make me even more mad than I am already.”
His grin creased his cheeks, his arms locking around her waist. “Bite me again.” At her narrow-eyed look, he nuzzled the side of her face before saying, “Truth is, I’d rather be at my aerie.” The leopard paced behind his eyes, its presence so strong that Kirby could almost see it.
Almost touch the gold and black of its fur.
“The days I can work from there,” Bastien continued, “I let my brothers, other packmates who want a night in the city, use this place, so we get our worth out of it.”
It betrayed so much of how he saw the world that he so naturally said “our” for a place that, to many other men, would’ve been a status symbol. For Bastien, she realized, it was his pack, his family, who were important, who mattered. She hurt with wanting the same—never had she fit in, always the constant outsider. And now . . .
“Please tell me what you know,” she said quietly, fear a metallic taste in the back of her mouth, a shivering rasp over her skin.
His expression stripped of any hint of humor, Bastien picked up one of her hands, a hand Kirby hadn’t realized she’d clenched by her side. “Open for me, little cat.”
As the blood rushed back into the strained-white flesh, he ran a single finger across the tips. “Do your fingertips ever tingle?”
Heart slamming hard against her ribs and mouth dry, she nodded. “Just recently.” She stared at her own fingers. “It’s not painful, but it prickles.”
Bastien continued to hold her hand, stroking his thumb absently over her skin. “In the weekend, the pain you felt”—wild green eyes capturing her own—“if I said it felt like something was trying to claw its way out, would I be right?”
Unable to accept what he was asking her to believe, she shook her head, broke the searing intimacy of the eye contact. “It can’t be. I’m human.”
Bastien cupped her jaw, turned her face back to him, the brush of his skin over her own almost succeeding in calming the skittering panic within. “Tell me about your parents.”
“I—” Her blood went cold. “My parents died when I was a toddler,” she whispered, the brutality of her history something she preferred to forget . . . a history that led to one inescapable conclusion, but for the impossibility of it. “The care services would hardly mistake a changeling child for human.”
“Not necessarily. Changelings don’t shift till around one year of age.”
“That’s how old I was when it happened.” She forced herself to recall the small number of facts that had seeped into her memory over the years, in spite of her refusal to access her own records. “My birth date is unknown but, according to one of my social workers, I was examined by a pediatrician and judged to be approximately twelve months old. If I hadn’t yet shifted, I should’ve soon after I was found.”
“Yes.” Bastien frowned. “How did you lose your parents?”
“In a fire.” She didn’t know much more than the basic details of that fire, her anger at her unknown parents for abandoning her a raw wound that had never healed. “I was found on the street dressed in one-piece pajamas covered in soot, the bottoms of my feet burned and bloody.