House of Earth and Blood (Crescent City #1) by Sarah J. Maas

“Unfortunately, I don’t think the size differences between you and Athalar would work in the bedroom. You’re barely big enough to wrap your arms around his dick.”

Smoke swirled around Lehabah at her puff of embarrassment, and the sprite waved her little hands to clear it away. “BB!”

Bryce chuckled, then she gestured to the tablet. “I’m not the one who’s bingeing a show that’s basically porn with a plot. What’s it called again? Fangs and Bangs?”

Lehabah turned purple. “It’s not called that and you know it! And it’s artistic. They make love. They don’t …” She choked.

“Fuck?” Bryce suggested dryly.

“Exactly,” Lehabah said with a prim nod.

Bryce laughed, letting it chase away the swarming ghosts of the past, and the sprite, despite her prudishness, joined her. Bryce said, “I doubt Hunt Athalar is the making love type.”

Lehabah hid her face behind her hands, humming with mortification.

Just to torture her a bit more, Bryce added, “He’s the type to bend you over a desk and—”

The phone rang.

She glanced at the ceiling, wondering if Athalar had somehow heard, but—no. It was worse.

“Hi, Jesiba,” she said, motioning Lehabah back to her guardian’s perch in case the sorceress was monitoring through the library’s cameras.

“Bryce. Glad to see Lehabah is hard at work.”

Lehabah quickly shut down the tablet and did her best to look alert. Bryce said, “It was her midmorning break. She’s entitled to one.”

Lehabah threw her a grateful glance that cut right to the bone.

Jesiba just began rattling off commands.

Thirty minutes later, at the desk in the gallery showroom, Bryce stared toward the shut front door. The ticking of the clock filled the space, a steady reminder of each second lost. Each second that Danika and the pack’s killer roamed the streets while she sat in here, checking bullshit paperwork.

Unacceptable. Yet the thought of prying open the door to those memories …

She knew she’d regret it. Knew it was probably ten kinds of stupid. But she dialed the number before she could second-guess it.

“What’s wrong.” Hunt’s voice was already sharp, full of storms.

“Why do you assume something’s wrong?”

“Because you’ve never called me before, Quinlan.”

This was stupid—really fucking stupid. She cleared her throat to make up some excuse about ordering food for lunch, but he said, “You found something?”

For Danika, for the Pack of Devils, she could do this. Would do this. Pride had no place here. “I need you to … help me with something.”

“With what?” But before his words finished sounding, a fist banged on the door. She knew it was him without pulling up the camera feed.

She opened the door, getting a face full of wings and rain-kissed cedar. Hunt asked wryly, “Are you going to give me shit about coming in or can we spare ourselves that song and dance?”

“Just get inside.” Bryce left Hunt in the doorway and walked to her desk, where she hauled open the bottom drawer to yank out a reusable bottle. She drank straight from it.

Hunt shut the door after himself. “A little early to be drinking, isn’t it?”

She didn’t bother to correct him, just took another sip and slid into her chair.

He eyed her. “You gonna tell me what this is about?”

A polite but insistent thump-thump-thump came from the iron door down to the library. Hunt’s wings snapped shut as he turned his head toward the heavy metal slab.

Another tap-tap-tap filled the showroom atrium. “BB,” Lehabah said mournfully through the door. “BB, are you all right?”

Bryce rolled her eyes. Cthona spare her.

Hunt asked too casually, “Who is that?”

A third little knock-knock-knock. “BB? BB, please say you’re all right.”

“I’m fine,” Bryce called. “Go back downstairs and do your job.”

“I want to see you with my own eyes,” Lehabah said, sounding for all the world like a concerned aunt. “I can’t focus on my work until then.”

Hunt’s brows twitched toward each other—even as his lips tugged outward.

Bryce said to him, “One, hyperbole is an art form for her.”

“Oh, BB, you can be so terribly cruel—”

“Two, very few people are allowed downstairs, so if you report to Micah about it, we’re done.”

“I promise,” Hunt said warily. “Though Micah can make me talk if he insists.”

“Then don’t give him a reason to be curious about it.” She set the bottle on her desk, and found her legs were surprisingly sturdy. Hunt still towered over her. The horrible twining thorns tattooed across his brow seemed to suck the light from the room.

But Hunt rubbed his jaw. “A lot of the stuff down there is contraband, isn’t it.”

“Surely you’ve realized most of the shit in here is contraband. Some of these books and scrolls are the last known copies in existence.” She pursed her lips, then added quietly, “A lot of people suffered and died to preserve what’s in the library downstairs.”

More than that, she wouldn’t say. She hadn’t been able to read most of the books, since they were in long-dead languages or in codes so clever only highly trained linguists or historians might decipher them, but she’d finally learned last year what most of them were. Knew the Asteri and the Senate would order them destroyed. Had destroyed all other copies. There were normal books in there, too, which Jesiba acquired mostly for her own uses—possibly even for the Under-King. But the ones that Lehabah guarded … those were the ones people would kill for. Had killed for.