Sunglasses at Night (Claws Clause 3)

Adam pressed his lips together.

“Why did you let him?”

Because I’d rather have you alive than him dead.

“You need to rest,” he said again, gentler this time. “Me, too. The sun’s out so I’m not going anywhere. We’ll talk tonight.”

“Adam—”

“Tonight, Tab. Okay?”

And, before she could try to convince him to stay, he bolted for the door and, feeling like a major asshole and a coward, made his escape.

With Adam’s help, Tabby moved from the Bumptown back to her rented apartment in Grayson the same night.

She was grateful for Colt’s hospitality and Shea’s support, but the second her body shook off the last of Priscilla Winters’ hit, Tabby wanted out of the bed.

Adam was right, damn him. She needed to rest. After an extended nap, she woke up just as the sun was going down, ready to go.

The healer was surprised to see her recover so quickly—not Tabby. It was part of what made her family suited to be slayers after all.

It was like how the magic imbued into certain slayer weapons could sense a person’s aura and tell whether they were human or not; if Para, then what kind. There was something in a slayer’s make-up: they didn’t produce any aura at all. They were quick, they were strong, and they had a high tolerance for pain. Basically, the perfect hunter so long as they had a weapon in hand.

Add that to Tabby’s tendency to want to get up and move and, despite Adam’s obvious concern and Shea’s invitation to stay, as soon as the sun went down again, she needed to get out of there.

And, no, it had nothing to do with waking up after her nap to discover the nearly faded phantom of an early twentieth-century gangster hovering over her, why do you ask?

Tabby hadn’t screamed. Her first reaction was to grab Venice and send it flying end over end at him. Unfortunately, since Dodge McCoy was a ghost, it didn’t do anything except pass right through him before landing on the floor with a clank that had Adam bursting into the room.

Because Adam was still there.

Because the Nightwalker had barely left her si

de.

She still couldn’t get over the conversation they had that morning, when she first woke up. She’d found it difficult to believe what Shea had told her, until Adam confessed that he had let Rafe Silverson get away all because she got hurt.

He gave up his chance to kill the Nightwalker responsible for his change… for her?

It seemed like Shea was right. Maybe Adam did care more than she thought.

He purposely didn’t mention the Alpha’s mate or her pregnancy again. Tabby began to wonder if that meant she was forgiven after all, and when Adam asked if she would invite him inside after he drove her home that night, she decided that she was.

And she couldn’t be more relieved.

Maybe he shouldn’t have begged for an invitation upstairs, Adam thought as he followed Tabby into her apartment, but it just slipped out. The idea of letting her out of his sight for even a second had him seeing red, the beginnings of an unholy bloodlust gripping him.

And not only because she had shared her blood with him twice now. Ever since he saw the other Nightwalker bowed over her, feed on his slayer, he felt this urge to slaughter the entire world if it meant he could keep her safe.

He knew what this was. It didn’t take a vamp expert to figure out that he was struggling with the incomplete bond that existed between him and Tabby. Now that Deb had pointed it out to him, he could… he could almost feel it. The way it twisted around his heart, ripping out of his chest, reaching for Tabby.

It was there and he couldn’t deny it.

But it was more than that, too.

While Shea was checking in on Tabby in the upstairs guest room, Adam searched out Colt in his workshed. Though he knew better than to disturb the ornery shifter while he was working—Pretty Boy was such an anal-retentive dick over his private space—he’d been surprised to find Colt waiting for him, his safety glasses and earplugs already put away in their proper place.

Turned out Dodge had a big mouth and a tendency to snoop; that or Deb had gossiped with the ghost. Either way, Dodge had told Colt that Adam was in the middle of bonding Tabby to him.