“Of course she said yes!” an exasperated Livy exploded. “Because she’s Blayne and is marrying a man who clearly has no control over her.”

“You could still say no.”

“And then you know what will happen?”

“She’ll make you sad with her tears of pain?”

“More like I’ll rip her face off because of her goddamn tears of pain.”

“That will cause awkward times on your derby team.”

“Don’t care. But Toni will care because the Smith Pack loves Blayne. And that matters now that Toni is with Ricky Lee.”

“Your life is very complex.”

Livy burrowed deeper into Vic’s jacket, looking way more adorable than she had a right to. “I know.”

“So you’re feeling like a sellout?” Vic asked.

Livy briefly wondered if she could permanently live in this jacket. It smelled good and made her feel surprisingly warm in the bracing East Coast cold. “Yes. Besides, what idiot would turn down that kind of cash?” She peeked over the collar of the jacket to look directly at Vic. “It’s an ungodly amount of money. Un. God. Ly.”

“But didn’t Da Vinci work for royals? And the Church?”

“Huh?”

“Renaissance painters, the good ones, were commissioned to paint royals all the time. Bach and Mozart wrote music for royals.”

“Your point?”

“You do what you have to during the day, so you can do what you love at night. Money, sadly, gives you freedom. Unless of course you plan to go off the grid, set up house in the middle of nowhere, and live off the land completely. I call that the Full Ted Kaczynski.”

“Because I love being compared to a paranoid schizophrenic.”

“We both know you’re not a schizophrenic.”

Livy smirked. “Thanks for that.”

“All I’m saying is if you can get top dollar doing work that’ll take you a few hours, thereby freeing you up to work on your real stuff . . . who cares? Unless, of course, you believe this is as good as you’ll ever be—a wedding photographer for rich shifters who aren’t intimidated by honey badgers.”

When Livy scrunched herself deeper into Vic’s coat, the hybrid smiled.

“You’ve gotta know that’s not the case here.”

“Do I? I’ve got nothing new to show for my gallery opening—”

“Then do limited prints of your early work.”

Livy let the silence stretch for a bit before she asked, “May I finish?”

“Sure. But you know I’m right.”

Livy sighed. “Yes. I know you’re right. I guess I just wanted to—”

“Prove you haven’t lost your creative genius?”

“Would you stop doing that?” Livy snarled, annoyed and surprised Vic understood her so well. Even Toni hadn’t been fully grasping Livy’s concerns lately, but the jackal also had a billion more things to worryabout these days than just her family’s performance schedules.

“Sorry. Feel free to go on.”

But Livy had nothing else to say.

“Livy?”

“What?”

“It’s okay to be afraid sometimes.”

“I’m a honey badger. I’m fearless.”

“In a fight? Yeah. Around snakes? Definitely. But this isn’t a fight or snakes. It’s something intensely personal that the average person would never understand.”

“Then how come you do?”

Vic looked at her, his painfully bright gold eyes glinting in the darkness from the light seeping out of the kitchen windows.

“So you’re calling me average?” he asked.

Startled, Livy said, “No. I’m not calling you average.”

“So you think I’m astounding?”

“Astounding? How did we get to astounding? You didn’t even pause at above average. Just leapt to astounding.”

Vic stood, grinned. “I notice you didn’t actually dispute astounding, though.”

“Well—”

“No, no,” he said quickly, reaching down and lifting her, then carrying her toward the back door. “Let’s not ruin the moment.”

After dinner and a few hours of TV watching, Ira went out to the backyard so she could inform her husband of “why I’m not coming home tonight, you bonehead,” and Vic carried his sleeping nephew up to bed. He changed him into his favorite Captain America pajamas and tucked him in for the night. Then he went to his room and closed the door behind him.

Vic took off his clothes, pulled on a pair of black sweatpants, and crawled into bed. This time under the covers.

Happy to be home—even if there was a giant panda sleeping on his couch—Vic let out a relieved breath and settled in for the night.

As Vic began to drift off, he thought about dinner. The food had been delicious and the company more than tolerable, which for Vic was a big thing. He might put up with a lot on any given day, but that didn’t mean he found those things tolerable. And yet, he’d truly enjoyed Livy’s company. She wasn’t painfully chatty, so when she did speak, her words had meaning and were often direct. He also discovered she was extremely well-read, but not a snob about it, and she had a vast amount of knowledge about really bad TV. It turned out she would flip on a channel and just leave it for the night while she worked—no matter what came on. She told them it was background noise that helped her focus, but she seemed to be fully aware of every storyline of every show she’d seen, from bad romantic comedies to bad biographies about the latest “story of survival” headline to the names and history of common reality TV superstars. Yet she retold those overblown shows with such a jaundiced eye that Vic knew he’d gladly have her over for dinner again. Because nothing had as high a meaning to someone with his Russian heritage as excellent dinner company.