Yeah, we like Raj. :)
Does Val?
Yeah.
As much as he can like anybody besides you and Taavi.
He likes you.
He even lets you call him Val.
Not that you ever do.
It’s weird.
Like calling your teacher by their first name.
You’re practically another brother in the Hart family at this point.
You should get used to it.
I can’t get over the fact that Judy named him that.
Neither can he.
It actually wasn’t asweird as I was making it out. Not anymore, anyway. It had been really weird when he’d first asked me to do it, but since that had been at a Hart family Christmas event, I’d seen the rationale. It didn’t really bother me to call him Val, but I was so used to him being Hart that it was still my default. And while Elliot got away with calling him Val around other people, I felt like me doing it was somehow disrespectful. A betrayal of trust.
No, I can’t really explain why. It just was.
I was sitting on the bed in the hotel room, Sassafras curled up against my thigh—the non-injured one—texting Elliot while Hart and Raj argued about what their next steps should be.
“We have to call them out on their fucking bullshit,” Hart argued. He was sitting on the other bed, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees. Raj—as tall as Hart, but broaderand smoothly muscled where Hart was all elegant angles—was pacing, the light mahogany skin of his forehead furrowed under a sweep of black hair.
It was impossible not to feel awkward and oafish in a room with these two.
Especially since if I wanted to go anywhere or do anything, I had to do it with two giant sticks—a.k.a. crutches—and one knee locked in place. I also had no car, so it wasn’t like I could go anywhere without Hart driving me, anyway.
“You want to admit to them that we’ve been lying?” Raj asked, his low voice smooth with a slight rumble that gave away a little bit of his felid second nature.
“We’re not the ones who are fucking lying,” Hart argued. “Theyfucking ran Elliot off the road and are claiming he’s dead when they have no fucking body.”
I didn’t much like talking about Elliot’s near-death, but I was starting to get used to it. The fact that Elliot was texting me at the same time made it a little easier, since I had immediate evidence that he was alive.
“Buttheyare assuming that he crawled off and died,” Raj pointed out reasonably. It seemed to be making Hart more agitated, and his pointed ears were starting to turn pink. “Whileweare pretending that we also think he’s dead, while we know that is is, in fact, very much not.”
“No thanks to those fuckers.”
“Maybe not,” Raj allowed. “But we are also technically concealing evidence.”
“Elliot isn’t fuckingevidence,” Hart growled. I had to agree with him, but I was leery of pissing off a giant tiger shifter. Not that I was genuinely concerned that Raj Parikh would actually hurt me, since he seemed to be a good guy and had saved Hart’s life more than once, but my wolf definitely had a very healthydose of respect for Raj’s tiger, and I could sense that even with both of us in fully human form.
Raj sighed, a long-suffering sound that made it clear he was used to dealing with Hart and his semi-volatile temper. “Fine. We’re concealing awitness, then.”
“For his own safety.”
“I’m not saying you did the wrong thing, Hart,” Raj explained, clearly trying to placate him. “But I am saying we can’t just run in there and start accusing them of lying without having evidence—or a witness—and without admitting that we’ve known Elliot wasn’t dead the whole time.” He shot a glare at Hart, who was spluttering a bit. “This requires somefinesse, something you, Keebler, utterly lack.”
Hart muttered something under his breath that I didn’t quite catch, although I thought I heard something about chickens, fuckers, and fists, but I might have been wrong. The fact that I missed most of it was fairly impressive, given that I have wolf hearing. Then again, Hart was engaged to a xolo shifter, whose bat-ears might have been even better than mine.
