Cixi lay on her back and yanked the pillow over her head.

Stupid. Stupid. Treacherous, hormonal, undisciplined, complete and utter...

She did not move; her thighs still felt warm, her cheeks still burned, and her pulse still refused to slow down. Cassian Crown was going about his night with absolutely no idea what her own brain had just done to him.

She would never be able to look him in the eyes again after this dream, and she knew it with a heavy heart.

Yet she would have to.

Cixi pulled the pillow off her face. And read the message once again. Message from Cassian.

She stared at it for a long time.

She should have put the phone down. She should have rolled over. She should have typed back something curt and professional, the kind of reply that would not betray the fact that her thighs were still warm, her breath was still uneven, and the dream had not yet finished leaving her body.

Her fingers moved before her brain caught up with them. The screen blurred between her thumb and the call button. The phone was already at her ear before she had finished deciding whether she meant to do this, and his name was already dialling, and the small, traitorous part of her that had insisted on the call refused to be reasoned out of it.

She pressed the pillow against her chest with her free hand.

Her heart was luttering. She should not have called him. Yet she couldn’t stop the call.

The line connected on the second ring.

"Why are you missing me so much?" Cassian’s voice came through, suggesting he had been standing exactly where he was standing for some time and was simply curious to see how long it would take her to find him. "If you cannot sleep without me, I can send a selfie. So your night can pass faster."

Cixi pursed her lips. The pillow against her chest tightened by a fraction.

"Were you here?" Her voice came out hesitant. "A few seconds ago."

Cassian, who was standing on the balcony of his apartment, looked at his watch before he replied. The cigarette in his other hand sent a slow ribbon of smoke into the dark sky above the building.

"Where?"

"In the bedroom. The one I am sleeping in."

"In our bedroom." A faint smile entered his voice, and Cixi’s heart skipped a beat. "With you? Doing what?"

Cixi’s cheeks burned. "Stop playing with the words and answer me straight."

"Did you dream of me?"

Cixi did not reply to that. Infact, her eyes darted across the dim room, hunting for a simple syllable to say no, but the syllable refused to surface. It had been sitting on her tongue when he asked the question, and now it had drowned somewhere between her tongue and her teeth. The denial that should have been the easiest word in her vocabulary felt suddenly, inexplicably impossible. Why has it become this difficult?

She did not answer. And that was the answer, which Cassian heard.

While Cixi was trying to calm her heart, something moved in the corner of her room.

A soft swish. A whisper of fabric or shadow or air against air. Cixi’s head whipped to the right. Her breath stalled in her throat, and a sharp, involuntary gasp escaped her, the sound of a woman who had been holding herself together by a string and had just felt one of the strings snap.

"You sounded like you saw a ghost," Cassian remarked.

She did not reply but kept her eyes pinned on the corner where the movement had come from. Slowly, quietly, she reached for the lamp on the nightstand and twisted the switch with trembling fingers.

The amber glow widened and pushed back the shadow.

The corner was empty. No one was there....

The curtain hung still. The chair was unoccupied. The wardrobe doors were shut. Everything looked in its place.

Cixi pressed the phone closer to her ear. "I think someone is in my room," she whispered.

"If you want me near you right now, you only have to ask." His voice was patient. "There is no need to invent a ghost."

Cixi rolled her eyes and wanted to curse him, kicking his head and telling him ghosts are real.

He had no idea ghosts were real. He had no idea that the woman currently whispering into his phone was supposed to be one tonight, that at this hour she should already be out in her grey, weightless second form, drifting through the city with the Empress Dowager’s scythe slung at her hip, harvesting whichever soul had been added to her list today. Instead, she was here. In a four-poster bed. Sweating through silk sheets. Having sex dreams about the Devil, whose mouth she could still feel on her collarbone.

She glanced at the clock on the mantle.

Eleven.

How was she still in her human body at eleven o’clock? Why had the Reaper not come for her tonight? And of all the things her cursed body could have done with an unscheduled hour of consciousness, why had it chosen to dream of him?

She pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead.

"Cassian." Her voice dropped lower. "I am serious. I think I saw someone move." She tucked her feet beneath her and settled back on her heels on the mattress, knees folded under her like a child preparing to listen to a frightening story. "I felt it earlier as well. Like someone was watching me. This is the second time."

She slid off the bed.

Her bare feet met the cold floor. She rose into a crouch and tiptoed slowly toward the corner, her free hand braced against the bedpost, the phone pressed hard against her ear.

"Is there a secret door in this room?" she whispered. "One that a family member would know about?"

Another thought arrived before the first had finished.

"What if someone kills me in my sleep?"

The question left her mouth before she could catch it.

A second behind it, the realisation arrived.

You cannot die, Cixi.

A small, traitorous wave of relief washed through her chest. The Reaper had been thorough about that part of the curse. No knife. No bullet. No poison in the soup. Whoever wanted to murder her in her sleep was welcome to try. Her own body would politely refuse the invitation.

"Why do you worry so much?" Cassian’s voice came through her ear, low and certain, "When you already know, I will kill any person who looks at you the wrong way?"

"Well." Cixi straightened slightly. "You are not here, are you? To protect me?"

"I think you need sleep, Lousy Kisser."

"Stop calling me Lousy Kisser." She turned in a slow circle in the centre of the room, scanning every corner. "I am not that bad."

"I admire," Cassian said, "how positively you think about yourself."

Cixi did not utter a word.

She had been about to argue. She had a list of arguments. She had been mentally drafting at least three of them. But somewhere between her search of the corner and the sound of his voice through the phone, her mind had wandered, treacherous and slow, back to the dream.

Back to the way he had unbuttoned the shirt.

Back to the way he had said her name.

Her thighs warmed again, the heat blooming low and steady, and her free hand drifted involuntarily to her own collarbone, where, in the dream, his mouth had been.

"Are you sure you were not with me?" she asked quietly. "You did not come into this room?"

"If you want a video call, as you miss me a lot, Lousy Kisser, all you have to do is ask. I would gladly make your wish come true."

He was teasing her. He was teasing her, and he knew exactly what he was teasing her about, and the worst part was that her body was in no position to be subtle about any of it.

"Yes." Her voice was softer than she meant it to be. "I miss you a lot."

She did not know why she said it.

She meant it as a weapon. A retort. A way to match his energy and throw it back at him. But the words landed differently than she intended. They came out softer than she planned, quieter, carrying a weight she had not put there on purpose. And somewhere in the silence that followed, Cixi understood that she was no longer playing.

She did miss him. She missed him so much it sat in her chest like something physical, heavy and warm, pressing against her ribs from the inside.

On the other end of the line, standing on a balcony with a dying cigarette between his fingers and the city spread beneath him like a kingdom, the corner of Cassian’s lips curled upward.

He said nothing. He let the silence hold. He let her words sit in the air between them, unretracted and undenied, and he held the phone against his ear and smiled.

While she was busy biting her lips.... staring at the mirror on the ceiling above the bed, Cassian watched Cixi through the reflection, a smile playing on his lips.

One thing Cixi overlooked, however, was that the mirror always displayed an image, even when the entire room was shrouded in darkness. In the darkness it illuminated the figure of Cixi...