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The first time Peter Hale met Stiles Stilinski, Stiles was seventeen, furious, and standing barefoot in the middle of a crossroads at midnight.
He had buried the box correctly: bone, photograph, graveyard dirt, and the last twenty dollars from his wallet folded beneath it. Most people cried when Peter appeared.
Stiles merely looked him over. “You aren't what I expected.”
“You expected horns?” Peter asked, one brow lifting.
“Honestly?” Stiles narrowed his eyes. “Yes.”
Fifteen years later, three days before the contract came due, Stiles disappeared.
A soul under contract was never truly hidden from the demon who held it. Peter could feel every one of his, distant sometimes but always present, each tethered to him by a hook buried beneath the breastbone.
Stiles’s simply went silent.
Four years later, at eleven forty-three on a Thursday night, Stiles existed again.
His soul struck Peter’s senses with such sudden clarity that he went still in the middle of a crowded room.
There you are.
Peter crossed the distance between them without bothering with roads and found Stiles living in a second-floor apartment above a laundromat in a town with no meaningful name. The apartment smelled of burnt coffee and laundry soap, while rain tapped softly against the windows. Peter appeared inside the narrow living room with hellfire already gathered beneath his skin, prepared for wards, traps, salt, perhaps even the crude remains of an exorcism. He had done this before. People always tried to renege when Peter came to collect his due.
Stiles was sitting on the edge of the bed in gray sleep pants and an old T-shirt, one bare foot resting against the floor and a mug cradled between his hands. He looked older than he had when Peter last saw him, naturally. The years had sharpened some edges and softened others.
What caught Peter off guard was how completely at ease Stiles seemed with his sudden appearance. Most people at least had the decency to look surprised.
Instead, Stiles lifted the mug in greeting. “Took you long enough.”
The satisfaction of finding him curdled immediately into suspicion. Peter glanced around, and then he noticed it: the thrum of power barely beneath the surface. “You lowered the wards.”
“Good evening to you too.”
“When did you learn to do that?” Peter asked, his curiosity genuine despite himself.
Stiles looked down into his mug. “Had some time on my hands.”
“Nineteen years.”
One corner of Stiles’s mouth lifted as he glanced up. “You kept count.”
“I keep accurate records.”
“Of course you do.”
Peter let his gaze travel over the apartment. The wards were still there, though lowered now, their remnants pressed into the walls in dense, overlapping layers. His gaze flicked back to Stiles, and the shape of it became clearer. The power did not belong to the wards. It was coming from within him. “You did not possess a spark when we made our agreement.”
“Maybe you didn’t look closely enough.”
“I looked closely enough to know exactly what I was buying.”
Stiles’s expression tightened briefly before smoothing out again. “Then I guess you got a bonus.”
“A bonus that concealed my property from me for four years.”
“Property? Good to know some things don’t change.”
“Some things are written into binding contracts.”
“And some things develop after signing.” Stiles took another sip.
That was true, though Peter disliked hearing it from him. Whatever power now moved beneath Stiles’s skin had not been there nineteen years ago, or it had been too faint to notice, no more than a dormant ember buried beneath an ordinary human soul. It was neither faint nor dormant now. Peter could feel it tangled through the remnants of the wards, bright and restless, threaded so deeply into the spellwork that it could not have been borrowed.
“You built these yourself,” Peter said.
“Eventually.”
“How many attempts?”
Stiles considered that. “Do the ones that nearly killed me count?”
“Yes.”
“Then I've lost track.”
Peter’s curiosity sharpened. “And yet you managed to sever the tether between us.”
“Mute it.”
Peter's eyes narrowed. Because it was true. For years, Peter had been unable to hear Stiles through the contract or find the tether that should have led him straight there. Now it was as loud as it had ever been.
Stiles lowered the mug. “I couldn’t sever it. Believe me, I tried. I could only make myself quiet enough that you couldn’t hear me.”
“For four years.”
“For four years,” Stiles agreed.
Peter watched him carefully. “Why can I hear you now?”
Stiles took another drink from his mug, and in the silence that followed, realization slowly settled into place.
“Because you let me.”
Stiles’s mouth curved against the rim. The confirmation landed harder than words would have.
Peter crossed the remaining distance between them. “You hid from me for four years, learned enough magic to make a contracted soul disappear, and then simply decided to stop?”
“I wouldn’t call it simple.”
“No?”
“No.” Stiles lowered the mug and lifted his gaze to Peter’s. “You’re here, aren’t you?”
Peter studied him. There was no fear in Stiles’s expression. Not enough, anyway, and certainly not the kind Peter had seen countless times when a contract reached its end and the person who had signed it finally understood that desperation did not nullify their freely given consent, and regret did not void a contract.
Stiles had invited him in, not across the threshold or into the apartment, but into whatever came next.
“Why?” Peter asked.
Stiles looked down at the coffee again. “You always ask the least interesting questions.”
Peter took the mug from his hand. Stiles let him, offering no resistance as Peter glanced at the contents and found the coffee cold.
He set it on the table beside the bed. “Then give me an interesting answer.”
Stiles leaned back on his hands and looked up at him. “I invoke the Right of Claim.”
Peter went still.
For one suspended moment, nothing happened. Then the contract answered.
Heat rolled through the apartment, deep and sudden, shuddering the windows in their frames as the lights flickered once and dimmed to a low amber glow. A thin black line surfaced beneath Stiles’s collarbone, curling across his skin to form the first stroke of Peter’s sigil before sinking out of sight again.
The Right had been recognized.
Peter felt the terms settle around them with the clean finality of a blade dropping into place.
Until dawn.
After that, there would be no contract, no tether, and no second invocation. Either Peter collected what he was owed tonight, or Stiles’s soul would be lost to him forever.
“You have been studying,” Peter said.
“I had some incentive.”
“You invoked it yourself.”
“I’m aware.”
Peter caught Stiles by the jaw and tipped his face upward. “Do you understand what you have done?”
Stiles’s eyes flicked toward the darkened window. “Sunrise is at six fourteen.”
Peter pressed his thumb into the soft skin beneath Stiles’s chin. “You spent four years beyond my reach only to place yourself willingly under claim.”
“Technically, I was always under claim.”
“Do not play with semantics.”
A faint smile touched Stiles’s mouth. “You’re a crossroads demon, Peter. Semantics are your entire business model.”
Peter tightened his grip. Stiles’s pulse beat faster beneath his fingers now, but the smile remained.
“What do you want?” Peter asked.
“There’s that boring question again.”
“You summoned me by lowering your wards and invoked a right that will either cost you your soul or strip me of it permanently. I am rapidly losing patience with your performance.”
Something shifted in Stiles’s expression. It was not fear but anticipation, bright and unmistakable once Peter recognized it.
“I didn’t summon you,” Stiles said quietly. “I let you hear me again.”
Peter stared at him as Stiles leaned forward as far as Peter’s hold allowed.
“There’s a difference,” Stiles smirked, pleased with himself.
Peter’s grip remained firm beneath Stiles’s jaw. “Enlighten me.”
“A summons would have compelled you.” Stiles’s gaze moved over Peter’s face, lingering with an openness that felt more dangerous than the wards had. “I only made myself visible. You decided to come.”
“You belong to me.”
Stiles hummed. “So you keep claiming.”
“It is a statement of fact.”
“Sure.” Stiles leaned another fraction closer. “But you felt me and dropped whatever you were doing to come running.”
“I did not run.”
“You literally appeared in my living room out of thin air.”
Peter stared at him. Stiles’s pulse had accelerated beneath his fingers, but there was no retreat in him, no attempt to disguise the warmth rising into his face. The anticipation Peter had recognized was not directed toward dawn or whatever scheme Stiles had constructed around it.
It was directed at him.
The realization rearranged the room.
Peter growled in frustration. “Get there!”
“Do I look like I’m in the habit of explaining my plans to demons?”
“You look like someone with less than seven hours left to reconsider his arrogance.”
Stiles glanced toward the clock beside the bed. “Six hours and four minutes, Peter.”
Peter’s thumb moved along the line of Stiles’s jaw, feeling the slight scrape of stubble beneath it. “I am deciding how best to collect.”
Stiles’s eyes darkened as he stood, matching Peter in height and forcing his hand from his chin. His breath was warm against Peter’s jaw. “Hmm, please do. Take all the time you need.”
There was a challenge in the words, but something else lived beneath it, something warmer and more vulnerable than Stiles seemed willing to name. Peter had spent centuries learning to recognize desire in all its disguises. He had seen it dressed as greed, vengeance, devotion, even sacrifice.
This was desire pretending to be strategy.
Whether that made it false remained to be seen.
Peter’s eyes flicked down to his lips. “You understand that distracting me will not save you.”
Stiles lifted one hand and threaded his fingers into the hair at the nape of Peter’s neck.
“And if I decide to collect you now?” Peter asked.
Stiles’s tongue darted out to wet his lips. “Then I guess you’ll never find out if I was worth it.”
Stiles tightened his fingers and pulled Peter into the kiss.
Later, the rain had softened to a whisper against the windows.
The room smelled different now, the burnt coffee buried beneath heat and skin and the faint trace of sulfur that clung to Peter whenever he let too much of himself show. Stiles lay beside him with the sheet gathered loosely around his waist, one arm folded beneath his head. Peter had expected him to reach for the wards the moment Peter’s attention slipped, or perhaps for some hidden weapon concealed beneath the bed.
Instead, Stiles traced an idle line across Peter’s palm.
Peter watched his finger move. “You have five hours.”
“I know.”
“You have made no attempt to escape.”
“I spent four years escaping.”
“And now?”
Stiles’s fingertip followed one of the creases in Peter’s hand. “Now I’m taking a break.”
Peter turned his hand and caught Stiles’s fingers before they could retreat. “You invoked the Right of Claim. There are no breaks.”
“Do demons ever stop talking about contracts?”
“Not when someone is attempting to cheat one.”
Stiles rolled onto his side to face him. His hair was a wreck, his expression loose with exhaustion, but his eyes remained alert. “What’s your favorite coffee?”
Peter waited for the rest of the question.
None came.
“My what?”
“Coffee.” Stiles gestured vaguely toward the abandoned mug. “Favorite kind. How do you take it?”
Peter studied him for evidence of another spell, a coded incantation, some obscure ritual in which preferences freely confessed could be fashioned into a weapon. “Why?”
“Because the stuff I made was terrible.”
“It was cold.”
“It was terrible before it was cold.”
“That does not explain why you are asking.”
“Because I want to know more about you. Especially if my soul is going to be yours forever.”
Stiles traced his fingers down Peter’s arm. “Which, not gonna lie, after that performance, I’m not entirely opposed to.”
Peter glanced between their bodies. “This is not a relationship.”
Stiles sighed and let his head fall back against the pillow. “Do you ever answer a question without interrogating the motive behind it?”
“No.”
“That sounds exhausting.”
“It has kept me alive.”
“You’re a demon.”
“And?”
Stiles stared at him for a moment, then laughed softly. The sound contained no triumph and no visible calculation. It was simply amusement, warm and unguarded enough to make Peter suspicious all over again.
“You really don’t know how to do this, do you?” Stiles asked.
“Do what?”
“Small talk.”
“Talk is never small.”
“You interrogate. You negotiate. Occasionally, you threaten.”
“All effective forms of communication.”
“Fine. I’m communicating that I would like to know what kind of coffee you like.”
“What will you give me for the answer?”
Stiles’s expression changed, the humor fading into something Peter could not immediately identify. “That’s not how this works.”
“It is how everything works.”
“No.” Stiles reclaimed Peter’s hand and resumed tracing its lines, gentler now. “Sometimes someone asks because they genuinely want to know.”
Peter looked at their joined hands.
Across the centuries, people had asked what he could grant them, what he would accept in return, how much time they had, whether the terms could be altered. They had asked his name only when they believed possessing it would offer protection or power.
No one had ever asked how he took his coffee.
“Black,” Peter said at last.
Stiles’s finger stilled. “Just black?”
“With cinnamon.”
Stiles looked up at him. “Really?”
“You asked.”
“I know. I just wasn’t expecting the cinnamon.”
“What were you expecting?”
“Something obnoxiously specific involving beans harvested under a blood moon.”
Peter considered it. “That sounds expensive.”
“You own souls.”
“I appreciate quality.”
Stiles smiled, and Peter felt the contract between them pulse softly with every beat of the approaching dawn.
“What else?” Peter asked.
Stiles’s brows rose. “What else what?”
“You did not spend four years hiding from me merely to ask about coffee.”
“No,” Stiles said, his thumb brushing once over Peter’s palm. “But it seemed like a good place to start.”
Peter waited, which only made Stiles watch him more closely.
“You know, small talk generally works better when both people participate," Stiles hummed.
“I answered your question.”
“After negotiating the price of admission.”
“There was no negotiation. You offered nothing.”
“And yet you answered anyway.”
Peter’s mouth tightened, and Stiles smiled, clearly pleased with himself.
“What kind of music do you like?” Stiles continued.
“That is an excessively broad question.”
“It’s really not.”
“There are centuries of music from which to choose.”
“Okay, so narrow it down.”
“By what criteria?”
Stiles stared at him. “You are making this incredibly difficult on purpose.”
“I am attempting to answer accurately.”
“Fine. What do you listen to when you’re alone?”
Peter opened his mouth, then stopped. The hesitation softened the edges of Stiles’s smile.
“You do listen to music when you’re alone, right?” Stiles asked.
“Sometimes.”
“What kind?”
Peter considered the question with the gravity he gave everything. “Cello.”
“Just cello?”
“Mostly.”
Stiles nodded slowly. “That makes sense.”
Peter’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”
“It’s dramatic.”
“Cello is not inherently dramatic.”
“You crossed half the world in a cloud of hellfire because you heard my soul turn back on.”
“I did not cross half the world.”
“How far?”
“That is irrelevant.”
Stiles grinned. “Far enough that you don’t want to tell me.”
Peter reclaimed his hand, though Stiles’s fingers dragged reluctantly across his palm before releasing him. “You appear to have confused small talk with an interrogation.”
“Oh, so now you recognize the difference.”
“I recognize hypocrisy.”
“That’s practically emotional growth for you.”
Peter gave him a flat look as Stiles settled more comfortably against the pillow, his shoulder brushing Peter’s.
“Okay, favorite composer?”
Peter hesitated. “Bach.”
“Really?”
“You seem surprised by all of my answers.”
“You’re a demon who likes cinnamon in his coffee, cello music, and listens to Bach. I’m recalibrating.”
“What did you expect?”
Stiles tipped his head back, considering. “Heavy metal. Screaming. Maybe monks chanting in reverse.”
“That would be insufferable.”
“See, this is fascinating!” Stiles vibrated with excitement.
Peter watched him for a moment, the amusement in Stiles’s face too open to dismiss as another tactic. “Why does that matter to you?”
The question quieted him as Stiles’s gaze dropped to where their hands rested between them, Peter’s palm still open beneath his. “You’ve been there for more than half my life.”
Peter’s expression sharpened. “I have not.”
“You have.” Stiles traced the curve beneath Peter’s thumb. “Not physically, obviously. That would’ve been creepy, even for you. But the deal was always there. The date. You. Every birthday, every plan more than a few years out, every time someone asked what I wanted to be when I grew up or where I saw myself in ten, twenty, thirty years. Where I saw myself at forty.”
“You would not have reached forty.”
“Exactly.”
The answer came without bitterness, which Peter found more unsettling than anger would have been.
Stiles shifted closer, his knee brushing Peter’s beneath the sheet. “I knew what you wanted from me. I knew what you could do, what you’d promised, what would happen when the time ran out. I spent fifteen years knowing all of that and four more making sure you couldn’t find me.”
“And now you want to discuss music.”
“I want to know who spent nineteen years on the other end of the tether.”
Peter studied him. “You could have asked at the crossroads.”
“I was seventeen. My mom died when I was ten and my dad was dying from a gunshot wound and surgical complications. My priorities were a little different.”
“You were remarkably insolent even then.”
“I was terrified.”
Peter remembered bare feet in cold dirt, clenched fists, and a voice that had remained steady through every term of the bargain. “You concealed it well.”
“My dad was a cop. I had plenty of practice.”
For a moment, neither of them spoke. The rain whispered against the windows, soft enough now that Peter could hear the machinery below them turning through another cycle.
Stiles resumed tracing Peter’s palm. “Besides, if you’re going to own my soul forever, I should probably know whether you have terrible taste.”
“You have already declared my taste fascinating.”
“I said my recalibration was fascinating. I’m gathering evidence.”
“For what?”
Stiles glanced up, the corner of his mouth lifting again. “I’ll let you know when I have a theory.”
Peter should have pressed him. He should have demanded the purpose behind the wards, the disappearance, the carefully chosen hour at which Stiles had allowed himself to be found.
Instead, he asked, “What do you listen to?”
Stiles blinked.
Peter immediately regretted the question, though not enough to withdraw it.
A slow smile spread across Stiles’s face. “Are you asking me about myself?”
“I am assessing your qualifications to judge my taste.”
Stiles settled more comfortably against the pillow, pleased in a way Peter found entirely disproportionate. “Depends what I’m doing. Classic rock when I’m driving. Classical when I need to concentrate. Embarrassingly bad pop music when I’m cleaning.”
“How bad?”
“Not important.”
“You demanded specificity.”
“I asked what kind of coffee you liked. I did not request your complete history with the bean.”
Peter lifted a brow, waiting.
Stiles sighed dramatically. “Britney Spears.”
Peter stared at him.
“She has range,” Stiles whined.
“I said nothing.”
“Your face did.”
Peter turned onto his side to face him more fully. “What else?”
Stiles’s smile softened, triumph giving way to something quieter. “You’re getting the hang of this.”
“I am waiting.”
“Fleetwood Mac. Bowie. Nina Simone. A frankly irresponsible amount of early two-thousands pop-punk.”
Peter considered him. “That explains a lot.”
“Name one.”
“Your personality.”
Stiles laughed, warm and startled, and the conversation wandered from music into books, food, cities, and every other ordinary thing no one had thought to ask Peter in centuries. Beneath it all, the contract pulsed steadily between them as the hours slipped away.
Stiles wanted to know whether Peter had ever owned a dog. He had, once, though the animal had belonged more to a village than to him and had followed Peter through two winters before dying peacefully, with its head in Peter’s lap.
Stiles asked other questions: whether Peter preferred oceans or mountains, summer or winter, paintings or sculpture, if he had ever been drunk, if demons dreamed, if he remembered the first language he spoke.
Some questions Peter answered. Others he deflected until Stiles circled back to them later, pretending not to notice that Peter’s refusals grew less absolute each time.
In return, Peter learned that Stiles hated onions, had broken his left wrist twice, and still carried his father’s old badge despite insisting he was not sentimental. He learned that Stiles loved thunderstorms, could not sleep without some kind of noise in the room, and had spent nearly twenty years trying to remember the exact shade of blue that Peter’s eyes were.
“They have not always been blue,” Peter said.
Stiles propped himself higher against the pillows. “Wait, really? What color were they?”
“Brown.”
“Huh.”
“What?”
Stiles narrowed his eyes. “Nothing. I’m trying to picturing it.”
“And?”
Stiles shook his head. “I think blue suits you.”
Peter should have asked why. Instead, he watched Stiles yawn and rub one hand over his face.
The room had slowly lightened around them, the darkness beyond the windows thinning from black to deep gray. The laundromat below had gone quiet hours ago, leaving only the soft rhythm of the rain.
Peter looked toward the window.
Stiles caught the movement.
Stiles looked at the clock beside the bed.
Six twelve.
Peter sat up.
The sheet slipped from his waist, and Stiles followed the movement with his eyes before looking back at Peter’s face. The ease had left him. For the first time that night, fear was plainly visible.
There you are.
Peter had known it was there.
He had simply forgotten to look for it.
“You knew,” Peter said.
Stiles swallowed. “That dawn would eventually happen? Yeah. I picked up on that. Kind of how time works.”
“You knew what these questions would do.”
“I hoped,” Stiles admitted.
Peter turned toward him. “You gambled your soul on the possibility that I would become distracted by small talk?”
“When you say it like that, it does sound a little stupid.”
“It was extraordinarily stupid.”
“Still worked.”
“Not yet.”
The words extinguished what remained of Stiles’s smile.
Six thirteen.
Peter reached for him, closing one hand around the back of Stiles’s neck. The contract answered immediately, opening beneath Peter’s touch. Stiles’s soul flared between them, bright enough to hurt, his newly awakened spark twisting through it in restless ribbons of gold.
Peter could take it.
He could feel exactly how. One pull, no more difficult than drawing breath, and the soul promised to him nineteen years ago would be his.
Stiles didn’t fight him.
That angered Peter more than resistance would have.
“You spent four years learning how to hide,” Peter said. “Constructed wards capable of silencing an infernal bond. Invoked a Right you had no reason to believe I would honor, and then you wagered everything on mundane conversation?”
“There was sex too.”
“Stiles.”
The humor vanished. “I didn’t know what else would work.”
“Why allow yourself to be found at all?”
Stiles looked at him for a long moment. “Because I was tired.”
“I do not believe you.”
Stiles’s voice softened. “I could keep hiding. Maybe not forever, but for a long time. Another year. Five. Ten, if I got better. But every day would still be about you finding me. Every ward, every place I lived, every person I let close enough to matter.”
His throat bobbed when he swallowed. “I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life running from someone I’d never even had a real conversation with.”
“So you decided to risk damnation instead.”
“I decided I wanted to meet you.”
“You met me nineteen years ago.”
“No. I met a crossroads demon who knew exactly what I wanted and what it was worth.” Stiles looked back into his eyes. “Tonight I wanted to meet Peter.”
The contract tightened sharply.
Six fourteen.
The horizon beyond the window began to pale.
Peter felt the instant arrive with perfect clarity. The final boundary. The last moment in which he could claim what had been promised.
Stiles’s pulse hammered beneath his hand, but he did not look away.
“Were any of your questions genuine?” Peter asked.
Stiles gave a small, incredulous laugh. “All of them.”
“You were stalling.”
“Yes.”
“You seduced me to delay collection.”
“Yes.”
“You manipulated my curiosity.”
“I was hoping you had some.”
Peter’s fingers tightened.
Stiles’s breath caught, but he continued. “I wanted my soul back. I also wanted to know you. Both things can be true.”
Sunlight touched the edge of the window.
The contract tore.
The sound existed nowhere outside Peter, a single violent snap through every layer of his being. The tether vanished from his senses, taking with it the claim he had carried for nineteen years.
Stiles gasped as the mark beneath his collarbone resurfaced, cracked, and dissolved into smoke.
Peter released him.
For the first time since the crossroads, Stiles’s soul belonged entirely to himself.
Silence filled the apartment.
Stiles’s face was pale, his eyes wet from pain or relief, perhaps both.
“You could have taken it,” Stiles said.
“Yes.”
“You had time,” Stiles clarified.
“Yes.”
“You let it expire."
Peter looked toward the growing light. “You distracted me.”
“For six hours?”
“You are exceptionally irritating.”
A laugh escaped Stiles, shaky at first, then bright enough to fill the room. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.
Peter watched him, newly aware of the absence between them. For nineteen years, Stiles had existed somewhere inside his senses, distant or muted but tethered. Now there was nothing.
The loss was immediate and intolerable. He regretted it instantly.
Stiles lowered his hands and found Peter still looking at him. His laughter faded.
“So,” Stiles said cautiously. “What happens now?”
Peter did not know what came next. He rose from the bed and began gathering his clothes, retreating into the familiar ritual of cuffs, buttons, and composure.
Stiles’s expression shuttered with remarkable speed. “Right. Of course.”
Peter pulled on his shirt. “Your coffee is atrocious.”
“I already admitted that.”
“You also lack cinnamon.”
Stiles blinked.
Peter fastened his cuffs. “There is a café three streets east that opens at six thirty. Their beans are—moderately acceptable.”
It took Stiles a moment.
Then his mouth curved slowly upward. “Are you asking me on a coffee date?”
“I am informing you where better coffee can be obtained.”
“And will you be there?”
Peter glanced at him. “That depends.”
“On?”
“What will you give me for the answer?”
Stiles stared at him before laughing again, softer this time. He climbed out of bed and reached for his clothes.
“Breakfast,” he said. “And after, myself. In this bed.”
Peter considered the offer. “That seems weighted rather heavily in my favor.”
Stiles paused while pulling on his shirt. “Are you complaining?”
“Merely confirming the terms.”
“Breakfast. Coffee. Sex.” Stiles’s head emerged through the collar. His hair somehow looked worse than before. “Possibly more small talk, provided you behave.”
“I do not behave.”
“Yeah, I’ve gathered that.”
Peter watched Stiles drag on his jeans, newly aware that there was nothing keeping him here. No tether. No ownership. No contract waiting beneath their skin.
Stiles was getting dressed because Peter had asked him to breakfast.
“Tomorrow as well,” Peter said.
Stiles stopped fastening his jeans. “Tomorrow?”
“Your coffee will remain atrocious.”
“I could buy cinnamon.”
“That would address only one of its many deficiencies.”
A smile began at the corner of Stiles’s mouth. “So you’re inviting yourself back?”
“I am preventing you from developing bad habits.”
“I think sleeping with a demon who nearly collected my soul probably qualifies as a bad habit.”
“You seduced that demon.”
“And I’m offering to do it again.”
“Tomorrow,” Peter repeated.
Stiles studied him for a moment, the teasing falling away just enough to reveal what the answer meant to him. “Tomorrow,” he agreed.
Peter opened the apartment door rather than crossing the distance without roads.
Stiles noticed. He came to stand beside him, close enough that their shoulders touched before they stepped into the hall.
For nineteen years, a contract had ensured Peter could always find him.
Now Stiles would have to choose to be there.
Peter found he preferred it that way.