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“Still got it.” Gavriil takes a sip of my whiskey. “I haven’t pickpocketed in years, but you never lose the touch. What is this? A seventy-six?”

My growl doesn’t faze him in the slightest.

“Rafe,” he calls over his shoulder, “top shelf in the booze cabinet.”

“When did you have time to go through my alcohol?”

“Right before your wedding.” Gavriil hands me back my glass. “I must say, for a lumberjack you carry quite the selection of fine alcohols and liqueurs.”

“You do realize,” Rafe drawls as he walks out onto the terrace and hands Gavriil a glass, “the drop down to the street would certainly kill you.”

Gavriil frowns. “Why would that interest me?”

“Because I think Michail is contemplating throwing you over the side.”

I raise my glass to Rafe. “It’s amazing for only spending a couple nights in each other’s company that you already know me so well.”

Gavriil’s amusement vanishes as he sits in a chair across from mine. “Your mother called.”

I roll my eyes. “Lovely.”

“She’s worried about you.”

“Mothers never stop worrying.”

Gavriil shrugs. “I wouldn’t know.”

“Neither would I,” Rafe chimes in.

I wince. When I first met my brothers, I assumed they had lived a charmed life, surrounded by the ease of wealth. But Gavriil’s earliest years had been spent as a petty thief on the streets of Athens. Rafe had grown up in a luxurious villa most people could only dream about, but his childhood had been more like psychological torture inflicted by the hands of our sire.

“I didn’t mean—”

“We know.” Gavriil leans back in his chair. “Your mother said she suspected something was wrong between you and Alessandra.”

Just hearing her name is painful, a sharp knife that lands somewhere in the vicinity of my heart.

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

“What happened?”

“What part ofI don’t want to talk about itdo you not comprehend?”

Gavriil cocks his head to one side. “As I recall, when I was going through my own issues with Juliette, you gave your advice freely.”

He’d been utterly miserable when I let myself into his Malibu beach house after hacking his security system. Swimming laps in a heated saltwater pool as if he could outpace his problems.

“You were there for me.”

My head snaps around to Rafe. I haven’t spent as much time with him. My first impression had been of a stuck-up bastard incapable of experiencing human emotion. But when I joinedGavriil in Greece to stage an intervention, it had been plain to see that Rafe’s attitude was rooted more in the hellish childhood he’d experienced, and that his feelings for Tessa were very real.

“That was different.”

“Where is she, Michail?”

I look over at Rafe.

“Home.”