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ability to completely undo me. It was scary, and the most beautiful thing I’d ever experienced.
    “She was sedated, Everly. Aukele and Harlan stayed with her, kept watch—”
    “And kidnapped her from the hospital. That decision probably saved her life, but what if she’d gone into shock or something?” I shook my head. “Dumb. Of course Aukele must have healed the burns right away. But the scars, Pierce. She has a hard time flexing her fingers. Why couldn’t he heal those too?”
    He traced a delicate pattern on my hand. “You’d know that better than me.”
    I scanned the images again, deliberately looking for a way to heal Millie’s scars. “There’s a barrier there. This had to be one of those times when our gifts were overruled by a higher power. It hurts that Aukele couldn’t erase Millie’s scars, but it’s also a melancholy kind of relief to know there’s something bigger, and I hope smarter, watching over me when I use my healing gifts.”
    Pierce frowned. “Has your sense of touch ever been blocked?”
    “You mean aside from when I panic or purposely shut it down? No. But that ability is strongly connected with my genetic exposure to Loyria Gray’s formula, and I’m not sure the DNA can be controlled like Huna-learned gifts. I just don’t know the answers. Maybe when we find Mille she can tell us how it works.” Fear shot through me. “Wait! It would be wrong to find her. She knows all about the plants and how to create the poison formula. That makes her a valuable commodity for people like Fion Connor and Eamon Grady.”
    He nodded. Once. “It does. Keeps me in business, eliminating people like your parents’ killers. I can assign a permanent bodyguard to Millie.”
    My fear level lowered a couple notches. “Yeah. That’d be good. Because you know we’ll find her, or she’ll find us. I better get back to work.” I stretched, then flexed my hands, and then ran my fingers over every surface in the kitchen. Millie kept popping up—cutting the fruit, slicing cheese, wiping down the counters, sweeping the floor, washing dishes—all over the bloody damn kitchen. Was she living here? Hiding here? I glanced up, and my attention was immediately sidetracked with the expanse of Tynan’s muscled chest, the light dusting of hair that narrowed, and then disappeared beneath the towel he’d secured around his waist.
    He tapped my nose. “You look disappointed.”
    There was no point in denying the obvious. “You’re an addiction, Pierce. That aside, it’s beginning to make sense that Millie has been here. It would be the perfect place for my grandfather to hide her while she recuperated from the accident. She was my grandmother’s best friend. They studied Huna together, and Harlan, too. Is he here?” I brushed my hand over the kitchen counter again.
    Tynan’s face was shuttered. “I don’t know. I would have told you.”
    Oh, damn. I’d doubted him. Hurt him. “I didn’t mean it that way, like you were lying to me or hiding something. It was more thinking out loud, asking you what you thought.”
    His grunt was a new one. And it didn’t have a trace of happy in it. “Yes. I think Harlan is here. They’re close. Separation wouldn’t work for them.”
    “You’re right, but I haven’t picked up a single image of him, and that doesn’t make sense. Surely if they were staying here, he would have left some kind of an energy imprint, especially here. Every member of a household tracks through the kitchen. Don’t they?”
    He gave me a barely there head shake, but was losing some of the tension around his mouth. Still, we couldn’t move on until I fixed my foot-in-mouth faux pas. I rested my hands on the bulky edge of the towel around his waist. “I trust you. My heart is so damn in love with you it hasn’t settled into a normal beat since I saw you sitting on the sofa. It’s just that my head hasn’t caught up with my body and spirit. I’m healing from Mitch’s betrayal, but