The Cardigans (Criminal Intentions, Season One #1)

by Cole McCade

The scent of his tears was strange and subtle, yet it was a scent Yoon knew by heart. Homicide detectives weren’t dealers in justice. They were peddlers of grief.

“Do you think I don’t know how to do my job, Malcolm?” she asked, deadly-soft. “You haven’t fired me yet. That’s a significant dereliction of duty.”

“We only define others by the value they have to us, and once they no longer provide that value, we let them go.”

Humans were the only ones who clung to the idea that each was distinct, each a thing so separate that the human race was comprised of seven billion species, and each death was nothing more than complete and utter extinction.

Their bodies fit together, the hiss of cloth on cloth, body heat meeting and melding like two storm fronts flirting, lightning crackling where their edges kissed.

to starless nights of angled, slyly tapered eyes that gleamed with the same blue-black crow’s-feather sheen as the fall of wild black hair across a pale golden brow.

Seong-Jae’s kiss was silk and flame and the hard, hot burn of a dram of raw whiskey setting Malcolm’s mouth on fire and searing all the way down to his belly. That sweet bruise of a mouth teased, assaulted, feinted, drew him in only to batter him back as their mouths met and parted and met again until they locked just so and Malcolm reached his melting point—that peak where his chest tightened and his blood became thunder and every taunt of Seong-Jae’s tongue tied another knot in Malcolm’s stomach, while every spark of pain graced by Seong-Jae’s teeth wound Malcolm’s body tighter.

Still Seong-Jae lingered—standing so close that if Malcolm breathed too deep their chests would touch, and then it would be heartbeat to heartbeat, straining against the cages of bone and blood and sinew to reach each other.

Seong-Jae had kissed him until he was liquor in Malcolm’s bloodstream,