CHAPTER TEN
I’m placed on the sofa, still cradled in Lukan’s arms and settled in his lap. He’s doing the majority of holding me up but seems unbothered by the task as Roan sets to work dragging my cardigan off.
“Hold still, sweetheart,” Lukan murmurs. “We have to find where she got you.”
“Got me?” I ask, watching Roan run his hands along my arms, turning them and moving them.
“Her venom.” Roan is at my shoulders. I’m being pulled forward. My camisole is dragged over my head, baring me. “It paralyses her prey.”
I’m about to tell them she didn’t inject me with venom when Roan yells, “Found it.”
I tip my head down to watch him run his fingers along the curve of my rib. Inches from beneath the swell of my left breast where the skin is flush around a pinprick no bigger than a mosquito bite. The swelling is brushed by his thumb, and I feel nothing.
“Am I paralyzed forever?” I gasp, reaching down to run my palms down my thighs.
The sensation is an odd one where I know they’re my legs, that they’re connected to my body, but I feel nothing. Like I’m touching someone else. I even try to wiggle my toes, shake my ankles, but my body isn’t obeying the commands.
“No,” Lukan strokes my cheek and drags his finger down beneath my jaw. “It’ll wear off in a few minutes.” His thumb skims my bottom lip. “Are you hurt, sweetheart?”
I manage a shrug while falling into the dark expanse of his eyes. “I don’t think so.”
“Good.”
He leans in and captures my mouth in a deep, almost angry kiss. The fingers at my chin drop to my throat and circle. They squeeze.
“Next time, when I tell you to come, you fucking come, do you understand?” he growls against my lips.
Despite the flutter the words give me in a different context, the current one has my brows furrowing.
“I’m not a dog.”
The grip around my airway tightens.
“Did I say that, Rina?” His eyes flash, lifting up to mine. “My job is to protect you, and I can’t if you don’t listen when you’re in danger.”
I understand his meaning and his frustration even while I’m still trying to understand what’s happening.
“I thought she was my mom,” I whisper, and watch his features soften.
“I know, but I would never ask you to do something that wasn’t important.”
I capture his wrist and take a deep breath. “You have a lot of explaining to do before I trust you. She may have lied about being my mom, but you haven’t been honest either.”
The parting of his mouth is met with the screech of a kettle coming to a boil. The same high whistle as the book when it was tossed into the fire. The part of me not frozen jumps, but I can do no more than that.
Lukan and Roan never bat an eye. They barely glance up at the sound.
Both are preoccupied with running their hands down my arms. Their lips over my shoulder.
Roan is on his knees on the floor next to the sofa, dark head bent over my side.
Lips counting each rib around my injuries.
Nuzzling the side of my breast while his brother runs big hands across my abdomen. Traces the waistband of my bottoms.
“This situation is complicated,” Lukan says like nothing happened. “There are things we’re prohibited from saying.”
My head settles on his shoulder and I resist the urge to shut my eyes as Roan kisses the top of my breast inches over my tight nipple.
“Like what?” I realize my mistake even before he lifts an eyebrow. I roll my eyes and try again. “Then what are you allowed to tell me?”
The brothers exchange glances over me.
“That we’ll never hurt you,” Roan says evenly. “That we will protect you with our own lives.”
“We will never lie to you,” Lukan adds.
“Are you really Lukan and Roan?” I ask, glancing from one to the other.
Both hesitate. Glances are exchanged. It’s a third voice walking into the room that answers.
“No.”
Kellen pauses on the threshold, a bear of a man twisting massive hands into his top and dragging it up over his head.
The sight of all those solid muscles catching the firelight is momentarily overruled by all the blood.
It’s soaked through his shirt. Dripping from his fingers. It’s speckled across his face.
“Oh my God, Kellen!” I gasp, forgetting I can’t feel my legs and try to lunge to my feet.
It’s only by the sheer grace of Lukan’s fast reflexes that keep me from tumbling to the floor.
“Easy, love. It’s not mine.” Kellen uses his ruined shirt to wipe the stain off his face and from his hands.
Then, without pause, he balls it up between his hands and chucks it into the fire where it feeds the already roaring flames.
“And to answer your question, no, we are not these faces. They were chosen because they make you comfortable.”
Smart.
They did make me comfortable. Comfortable enough that I didn’t question anything. Comfortable enough to lower my guard and feel safe.
“So, what are you?” I ask softly, letting my gaze travel the broad width of his chest. Follow the lines and grooves where the shadows dip suggestively down the waistband of his pants.
I have to remind myself that this is Kellen’s body. Whatever he looks like underneath may not be at all what I’m being gifted currently.
But I doubt that. I know with a certainty I can’t explain that they are perfect in their true form. That they will be everything I crave. It’s a deep, irrefutable knot in my chest.
“We’ve had many names by many cultures,” Roan murmurs. “But we’re Shades.”
That’s what the snake lady had called them — fragments of a useless demiurge, desperate for freedom.
Still, I ask, “What’s a Shade? What’s a demiurge?”
It does dawn in some part of my brain that I should be hysterical. The bubble tickles the back of my throat, but I know if I fall into it, if I let it pull me under, I will never pull out and I need answers.
“Demiurge are gods. They created the universe and rule over all the realms, and Shades...” Lukan murmurs. “Shades are shadows. Echoes of a soul. We’re that blur you see from the corner of your eye when nothing’s there.”
I remind myself that I just survived getting injected with venom by a woman with a snake body and saw the ghost of my dead aunt who threw me into the basement. This isn’t as strange, yet I have to draw in a slow, easing breath to brace myself.
I lick my lips. “What are you going to do to me?”
The pad of Lukan’s thumb sweeps along the bottom curve of my mouth, following the path of my tongue.
“We want you to come back home, Rina.” My chin is tilted with the nudge of the same thumb. “Return to us like you were meant to.” The thumb skims across the line of my jaw. “We want you to be our queen again.”
It really shouldn’t, but the brush of his fingers has my pulse racing.
My nipples have become hard, sensitive points begging them to touch.
There can’t be a worse possible time to get aroused, but they’re making it impossible not to melt into everything they say when Roan resumes his slow descent across my abdomen with open mouthed kisses.
“You ... I’ve never ... shit!” I squeeze my eyes shut with the cradle of Lukan’s palm beneath my left breast lifting it to the immediate attachment Roan takes on the peak with his teeth. “You keep saying back,” I blurt out before my brain melts completely. “When did I...?”
Lukan’s mouth finds mine. His tongue slips between my lips, coaxes mine to join him. Mirroring the steady flicks of his brother’s on my breast. All the while, the steady weight of desire on Kellen’s face scorches my soul.
“You have belonged to us for much longer than you remember, little one,” Kellen murmurs, gaze hot on my face when I open my eyes. “We lost you once. We won’t let you go again.”
“But you have to say yes, baby.” Roan pushes up to steal my mouth from Lukan. His fingers close into my hair and he holds me against him as his brother palms my breasts. “Stay with us, Rina. Please.”
The low, tortured whisper propels my arms up. It has my fingers curling into his hair.
“I don’t ... I can’t think when...”
Lukan takes my face back from his brother, relegating Roan to my throat.
“Don’t think, sweetheart.” He sinks his teeth into my bottom lip. “Feel. You need to let yourself remember. Remember that afternoon in the forest. The heat of the sun. Your skin glistened beneath its sharp light.”
I do remember that.
I remember everything about that afternoon in the park.
I remember Aunt Sammy yelling at her kids to stop hitting each other with sticks.
I remember Mom waving Uncle Jordan over to help drag two picnic tables together.
I remember drifting away from the crowd, searching for silence and solitude amongst the thicket of trees.
It had been so still, so quiet. I maneuvered down the neatly marked path.
I followed the winding dirt leading deeper through the peace.
I remember thinking how I could stay there, lost in the gossamer drapes of sunlight crashing through knotted branches.
I could build a house, tend a garden and simply live off the land with not a soul for miles to tell me I was doing it wrong.
It was an impossible fantasy, but one that kept replaying in my head when I slipped off the trail.
Not far, I told myself.
But what was the world like off the path? What would happen if I went a little deeper where no one else ever ventures because the little, plastic signs told them not to? What was over there? Why weren’t we allowed to go?
It lured me.
Something shimmering far into the distance coaxed me to step off the trail and wander aimlessly through the canopy of leaves and over arched roots. I gathered fistfuls of beautiful flowers Mom would love.
It was all so innocent.
And then the tiny, purple blooms. So close to the ones stamped on my dress. Planted in a perfect circle beneath a deliberate halo of light that made the petals glisten.
“Keep going, sweetheart,” a voice in my head whispers. “You’re almost there.”
Leaves crunch beneath my feet. Twigs snap. There’s a faint rustle from somewhere to my left, but there’s nothing there when I glance over.
The flowers are inches from the toe of my white flats. Tiny. With speckles of yellow at the center.
I don’t know what, but something propelled me to step over. Step into the circle.
My eyes snap open and I find Kellen’s. The desire in them is now a steady focus. The pleading of a man begging for his prayers to be heard.
“I stepped into a ring of flowers,” I whisper.
“A fairy trap,” Roan mutters.
“Fairies?”
Even as I say it, my brain struggles to register that I was kidnapped by tiny people with wings.
“Assholes,” Lukan adds with an edge of irritation in his voice. “Hate those fuckers.”
Okay. This is fine.
Snake women.
Dead aunts.
Shades.
Fairies.
A memory I can’t fucking pull to the forefront of my thoughts no matter how hard I keep clawing at it because it’s right there. It’s right ... fucking ... there. I can feel it picking at the barrier keeping it from me.
“Easy.” Kellen leans forward and lightly puts a hand on a knee that I can’t feel because some snake lady stabbed me with venom so she can eat me.
And I think I’m starting to lose it. That well of panic I’ve been trying to shove down is beginning to overflow.
“Okay, baby. It’s okay.” Roan drags the blanket up around me as I fight to push up to my feet and pace and can’t.
“Deep breath,” Lukan urges, helping his brother swaddle me.
“I can’t...” I gulp air like it’s running out. “What is happening? Just tell me...” A sob escapes. “What is happening!”
“Roan, make her tea.” Kellen orders, never taking his attention off my face. “Rina, easy breaths. You know you’re safe.”
“I don’t know!” I scream, terror melting into fury.
“I don’t know anything. Everything I thought I knew is a lie.
I thought you were you, but you’re a ...
a soul? A fragment? I thought my aunt was dead, but she’s upstairs with shit all over her walls and her eyeballs in a bowl.
I thought fairies and women with snake for legs were a myth.
” I’m getting louder with every word, practically screaming as I shove Lukan’s hands off me.
“And you’re lying. That snake woman said you were taking me back to be some .
.. some demiurge’s sacrifice. Tell me she was wrong. ”
No one stops me when I clumsily drag my torso off Lukan’s lap and into the cushion next to him.
It takes a lot of work. A lot of clawing and using upper body strength that I don’t have, but I find myself half reclined with my feet on his thighs.
He doesn’t touch me, for which I am grateful, but lets me stay there while I bunch the blanket up to my neck.
“Tell me she lied.” I fix them with hard eyes wet with tears I can’t stop. “Tell me you’re not taking me to whatever the hell a demiurge is who killed thousands of humans and wants to kill me, too.”
Only the crack of my heartbeat echoes through the room. Tangles with the snap and pop of the fire. The shriek of the wind slamming against the windows. The silence is a screaming confirmation that grips my throat.
“It’s more complicated than that, Rina,” Kellen says at long last, every word tight like he has to physically pry them from his chest. “We can explain everything.”
I wiggle myself further against the cushions. Adding more distance.
“Then explain!” I snap.
My attention fixes on the hands he rubs together anxiously between his knees. The stain on them is no more than shadows, but I know they are still marked with blood.
He killed that snake creature.
I’m not angry about it. I don’t blame him for it. She was going to eat me. But the fact that I witnessed a murder...
Of a monster, I remind myself. She was a monster.
So, what are they then? What makes them any different?
At long last, Kellen sighs and shifts back. His hands fall flat against his thighs as he meets my eyes.
“In order for you to understand, we have to tell you how it all started.”