Chapter 2
Rowan
Iheard Violet’s voice waver through Levi’s phone, clipped and angry, right before she told me to go fuck myself. The line went dead, but her words still echoed in my ears.
There was a hint of. . . something in her voice that was not normally there. She had been clearly bewildered when I had answered, and then she struggled when I poked at her. It had been so much easier than normal to get under her skin.
My ears picked up the conversation of Levi and Charlie outside despite the walls and glass door separating us.
“Violet’s going to be fine, Levi. College is where kids can explore and get life experiences.” My adopted father’s calming voice threaded through the sounds of wind rustling uncut grass.
“She could have done some of her classes virtually. She had that option.” Ah, yes, Levi’s possessive nature in full force, I thought as I eased down my senses, careful not to eavesdrop unintentionally again.
It had been five years since I’d woken up in this boy’s body along with its heightened hearing, and I still caught details I didn’t want.
The boy had lasted only a few months before he’d killed himself to escape the Godsblood curse of heightened hearing.
The constant noise drove him to swallow a bottle of pills that the hospital pumped out of his stomach even as his soul was passing on. The trade-off?
Me. Someone not of this time, who died struggling for his last bit of freedom to escape a rigged deal between a mortal and a demon.
A free fucked up ticket of reincarnation through claiming the boy’s empty body as my own.
Where the boy had failed, I’d made it this long only because I had already survived far worse in my first life.
Learning to control my heightened hearing and somewhat enhanced sense of smell had felt like child’s play.
I took a sip of beer as I walked from the kitchen out to the patio, taking a moment to stare at Levi’s phone.
I was unable to stop the chuckle that escaped me.
Violet Shaw, all spit and fire wrapped in privilege that she didn’t even see she had—a princess.
I called her that because she was the kind of girl who could tell me to go fuck myself, yet make it sound aristocratic.
“Or a volchok,” I said, the word slipping out in thick Russian, a language close enough to the one from my homeland, the Wastelands, that my tongue moved comfortably in without thinking.
There were brief moments that her spitfire reminded me of a wolf cub, malicious and lacking in domestication.
Not that I minded. I preferred strong women.
“Rowan?” Charlie’s voice pulled me back to the patio where he and Levi sat with their barely touched burgers.
Both men were a reflection of the other, one light and the other dark.
Charlie wore his standard polo shirt and jeans, blonde hair tousled against piercing blue eyes.
Levi, like his dark twin, wore a black t-shirt and jeans with shortened raven hair and amber eyes.
From the unique and bizarre experience of each of them being reincarnated over a decade ago, these two men had forged a powerful friendship with one another.
. . and that fascinated me. Partly because—unlike how I’d been thrust into a stranger’s body in a time very different from my own—they had simply reincarnated as younger versions of themselves.
But even more than that, it was just how vastly different they had been from one another in their first lives.
Adversity makes for strange bedfellows. Was that the expression?
I set Levi’s phone on the table between them, watching both men tense. Having spent so much of the past five years together, they knew the look that must have been on my face. The one that said their comfortable suburban afternoon was about to crack at the edges.
“Easy there, you two,” I said, placing down my beer and settling back into my chair, hoping my tone was calming enough. I looked pointedly at Levi. “Your faux life is still intact. It was Violet. She wants to come home this weekend.”
Levi’s distrustful eyes locked onto mine, the hardened look of assessment sliding across his youthful features.
We had been dancing this dance for years—him treating me like a threat to catalogue, me trying not to give him any reasons to be right.
It was only thanks to Charlie’s word that Levi tolerated me despite how often our families were together.
Like a pod, our two families were ingrained with each other.
“Why were you answering my phone?” His gruff voice carried an edge that meant he was already mapping out exactly how he planned to hit me if this conversation went poorly.
Daddy’s little princess needs him to save her, I wanted to say, but I knew it would start a fight I wasn’t ready to give up my burger for.
Levi only ever had a violent streak when it came to something related to his family, which left a sour note. . . the knowledge that he would never consider me family.
Joke’s on him, I thought. I actually enjoyed it when we came to blows.
As for Charlie? “No open wounds,” he had eventually conceded after one particularly bad argument between Levi and I.
After we fought, I like to think we both felt so much better.
“Thought it was the work phone,” I lied.
The truth was, I’d seen Violet’s name and could not resist the urge to answer.
There was something about her voice when she was frustrated that I found alluring.
Her irritation was a blanket of solace, reminding me that not everything in this soft world was bland comfort and willful ignorance, that not everybody was a docile sheep.
Disbelief was plain on Levi’s face, but he had no way to prove me wrong.
Through the noise of his increasing heart rate—one hundred and twelve beats per minute and climbing—I caught the sound of keys jingling and grocery bags rustling.
Violet’s mother, Sloane, would be inside in thirty seconds, and she’d notice Levi had left dirty dishes in the sink in about forty-five.
“Your wife is home,” I said, taking a deliberate sip of beer. “You may want to tend to the pots and pans.”
“You’re lying.”
“You could wait to find out,” I said, my voice carrying a big ‘fuck you.’
Levi’s face went through several interesting colors before he pushed back from the table and rushed inside.
The man had learned exactly how much his wife’s anger could cost him, and he treated her like a queen now because of it.
While I appreciated his loyalty, there were a few transgressions I couldn’t forgive, so I held Sloane on a higher pedestal for her strength more than I did her asshole husband.
Charlie, ever calm like a quiet sea, waited until the door closed before leaning forward and saying, “You really need to stop antagonizing him, Rowan.” While his tone was of stern admonishment, his eyes crinkled. “How did Violet sound?”
“She sounded like herself. Angry. Exhausted.” I paused, remembering the atypical sound of her voice. “Possibly stressed about something.”
That got his attention. Charlie might play the diplomat between Levi and me, but he had developed a real affection for Violet over the years—the daughter he’d never had, perhaps.
“Did she say something to imply she was stressed?” he asked as he set his own burger down.
I shrugged, though my jaw tightened. “She barely gets full sentences out around me.” I shrugged, “It could be the move? Or possibly she is scared—”
Charlie interrupted, “Scared?”
Fuck, these overprotective men.
“I said, possibly she is scared. It could be nothing. . . or it could be she has finally noticed what kind of place that school really is.”
“Rowan.” The warning in Charlie’s voice was familiar. This was heading towards an argument we’d had before.
“I know what I know,” I grumbled, running a hand through my hair. “In my world, we had Female Seminaries—a pretty name for breeding programs.”
The sound of Levi’s desperate apologies drifted through the walls, followed by Sloane’s clipped responses. Then silence. Soon after, I tuned them out because some things I didn’t need to hear again.
“Gods,” I muttered, focusing hard on the label of my beer bottle. “Every fucking time.”
Charlie’s mouth twitched. “At least they’re consistent.”
Consistent. That was one word for it. Levi and Sloane had the kind of hunger for each other that should have burned out years ago, but somehow hadn’t. Even when he’d cheated, even when she’d thrown him out, they’d circled back to each other like satellites locked in orbit.
The most sorrowful part of their tale was that Charlie also lived in that other shared life alongside Levi. At one point, he had been Sloane’s husband. I still hadn’t heard his entire story, but I imagined it was why he kept so close to both of them.
“About Violet,” Charlie said, pulling us back to what mattered. “You really think something’s up?”
I sipped my beer as I thought over my words carefully. Charlie would listen. He always did. It was Levi who refused to hear anything that threatened his perfect suburban narrative.
“I do,” I said. “It might just be my paranoia, but from what I recall from my previous life? We had stories of society before the veil fell. Many of those stories spoke of how deeply ingrained the supernaturals were in everyday life. How they lived among mortals in secret.”
“To what end?”
I shrugged. “There were lots of different stories with lots of different reasons. Some spoke of keeping mortals as sex slaves, pets, breeding stock, or food. It was harder to pinpoint when they made an effort to burn all texts relating to it. However,” I said, then paused as I took another drink of beer.
“Can you guess one point that nearly all the stories agreed upon?”