Loren’s hold tightened on the door handle. She wasn’t sure why, but she felt wounded, as if he’d slapped her. And she felt…angry—not just at him, but atherselfas hot tears sprang to her eyes before she could stop them.
On top of the anger and the hurt, she found herself confused. Clearly, he’d known she was an orphan. Was he so bitter about people who were born into cash that he’d forgotten so easily?
When she spoke, she used a tone as cutting as the one he’d used. “Actually Darien Cassel, despite what you seem to have concluded about me, I havenothad everything handed to me. I am a foster child whose adoptive mother hates her, and the onlyrealfamily I can say that I have is my adoptive sister, Dallas.”
Darien didn’t say anything. He only watched her in silence, his face betraying nothing.
“If my guardians were to die, I wouldn’t see a copper of their estate, and to be completely frank with you, I wouldn’t want it anyway. I would rather Dallas receive all of it as their rightful heir, and after being treated almost as badly as me by her own flesh and blood.” A tear escaped the corner of her eye, and she dashed it away as memories of growing up without a mother and a father seared through her mind. “Are you happy now?”
He broke her heated gaze and glared out the windshield. “No, I’m not.” His voice was surprisingly gruff. “I shouldn’t have said anything.” She supposed it was the closest she would get to an apology.
“You’re right, you shouldn’t have.” Her voice cracked on the last word. She opened her door, a balmy breeze sweeping in and ruffling her hair. “Can we get this over with?”
She didn’t bother arguing that he didn’t need to come with her as he got out of the car and crossed the street to the apartment. A pink sunset had spread across the hills, reducing the palm trees and cacti in the distance to silhouettes. Luckily, no neighbours were around to witness who was escorting her to the doors.
They made their way into the lobby, where Loren keyed in the passcode for access to the elevator and pressed her hand onto the scanner. As the elevator dinged, the chrome doors sliding open, she wondered how much crap she would get in if Taega found out she’d brought a Darkslayer into her apartment.
9
Darien waited in the living room while Loren packed up whatever belongings she deemed necessary for her stay at Hell’s Gate.
He had to admit he felt bad for the assumptions he’d made about her, but as he paced back and forth in the spacious living room, with its immaculate wooden floors and ornate furniture that made it look more like a show-home than a place where actual people lived, he felt hostility simmering in his veins again.
In the heat of the moment, while they were in his car, he’d forgotten all about the fact that she was an orphan. It wasn’t the first time his fucked-up past had made him do things that had him questioning his own sanity; he was always so quick to verbally stomp a person into the ground if they’d been dealt a hand of cards better than his own. But doing it to a girl like Loren was a new low for him, he had to admit. He blamed it on sitting in the hot car for too long—and this silk-stocking district that had rubbed him the wrong way ever since he’d lived here as a child, back when his mother was still alive. The people here were so rich, they shit gold and wiped their asses with their unending stacks of banknotes.
It wasn’t as if he himself didn’t have cash; he had plenty. More than he sometimes knew what to do with. But all of it—everything he owned—was paid for withbloodmynet. With a life he wasn’t proud to call his own. Meanwhile, the swanky couple who fostered Loren probably got up every day and drove to their nine-to-five jobs in fancy office buildings, in their fancy suits, in their fancy cars, and came home every day before sundown with more cash than what he received for a night of slitting throats and paying for it with his own soul. After all the shit he’d been through, he would be surprised if he had a single scrap of soul left.
He ran a hand through the straight locks of his undercut, his rings catching in the hair product he’d slapped into it that morning after a long and tiring night.
In the slit where Loren’s closed bedroom door met the floorboards, her shadow flitted back and forth as she packed her things.
Darien stepped up to the console table in the hallway that led to her room. His gaze roved over the assortment of framed pictures dotting its surface, his attention snagging on a head of red-gold hair. With a gloved hand, he picked up the photo for a closer look.
Loren’s door suddenly swung open. She emerged with a small suitcase in hand, her crossbody bag dangling from her shoulder. Instead of the tight red shirt and the painted-on jeans that left little to the imagination, she wore a blue hoodie that was two sizes too big for her, black leggings, and white sneakers. Despite the obvious contrast to what she had been wearing before, she still managed to make him stare at her like some sort of idiot.
“What?” she demanded.
He gestured to the photo in his hand. “You didn’t tell me your guardian was Taega Bright.”
“I didn’t think it mattered.” She pulled the bedroom door shut behind her.
“How did the commander of the Angelthene Fleet end up raising a human girl?”
“Taega didn’t exactly choose to. In fact, she had very little say in the matter. The person who made the decision to take me in was her husband.”
Darien cocked an eyebrow. “Really.” One of Loren’s sloped in answer. “You’re telling me the general of all Aerial Fleets in this country decided to take in a human orphan.” While the general yielded control of the city’s Fleet to Taega in his absence, she still answered to him.
“I guess so.” She shrugged. “Nineteen years ago, a priest of the Scarlet Star found a baby on the temple steps with nothing but the blanket she was wrapped in…and this.”
She pulled up a solar-shaped amulet from beneath the collar of her hoodie—the Scarlet Star, complete with an engraved face and eight rays, each of those rays representing the common gods and goddesses. Caligo, Tempus, Okapi, Ignis, Mortem, Vita, Sapientia, and Sylvan. The religious symbol Darien wore around his neck was another version of the one Loren wore, though his was fashioned after an ancient piece of art known as the Deity of Eight Faces.
Loren continued, “The priest offered the baby to the general, and Roark—being the religious zealot that he is—took it as a sign from a greater power and declared himself my legal guardian.”
“I didn’t know the man had it in him.” Darien wondered if Taega was the reason Loren didn’t share her last name.Calla,he remembered her saying,like calla lily. Delicate or wimpy-as-fuck, depending on how a person looked at it. From what he’d heard of Taega, she’d likely been aiming for the latter. “Did he play much of a role in your life after that day?”
“No more than Taega has.” A flash of sadness entered her gaze and left so quickly he might’ve imagined it. After how she’d reacted in his car, he supposed he shouldn’t have even asked. After a quiet moment she added, “But I know he loves his daughter, Dallas. He just doesn’t show it much.”
Darien set down the photo and made his way to the front door. Loren followed him, her suitcase banging into the white sectional as she edged around it.
