Taking the chair across from me, she said, “He’s not myboy,you know. Ronan and I are… We’re just… We’ve known each other a really long time.”
“Yeah?”
“Seven years.” She folded her arms across her chest and leaned her chair back on two legs, her smile smug and adorable. “Nearly a quarter of my life.”
I shoved in a forkful of chicken stuff. With a full mouth, I said, “Well, I’ve known him for a hundred and eighty, and you don’t see me blushing every time someone says his name.”
Not that I minded that sweet little blush. Not at all.
“I’m not blushing,” she said, dropping her chair back to the floor. But now she was biting her lip, too, trying to hold in a smile.
Damn, she had it just as bad for him as he had it for her.
This can’t possibly end well…
“So,” I said.
“So.”
I glanced around the kitchen, taking in the girly decor. Yellow walls, cutesy little bird knick-knacks on the window sill, fox clock on the wall, a bowl of stones in the middle of the table with flowers and little sayings.
You can never really know love until you know yourself,one of them said.
Next to the basket, I spotted a deck of tarot cards, but that was the only thing that screamedwitchabout the place.
Last time I’d been here with Ronan, I hadn’t really given it much thought, but now I realized something seemed off about Gray’s house.
No witchy shit.
“Not very mystical in here,” I said.
“How do you mean?”
I shoved in another bite of food. “You know, little statues, incense, pentacles. I thought all you witches were into that woo-woo shit.”
Gray shrugged and lowered her eyes, running her thumbnail along a crack in the table. “I don’t practice magic anymore.”
“Since when?”
She stopped messing with the table and looked up, lasering me with an icy glare that damn near made my dick shrivel. “Since hunters butchered my mother right in front of me.”
I dropped my fork, and she flinched. Total accident, but damn.
I’m such an asshole. Son of a bitch, Ronan. Why the fuck didn’t you say something?
I’d met Gray the same night the rest of them did—her first night in the Bay. Ronan, though… he’d known her longer. Knew she came with baggage. Couldn’t talk about it though—all part of the gig for a demon like him.
“I need your help on this one,”he’d said back then.“She’s important.”
And we’d all agreed, no questions asked. Blood or not, that’s what real brothers did. All I’d known about her at the time was she was one of Ronan’s contracts. A witch. Powerful as hell. And eighteen years old.
That she’d suffered some kind of fucked up tragedy was obvious; kids like her didn’t just show up in the Bay in raggedy-ass clothes, half-starved and half-beaten if they had money and a nice, cozy family somewhere.
But hell if I’d ever asked for the details.
He’d asked us to look out for her. Said that one day he might need more than that. It was good enough for me.
Barely a week in her life again, and I was already hurting her.
