“Are you sure? Because if you don’t like them, I bet we can exchange them. There were at least a hundred different decks at the shop, and—”
“It’s not that. It’s….” I took a deep breath, the shock of it still washing over me. “This is the deck Calla used to use.”
It was her favorite deck. The only card I had left from it was the High Priestess—I’d found it inexplicably tucked into my book of shadows the night we’d dug the book up out of my backyard. At the time, it’d felt like a message from Calla. An infusion of strength and wisdom and encouragement. Now, it felt like she was looking down on me again, wrapping me up in a gentle hug, reminding me that she was still with me.
“There was a time I’d be surprised to hear that,” Emilio said, “but if I’ve learned anything from you, it’s that there are no coincidences.”
“No, there really aren’t.”
“You were meant to have those cards, Gray. I felt it from the moment I saw them in the case.”
I nodded, unable to express how touched I really was.
When I finally looked up from the cards, Emilio offered me a shy smile. The sight of it filled me with so much warmth, it felt like the sun had finally found me again, thawing out my bones from a deep freeze.
There was so much going wrong. So much falling apart.
But here in Emilio’s embrace, I’d found a moment of pure peace.
“You’re trembling,mi querida.” He rubbed my back, as if I needed warming up. As if I could ever be any warmer than I was right here in his arms. “Are you okay?”
“More than okay.” I pulled back and looked up into those soulful brown eyes again, my heart fuller and lighter than it’d been in weeks. “You make me believe we’re strong enough to—”
He cut off my words with a kiss. A quick one, soft and pure, just this side of friendly, but a kiss nevertheless. There was a promise of more to come in a kiss like that—so much more—and for now I tucked it away for later, knowing that in the midst of all this chaos, there was at least one good, pure, beautiful thing waiting for me on the near horizon.
“Whatever you were going to say,” he said, pressing his forehead to mine and closing his eyes, “it’s true. Wearestrong enough. For whatever’s coming our way. For whatever we need to do to fix this. For whatever we need to do to protect our pack.”
* * *
Elena’s dinner was amazing, and despite the challenges we were all facing, we still managed to laugh. To enjoy Elena’s cooking, trading a few stories from their mutually trouble-making childhoods in Argentina. I learned that Emilio liked to chase away the chickens that his mother had meant to cook, and Elena had a knack for growing what she called a “very special medicinal herb of the smokable variety.” Everyone got a good laugh at that.
Through all the laughs and the good food and the endless wine, there was only one thing missing. One thing that Ronan and Emilio both had deemed too dangerous to bring to the table.
My vampire.
Twenty-One
Gray
“Good evening, love.”
Darius called to me before I’d even reached the bottom of the basement stairs, and I closed my eyes and stopped, hoping he couldn’t sense the skip in my heartbeat at the sound of his voice.
Love.The sweetness of that word on his lips made my chest hurt. How many times had he called me that? Had he whispered it into my ear, his lips brushing my skin?
“I was hoping you might visit me,” he said again. “It’s dreadfully dull in this establishment. And the menu leavesmuchto be desired.”
Thanks to Deirdre’s potion, Darius had remained in a heavily seated state for the entire trip home from Las Vegas. He’d been down here ever since, fed a steady IV drip of some kind of hawthorn-infused herbal tonic Elena had fixed up—just enough to keep him calm and slightly lethargic, but not totally immobilized.
In his current state, Ronan and Emilio said, he could still attack us. Even me. They said we had to be careful.
That didn’t mean we had to be cruel.
The basement was finished, with warm yellow walls, and plush beige carpeting. Darius was seated on the couch, his legs free, but his upper body wrapped impossibly tight in what looked like a souped-up straightjacket. The IV was taped to his neck, the tonic in a clear IV bag hanging from a pole at the end of the couch.
I gasped, horrified. I didn’t know what was worse—the chains at Inferno, or this?
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
