“And on that note…Barf.” Haley stood up, making a show of yawning and looking at her phone. “Wow, would you look at the time?”
Addie laughed. “Subtle, girl. Real subtle.”
“Stay for the show if you want,” Haley said, “but the two of them have enough chemistry to set the whole lodge on fire, and trust me, you don’t want to be at ground zero when it happens.”
“Alright, alright.” Addie stood up and grabbed her glass, along with the unfinished bottle of whiskey. “You two kids have fun. Try not to incinerate anything.”
“No promises,” Gray said.
And then two of the three drunk-ass sister witches were gone, leaving me alone with a woman insisting on being taught the hard way.
Emphasis on hard.
Gray leaned forward, licking a path across my lips.
Three, two, one, and… yep. Hard as fuck.
“You taste like beer,” she said, her voice low and sultry.
I kissed her again. “You taste like trouble.”
“Mmm. We make a good combo, don’t we?” She looped her arms around my neck and sighed, her breath warm on my lips. “A vampire-fae-witch with the worst gene pool in history, and an incubus with… well, let’s just call it your garden variety mysterious origins.”
I laughed. “My origins aren’t all that mysterious, Cupcake. You take one incubus, find him a succubus mate, throw ‘em together, shake well, and garnish with a cherry.”
“That’s it?” she asked.
I shrugged and ran my hand up her spine, cupping the back of her neck and pulling her mouth to mine. Kissing was better than talking. Always had been.
But eventually she broke our kiss, pulling back and staring into my eyes in a way that completely undid me. She wanted to know more. She wanted to knowme—all the things I’d never told her, the things I’d been trying not to tell myself.
“Last I heard they were somewhere in Italy,” I said. “I haven’t had any contact with them for at least a hundred years, give or take.”
Her mouth fell open, and she stared at me for a good full minute before finally finding her voice. “Ash, your parents are stillalive?”
“No idea, but I haven’t heard otherwise, so that’s my assumption.”
“You don’t talk to them at all?”
I reached for my beer again, tossed back another slug. Normally the booze kept the memories at bay, but every once in a while they snuck back in.
Like whenever I had to watch Gray live through some fucking trauma her own family had caused. That shit always stirred up old ghosts.
Hundreds of years wandering this forsaken rock, and I’d never understand why so many of the world’s worst people in existence insisted on procreating. Most of the population—human and supernatural alike—had no business bringing kids into this world.
“Alright, Cupcake,” I finally said. “You want the whole sob story? You got it.”
I sighed and closed my eyes, breaking off her intense gaze. Saying the words was one thing. Seeing her eyes change from sexy and flirty and curious to sad and pitying was another—one I wanted no part of.
“My parents never bothered to tell me what I was. I grew up thinking I was a regular kid with serious fucking problems.”
“How did you finally figure it—oh. Oh, fuck, Asher.” She leaned forward, resting her forehead on my shoulder, and in that moment I knew she’d answered her own question. “The girl,” she said softly. “The one from your drawings.”
“The one and only.” The same girl I’d drawn night after night for decades, though the drawings had stopped not too long after things heated up between me and Gray. Somehow, whenever I tried to draw her after that, I’d end up drawing Gray instead, which was just fine by me.
“I saw her,” she said. Confessed. “The night I… When I had your soul. I saw the whole thing.”
“I figured as much.” The night she’d taken my soul to save me from the devil’s trap in Norah’s attic, our souls connected. She relived my worst memory as though it were her own, and I was pretty sure it’d haunted her ever since. “If I could erase that from your memory, I would.”
