Page 11 of Blood and Trouble

She glanced up. “Oh, I didn’t realize you were gay.”

“Non-discriminating,” I corrected. “Life’s too short for inhibitions.”

“Fair.” She finished her scotch and lifted the crystal to refill both of our tumblers. “What happened with Poe?”

I hummed and bit back the ache in my chest, the clench in my lower gut.

“Something similar,” I said. “He wanted forever. I couldn’t give it to him.”

“Why not?” Ava discarded the first card on the pile before flipping over the next. A seven of clubs. I kept my face trained on hers, watching as she bit her bottom lip before locking down her reaction.

She had a good hand, and she didn’t want me to know it.

“I’m not a good person, Ava,” I said. “I’ve never loved anyone except my family, and Poe…” I debated the best way to tell her I was a piece of shit as I gazed out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the Parisian skyline.

Lights twinkled in the distance. The waning moon illuminated the buildings, casting shadows on the dreary landscape. Despite its reputation as a romantic place, Paris was a shithole. Dirty and rotten and teeming with an epic wealth divide. But perhaps that was what I loved the most about it. I saw myself in its filth.

“Poe is the closest I’ve ever come to saying yes,” I admitted, unsure why I was divulging this much to her. No one in the pack knew the truth, at least not from me. I hadn’t talked about him since it happened, since he asked me to mate him and I’d turned him down. Tears in his eyes and frowning with silent resignation, he’d broken it off, kicked me out.

I deserved worse.

“Why didn’t you?” She put her elbows on the table and leaned closer, her blue eyes begging me for answers, begging for recognition. Perhaps she wasn’t the only lonely person in Paris. Perhaps she longed to see herself in me, too.

“That’s a loaded question,” I said with a snort. Then I gestured to the deck, reminding her of our game. She discarded the top card and flipped over the next one. An ace of clubs.

I had nothing. Absolutely nothing.

“Alright, show me,” she said. When she revealed her hand, she had a full house and kicked my ass, just as she said she would. “Well?”

“Nada,” I said, trying not to focus on the long stretch of skin from her neck down to the hint of chest peeking out through her top. “I guess you get to know my secrets after all.”

She smiled and hummed, pretending to think while she drummed her perfectly manicured nails on the table. “When did you stop letting people get close to you?”

I guess I brought that on myself.

“Is it that obvious?”

“It takes one to know one,” she replied with a tender lift of her lips. Her casual, cute smile. The one she wore authentically. Not the one she wore right before she cut someone down to size.

“My parents died when the Bloody Scorpions raided our territory,” I explained, and she averted her gaze to her drink, the rancid scent of shame pluming between us. “A lot of people died. I’m not special.”

She opened her mouth to argue, but I kept going before she said something she couldn’t take back.

“Nothing in this life is forever,” I continued. “Not love. Not money. Nothing.”

Not even mates, but she didn’t know such a thing existed. Even if a shifter had the piss-poor fortune to find their magical soulmate, one would eventually watch the other one die. And I’d seen what happened to shifters who survived the loss of a mate. They turned rabid, uncontrollable, frothing at the mouth, and determined to kill anything that came near them until someone put them out of their misery. What a fucking terrible way to go. I’d rather not experience it at all than live in the delusion of happiness only to know it would one day be ripped out from under me.

For twenty years, I’d imagined those final moments for Mom and Dad. Did they breathe their last air together? Or was he pinned down while those vampire bastards ripped her throat out? Maybe it was the other way around. Maybe they forced my mother to watch as they snatched my father’s heart out of his chest, psychologically torturing her before sending her off with him. Either way was a curse, and I wanted nothing to do with it.

That was the version I gave people when they asked. It was even mostly true.

“That’s sad, Lycan,” Ava murmured.

I didn’t like the gloomy direction our conversation had taken, so I tried to make light of it. “That’s why there are rumors about my…uh…extracurricular activities. I don’t settle down, and everyone I play with understands what they’re getting into.”

Her cheeks turned a rosy shade of pink that cascaded into her ears and down her neck.

Oh, such innocence. I’d fucking eat her alive. I’d chew her up and spit her out. And fuck…it would be so much fun.