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Zinnia curled her arm around my neck and bumped her hip into mine. “This is probably your best idea yet.” We walked down the stairs to the main tunnel below the hellhound’s clubhouse and into their underground den.

I bumped her back. “Do you really love the design?”

“It’s stunning, Jazzy.” Hemlock, her familiar, poked her head out of the hood of Zinny’s sweatshirt to take a look around, then pressed her little face against Zinnia’s.

“Hey, Hemy.” She gave her head a scratch.

Hemlock was a sweet black rat and extremely shy. Most mediums had gentle familiars, and usually animal, not shifter, since they were less intimidating to the souls we communed with.

The first time Zinny went to Limbo, she’d left Hemy with me, not sure it was safe for her there. Now Hemy went with her, and I was glad she at least had the comfort of her familiar when she was away from us.

I inwardly shook myself. I couldn’t even think about her leaving, not yet. Zinny didn’t talk about what she did while she was away. I’d tried to ask her, and she always shut me down. Now it was an unspoken rule for me, and my cousins as well, not to bring it up unless she did.

She never did.

It’d always really just been the two of us. We’d grown up in Philadelphia with our mom, not that she’d been around all that much. Our dad left when I was a baby. Like Mom, he was a free spirit. Being in one place for any period of time wasn’t something either of them handled well. We never saw Dad after that and had spent school holidays here in Roxburgh with my aunts and cousins. When Zinnia was old enough to look after me on her own, Mom had taken off to see the world. I didn’t blame her for it, I knew she loved us, she just had a restless soul. But at times like this, I wished she’d put her daughters first and come home. But that just wasn’t her.

She texted occasionally to let us know where she was, that she was okay, and we’d learned a long time ago not to expect more. Or anything at all.

“Do we have time to check out the nursery first?” Zinny asked, stopping outside Willow and Warrick’s place. Willow’s mate had dug through the wall, connecting three of the original rooms and turning it into one underground apartment. He’d also put in several skylights to let in more natural light.

“Yeah.” I knocked, and my current tiny familiar, a mourning cloak butterfly who had been with me a while now, and had been resting on my shoulder, fluttered up to rest on my hair just above my ear. Wills asked me to paint a mural in Violet’s nursery when she was pregnant, and now I hung out there a lot when I wasn’t working. If I wasn’t with her or one of my other cousins, I was usually with Relic or Roman.

Relic was my gym buddy, he’d also taught me a few self-defense moves. After what my cousins had been through the last few years, he said Thornheart females needed to be ready for anything. And Roman had become a friend—well, as much as you could be friends with a thousand-year-old hellhound with limited emotions. But being an empath, spending time with hellhounds was kind of a nice break from all the noise. The emotions they were capable of were far from complicated.

I’d asked Rome to teach me to tattoo after Zinnia left. Basic tattooing was sometimes needed in witchcraft, especially when you were dealing with souls, and I’d used my new skills several times already. That led to designing tattoos for Rome and his brothers when they asked, which they did more and more lately. In exchange, Roman gave me the ink I wanted. Both of my arms were now covered in pretty, delicate tattoos, mainly flora and fauna, animals and insects. I loved them; it was kind of an addiction.

The door swung open, and Warrick stood there, Violet nestled against his chest, holding her close with one massive arm. “Yo,” he said and opened the door wider for us to come in.

Zinnia swiped Violet from her daddy as we walked in.

“I’ve come to show Zinny the nursery,” I said to War as we headed into the new living room he’d created—and had to force my expression not to change, or to instinctively retreat, like I usually did.

Ren was on the couch beside Willow.

Our cousin jumped up, a wide smile on her face. She pulled Zinny in for a quick hug. “Hey, I didn’t know Jazzy was bringing you over for a visit.”

Ren stood as well. “Hey,” he said, his voice deep, a raw quality to it he hadn’t had before the evil spirit had possessed his body. What hadn’t changed, though, was how devastatingly handsome he was. He was rougher around the edges, of course—the scars and that hardness he wore like a shield—but Ren was still utterly beautiful. Tall and muscled, that angled jaw and the sharp cheekbones—and that mouth. I’d dreamed of pressing mine against it so many times, against lips that had been sculpted by the goddess herself and designed to tempt us mere mortals with all kinds of wicked thoughts.

Zinnia smiled at Ren. “Haven’t seen much of you the last few weeks. Glad I am catching you now, before I leave.”

“Yeah, you two haven’t been around much,” he said with an easy grin, a grin that didn’t reach his eyes. They never did anymore. There was a hollowness there, and I knew I couldn’t be the only one who saw it.

His gaze slid to me, and he ran his fingers through his deep russet hair, making his scarred bicep bulge, not that I was looking. I didn’t give a shit about his biceps, or any other…parts of him.

Yeah, right.

Fine. I was in love with the asshole. That didn’t mean I liked him very much right now. We’d barely said two words since Magnolia’s mating ceremony four months ago. Since I blew up at him after I saw him with one of the females he regularly fucked. He’d had the nerve to look at me the same way he’d just looked at her, like someone he wanted to go a round with between the sheets. Like I was no different than all the others, just some Band-Aid to numb his pain for a few hours. If he’d been sober, he’d never even consider taking it there with me…which had kind of made it worse.

I would’ve been just another distraction from the things he needed to deal with but wasn’t. He’d been drunk, I should have let it go. Instead, I’d let my hurt take over, and I’d reacted. I’d called him a bunch of not very nice names. Ren’s surprised expression was branded on my frontal lobe for eternity.

“Hang on a minute, I was just—”

“You were just what? Do you even know? Behaving like a slime ball comes so naturally to you now, I don’t even think you’re aware of it,” I bit out.

The surprise vanished and his lips curled. He leaned against the wall, not taking his eyes off me. “You kind of sound like a judgmental bitch, Jasmine.”

I inwardly winced, studiously not looking at the male now standing only a few feet away from me, because that hadn’t been the worst of it. He’d dealt a final blow that day, and it had hit way too close to the bone.