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“Wait—you think the twins arecute?” I demanded, shooting into a sitting position as she grinned, looking far too pleased with my disbelief. “Reese, they’ve eaten people! And prefer being fluffy to being human!”
“Okay, set that aside, becauseobviouslythey’re not as cute when they look like sleep paralysis demons! We’re not all mated by the universe or whatever, and the twinsarecute,” she defended.
I could feel the laughter threatening to bubble up at the absurdity. “What do you meanascute, Reese? You literally can't even look at them when they're like that, or you get all faint and stuff!”
She rolled her eyes at my theatrics, starting to giggle as she looked anywhere but at me.
I could see Auren or Johnny, butAtlan? Grouchy, grumbly Atlan was cute to her? Kiran tried his best, but even he couldn’t make the pair of them appealing. Maybe if it’d been just him, but the two might as well have been born conjoined.
I waggled my eyebrows when she finally looked at me again. “Are they cuter than—”
“It’s too soon,” she whined, rolling dramatically onto her stomach.
I felt alittleguilty for trying to make light of the end of her situationship. Not enough to stop, though. “I’m taking that as a yes.”
“Don’t make me kick your ass again, Gribald!”
We both giggled, and Reese seemed more relaxed as she kicked her feet out and stared out into the trees. Despite what she’d said, I couldn't help the nagging feeling that maybe her interest in the twins was the real reason she’d stopped being as into Neo.
But I decided that really wasn’t my business just as quickly, brushing it away with a shrug.
“I need to go to a bar or something,” she lamented. “It’s really unfair that I’m surrounded by so many hot people and can't even let myself enjoy it. I wish they all looked like Kiyomasa or Grel; it would save me so much heartache.”
Snorting, I pushed myself up and offered her a hand. She took it with a smile, happy enough to say her goodbyes as we both limped our ways back to our separate houses.
9
CHANGING VIEWS
SARIEL
Auren looked nearly unhinged when he reached me, scowling and so obviously disturbed that I had to pause.
The man seemed to be growing more and more expressive the longer I was around him—or maybe I was just beginning to pick up on his little tells—and it was making me nostalgic. Sometimes, I could catch a glimpse of the boy I knew beneath all the hard lines and apathy; it never failed to make me grin.
It was easy to forget that he was barely old enough to drink, much less run an entire rebellion. I still wasn’t over the fact that Kiyomasa had effectively handed over leadership to a man not even a tenth his age.
“How did you convince Aria to be with you?”
He wasted no time in posing that question. I cleared my throat, wondering if I even knew the answer myself.
“Honestly, Auren, I have no clue. I was just trying to do the right thing at the time, and letting Azazel do whatever he’d planned for her wasn’t it.”
This answer didn’t seem to appease him. His arms folded across his chest, a thoughtful frown pulling onto his lips.
“I’ve never really been great at making friends,” he quietly admitted. “I just need to know how to convince someone to like me, and—I don’t even know why I want Ashe to like me so bad. I just… he’smine.”
I winced. If anyone could understand that feeling, it was me, I supposed.
“How do you know Ashe is your mate?” I asked, thinking back to my kind of weird, if wholesome, interaction with Elias’s apparent nephew. The shifter hadn’t given any indication that he was bonded to anyone, let alone Auren.
“I just do,” he grumbled, then reluctantly continued when I just stared. “We’re connected telepathically, and I can always find him. Look, I’m not asking for a playbook on how to get laid because I’m honestly not interested, I just need him to stay in the room with me for longer than ten seconds.”
The joke fell a bit flat as I realized that my baby brother had missed out on this developmental milestone. That, or he’d been so thoroughly rejected by his peers, he wasn’t comfortable trying to connect with anyone anymore. He just needed a boost to his self-confidence, in my opinion, but there was no way for me to get that across without him taking some offense.
“Well, I talked to Ashe not too long ago,” I admitted, and his look of disbelief made me chuckle. “I don’t know if this helps, but he more or less told me that he loves macabre stuff. He even took one of my nightmare paintings.”
“He’ll talk to you, but not me?” he grumbled.
