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Neither Asher nor Anaïs would be coming along to the party. It was one thing to be allied with a lair, it was another thing to trust them with your young. So both sets of parents had chosen to leave their child with babysitters at Harper and Knox’s home. Their estate was impenetrable. In their position, Larkin would have made the same call.
If she was honest, she wasn’t sure she’d make a good mother. She liked kids, she just wasn’t maternal by nature.
The first time she’d been given a doll, she’d stared at the plastic infant, not entirely sure what she was supposed to do with it. She hadn’t at all liked its overly wide eyes.
So she’d buried it.
Not normal, no, but it had made perfect sense to her back then. Well, Larkin had let her inner demon guide her a lot in those days. And when said demon discarded something, it did it in a definitive fashion.
This included people.
It was even more unforgiving than Larkin. If someone in their life messed up, the entity no longer had any time for that person—they ceased existing for the demon. As proven by how it had literally zero interest in its own psi-mate due to his betrayal.
She hadn’t seen or heard from Holt since their little confrontation at the bakery. Predictably, Knox and her fellow sentinels had been furious about it. As had their mates, who’d all agreed that Holt should be drawn, quartered, skinned, and decapitated—and preferably all while alive and sobbing.
Her demon was certainly up for it.
She knew that, despite his betrayal, some would still struggle to understand how her demon could want to harm its own anchor. Wish him dead, sure. But be prepared to kill him? Not so much. After all, it went against every instinct a person had toward their psi-mate. But her entity’s supremely vindictive nature completely overrode those instincts.
Of course, its aforementioned nature made relationships difficult for Larkin, because everyone made mistakes. Nobody was perfect. That didn’t matter to her demon. It would discard people just as easily as Larkin and her entity had once been discarded.
On one level, she was glad of its reluctance to trust and connect. Because it meant that its habit of collecting pretty things didn’t extend to collecting people. That was good, since it was pathologically possessive of whatever it owned and point-blank refused to share those belongings with others.
She suspected this came from growing up in a children’s home. You didn’t have many things that were purely yours, and people tried to snatch from you whatever you did have. As such, her demon was something of a hoarder and stashed its belongings in hidey holes around Larkin’s apartment.
You couldn’t exactly stash people, but you could certainly monopolize their time and attempt to isolate them. She worried that her entity would attempt such a thing with any person it chose to collect. That would be bad, so it was better this way even if it did make relationships complicated for Larkin.
A knock came at the front door, pulling her out of her thoughts.
She crossed to it, opened it wide, and felt her pulse briefly stutter as she found Teague stood there. He looked all self-assured and sexy and business-casual in his gray shirt and black slacks. Her ovaries got a little faint, and her demon slinked closer to her skin.
He gave her one of his slow, languid smiles. “Hey, baby.”
Her belly did an excited roll at the endearment, even though there could be no real feeling behind his choice to use it. “Hey.”
He didn’t wait for her to step aside to allow him entrance. He stalked forward, pushing into her personal space and forcing her to back up. Cupping her hips, he mule-kicked the door to close it and very blatantly eye-fucked her.
Her hormones pathetically aflutter, she resisted the urge to tense under his scrutiny. The others—who she could feel staring at them—would easily see it.
“You look incredible.” He swept his gaze over her once more. “I do like that dress on you. I’d rather it was off, though, so I can do wicked, wicked things to you.”
Tanner cleared his throat. “We’re right here,” he clipped.
Teague blinked at him. “That’s . . . nice.”
Larkin snickered.
“Settle down, pooch,” Devon told her mate. “You promised Larkin you’d leave him be tonight so they could enjoy the party, remember?”
Tanner clamped his mouth shut. His gaze lowered to the harpy wing brand, and he gave a disapproving shake of the head. Keenan and Levi looked equally unapproving.
See, this was why Larkin had extracted a promise from them to behave. They would otherwise have bitched about the mark. It was one thing to know it existed, it was another thing to see it for themselves. Knox was the only one who seemed to have little interest in the matter. Seemed being the key word.
