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“What do you expect me to do?” Calder growled. “Her father took her away from all of us for the past four years. We had to learn to live without her. Without our fucking mate! What the hell don’t you understand about that? Yes, I’m fucked up. I get that. But I don’t want her to go through any more fucking pain.”
His words trailed off, and I realized that, all this time, he had been there for us. He had been holding in so much pain, had been trying to protect Sina since she had gotten here from everything that had happened.
We all knew how much she had been hurting. But while I wanted to understand her pain, Calder wanted to eliminate it. He thought that keeping shit from her was the best way. And while he might’ve been wrong about that, I could tell right now that he couldn’t stand to see Sina this way, so torn up.
When she had cried in my arms last night, he’d looked devastated. Absolutely fucking devastated. And when she’d sobbed about how she couldn’t remember some things that had happened in the past … maybe he’d feared that she’d forgotten how much he loved her too.
“Maybe she’ll tell Darius,” I chimed in for the first time tonight.
“Or maybe she’ll fuck him,” Thayer said, trying to get under Calder’s skin.
“Darius isn’t going to do shit with her,” Calder growled. “Not alone.”
I sipped my drink and let Calder live in whatever damn fantasy that went on in his head. Sometimes—scratch that, most times—I didn’t fucking understand him. He thought that Darius, who was one of Sina’s mates, wouldn’t try to get with her while they were alone.
Calder seemed to be in his own little world sometimes. I totally got it. He did it to deal with the trauma of finding out his mate had left on her eighteenth birthday, then getting attacked by her father’s goons a few moments later. He and Thayer were both fucked up that way.
Thayer rolled his eyes and sipped his drink, turning toward me. “Heard she invited us to a Halloween party and thatyouare planning to dress her up that night. What’re you going to dress her up as?”
After drawing my finger around the base of my glass, I smirked. “You’ll see.”
Jaroth, Sina’s ex–incubus boyfriend, walked into the tavern and toward the back. Calder sat up straight as we all watched his every move. Sina hadn’t dated him while she still lived in Durnbone, which meant that they had met while Sina lived at her father’s estate.
“You think he knows what happened to her?” Calder said, upper lip curling in disgust.
“We’re going to find the fuck out,” Thayer growled, shooting up to his feet and storming over to Jaroth with eyes completely red. While Thayer didn’t like many people, he especially hated demons likehim,who had tried to get with his mate.
Once Calder stood, I hurried after them. Not only to keep them out of trouble—sometimes, I felt like a fucking babysitter with them—but I wanted to hear what Jaroth knew too. I didn’t know if Sina would ever tell us.
If we didn’t know what her father was capable of doing, then who the hell knew how far he would go? Would he be using humans who were armed with guns loaded with silver bullets and magic? Would he use other species against us? His obsession with Sina wasn’t normal.
Before Jaroth could reach his destination—which looked like the back of the bar, where a bunch of other demons hung out—Thayer grabbed him by the back of his jacket. “We need to have a little talk, you fucking ass.”
Jaroth stopped completely and looked over his shoulder. His eyes were hazy and looked as if he had just had sex at the Monster Dungeon, just down the road. Incubi were easy to read, especially after they just had their fill.
“Get your hands off me,” Jaroth said, shrugging out of Thayer’s hold. “What do you want?”
“To talk about Sina,” Calder said, stepping forward.
Calder towered over Jaroth, his figure overcoming Jaroth’s smaller and scrawnier one. But Jaroth didn’t look even a bit intimidated or scared.
“About what? How I want her back?”
Calder growled.
“Of course I fucking do,” Jaroth said. “She was the best thing to happen to me.”
Before Calder could rip his head off, I stepped between the two of them and clenched my jaw. Hell, I was moments away from ripping off this man’s head too. I didn’t want him anywhere closer to our Sina.
“We want to know about her father …” I said, trailing off. “And what he did to her.”
Jaroth suddenly dropped the act and stiffened. “What do you want to know?”
“Did he … did he … sexually abuse her?” I asked.
We were all thinking it, but nobody wanted to say it out loud, especially Sina. She wanted to keep this all under wraps and not go through the pain of it again. I fucking got that. But I needed to know.
I needed to know how we had failed to protect our mate all these years.
