The tragedy always followed them. Dahlia had been no exception. The shimmering bright light guttering in the darkness closing in around her. The man at her side—her boyfriend—snapped with the darkness consuming him. It had damn near drained him dry, and all that self-hate and loathing had been redirected at the amusing, vivacious, and downright dangerously sexy woman at his side.
When he’d begun his verbal assault, nothing would allow Zhan to look away. He should have. They should have just left then. Instead, he forced himself to watch as her time dwindled. Three chances to escape him. She should have had three.
None of them presented themselves.
Luck didn’t put on an appearance.
Karmen sat in her corner, feet on the table as she drank her wine and played on her phone.
Then there was Bish.
Fucker.
The whole room wavered a moment before Dahlia left with her murderer. In that, all too brief space of time, Zhan hoped it had been Bish daring to get involved. But he didn’t. He just lingered there as Dahlia vanished into the night to meet her death.
But she didn’t die.
How?
His thoughts circled and stuttered on that single fact over and over. Finishing the rinse, he shut off the water and snapped one wing out to shake off the droplets. Then the other. Then both faded back into the ether. The weight of them an afterthought until A.D. Before, they’d almost vanished. But after Dahlia?
No, they strained his muscles as the tension cording there flexed them.
In no world had Dahlia deserved the abrupt end. But wasn’t that true of all murder victims? Humans took life with such gratuitous ease. Greed. Gluttony. Lust. Envy. Those fat bastards barely had to lift a finger anymore. Why bother? Humans didn’t need encouragement.
Why bother indeed?
Striding nude across the bathroom with its marble tile and inlays, he paced into his bedroom. They’d built the whole structure, including their rooms. Tarus had the west wing of the house while Zhan took the east. Zhan didn’t need much. A comfortable bed to sleep in, shelves for his books, and an eighty-inch screen to watch fictionalized humanity.
It amused Tarus to no end that Zhan watched just about anything that had a happy ending.
Anything.
Not that the shows helped. The news detailed the people sent to prison for crimes they didn’t commit. People died. They got sick. Lost their jobs. Fought desperately for the right to even exist.
It was an ugly, brutal world with no justice. No matter what he’d attempted.
The fruits of his labor were rotting in stinking fields. Nothing made a difference.
Nothing.
Except, she’d swallowed every drop of his anger and desperation. Swallowed them, and given him life.
A flash of her dark eyes, the way the pupils nearly swallowed all the color from them, and the swollen pinkness of her lips. No one had ever responded to him with such ferocity before. The alcohol couldn’t touch the effect she’d had when she detonated his system and obliterated the apathy entrenched in his bones.
Dahlia was dangerous.
When she declared herself his…
Fuck.
He ground the heels of his hands against his eyes as if to erase the thoughts scalded into his brain. Nothing worked. Tarus brought him a woman the night before. Dark haired, dark eyed, very willing, and so sweetly submissive in her compliance.
Zhan hadn’t touched her.
He couldn’t even stand to smell her.
His constant raging cock had vanished without a trace, until the imposter was gone and his mind returned to Dahlia.
Because that woman hadn’t been Dahlia. Whether Tarus played with her or not, Zhan had no idea. He hadn’t seen his brother after he took her away. The loss so profound, the house felt hollow. He didn’t even want to go down to the playroom anymore.
Pushing open the double-doors that led to the veranda running along the second story of their house, he gazed out at the yellow-green grass in the distance. The heat pounded against his wet skin, but the humidity did little to dislodge the moisture. His wings ached. The only sounds filling the hot afternoon air was that of birds in the distance, a trickle in the creek running along the southwest edge of the property. The occasional snort of one of the horses and the flick of their tails.
Peaceful.
Steady.
That was what they’d wanted from this place when they’d made it.
A haven they carved out away from humanity’s careless and often deadly mistakes.
“Tell me,” Zhan demanded, even as Tarus stared at her. She couldn’t see his brother’s eyes or the heat flashing in them. Tarus played with their women, but he didn’t look at them. But how could they not look at Dahlia? She was incandescent. Zhan could taste her desire, the musk of her need ringing through him like a perfume. They still needed to know what she was. What had happened? Who was Bish to her?
So many questions. He tugged her hair in an effort to get her attention back on him.
No, that was a lie. He’d fisted that mass of gorgeous, silken strands and tugged it because he wanted to see her face.
“Yes,” she sobbed with the release. It vibrated the air around them like a tuning fork. If he hadn’t already been hard, he would have been stone. “Anything.”
“Who are you?”
“Yours.” The desperation in that whisper stunned him. “Yours.”
The resonance of truth had terrified him.
And nothing he did got her out of his head.
Whipping around, he strode back inside and dressed. Not waiting for Tarus. Not even bothering to tell him anything. Zhan headed for Sinner’s. If he couldn’t get answers from Dahlia, he’d get them out of Bish or Karmen, or whatever other twisted one of their kind lingered there. The bar was a crossroads of sorts, and Zhan was exceptionally cross.
The fact that he might see Dahlia had nothing to do with his choice.
Nothing at all.
Tonight was a busy night at the bar, like every Saturday. Ignorant humans danced and laughed, drinking way too much alcohol for their measly livers to process. As Zhan passed one particularly drunk man at a high top, he deflated from the all too common sorrow. This man had lost his wife and child in a car wreck less than a year before. Every day since, he’d drunk himself into a stupor to the point his liver was failing. His days were numbered.
How was that justice?
It wasn’t. The man had done good things in his life, and now he would die of grief.
Just like Dahlia should have died at the hands of her abusive boyfriend.
The ratio of Keepers to humans tonight was slim. He spotted Quetta behind the bar, but that was normal. She thrived on the stupidity of humans, so why not work every chance she got?
Karmen was nowhere to be seen, however, a despondent Bish slouched over the bar, two empty glasses and one half full one sat in front of him, as if he’d been there for a while.
Not unusual to see him holding up a spot here, he was actually quite the regular, but the dark amber liquid was unusual.
No liquor for Bish tonight. Instead, he had the faintly luminescent Nectar of the Gods. It was the only drink guaranteed to put a Keeper on his ass.
Also the drink of choice for Zhan and Tarus. Sometimes it was too tempting to numb the constant demand of their grace. Others probably thought it was easy for them to sit back and do nothing.
It fucking wasn’t.
Zhan fought every day to stay sane, and somewhere along the way, they’d succeeded in dulling the senses enough that it had hardened his heart.