wished I hadn’t, because I started thinking about Val.
I still couldn’t believe what she’d done. I mean, I’d accepted that she was a traitorous bitch, but I just couldn’t understand why. How long had she been working with the fae? There was no way it could’ve been since I met her three years ago. Or at least I hoped not. She hadn’t been under compulsion, because she’d been wearing the four-leaf clover incased in her bracelet. I’d seen it, and the simple, yet extremely powerful thing prevented a fae from manipulating a human. She was using free will while aiding the fae, and even when she went back to headquarters, removing some weird, random crystal David had kept in storage. She made that choice.
How could she do this to everyone?
Heart pumping, I opened my eyes. “Ren?”
“Yeah?”
“Did . . . David say anything about Valerie?”
He didn’t answer immediately. “Order members are looking for her, but no one has seen her.”
That was because they didn’t know where to look or know her like I did, but I was going to find her. I had to, because I had to make sense of how she could do this.
“She’s a big concern. She knows a lot about the Order, and David isn’t keen on the fact she’s probably shared a shitload of secrets with the fae.” He paused. “I still want to kill her.”
And I still had a hard time hearing that.
I got his anger though. I was also furious. After the gate had opened and the prince had strolled through, kicking ass and not taking names, I’d followed them back to the Order’s headquarters, and she . . . she had left me there with him. There was no doubt in my mind she knew what was going to happen, and she left me.
“But it’s more than that.” His voice was heavier, tired. “He’s not questioning the whole halfling shit anymore. He knows we’ve got to find her.”
Understanding rippled through me. “You think Val is the halfling?”
“Yeah, babe. It’s what I’ve been thinking for some time. It’s why I wouldn’t tell you who the other person I was looking into was. Didn’t want to put that crap in your head if it turned out not to be the case,” he explained.
Holy Sunday-sized shit balls.
Ren and David, the sect leader, thought the halfling was Val. To them, it made sense. Then didn’t they have to be worried out of their minds that Val was already in the process of getting pregnant with the doomsday baby?
“She must’ve figured it out somehow. Maybe a fae got to her and found out,” Ren added, and then yawned. “I know her parents are denying it. Both are claiming that they’re her actual biological parents, but who would fess up to that shit?”
My stomach sunk. “Where are her parents now?”
“Don’t know. Don’t really care.”
Pressure clamped down on my chest. I opened my mouth to tell him . . . to tell him what, exactly? That I knew for a fact her parents were innocent of shacking up with a fae? How could I prove that without incriminating myself? I closed my mouth, and oh God, I was a terrible person, a legit horrible human being.
Well . . .
Nope. Wasn’t quite a human being now, was I?
Oh my God, I needed my brain to, like, jump off a freaking cliff. What in the hell was I going to do? I couldn’t let her parents go down, because I seriously doubted they had anything to do with what she’d done. And they would go down. That was the way the Order operated. Her parents would’ve been deemed a threat and there was only one way threats were dealt with. Unease blossomed in my chest, along with a hefty dose of fear.
“You sure you’re okay?” he asked suddenly.
“Yeah,” I breathed, forcing my tense muscles to relax. I refocused. “Has David said anything about that crystal Val took?”
“He doesn’t know what it is.” Ren paused. “Or he’s not saying. Not sure if he trusts anyone at the moment, but I’ve put some feelers out to see if anyone in the Elite has an idea.”
Couldn’t blame David for not trusting anyone. Hopefully someone knew about the crystal. I thought about Merle. She’d randomly mentioned a crystal once before, but I was reluctant to involve her and her daughter. I didn’t want to bring trouble to their doorstep. They’d been through enough.
His hand tightened along my hip, and then he found my cheek in the darkness once more, and kissed me there. I let him fall asleep this time, but I stared into nothing as my mind jumped from one screwed up situation to the next. Stupid tears burned the back of my throat, but I fought them back, because if they fell, Ren would wake, and I was feeling too weak, too ripped open to keep this very big, very horrific secret under lock and key.
But as I lay there, the fear inside me grew like one of the vines that had crawled its way up the wall and over the balcony railing. There was no shaking the feeling that no matter what I did, things were going to go bad.
And they were going to go bad fast.
Chapter Three
I’d originally planned to get my butt out of my apartment and make my way to the headquarters on Thursday, but that’s not what I ended up doing. Instead, I checked in with Jo Ann, my only non-Order friend. Unsure of how to explain why I had disappeared from class and hadn’t been very communicative, I went with the trusty old “I got mugged” excuse, which was sadly believable, but there was a good chance that was the second time I’d used that excuse to explain away random bruises. I really needed to come up with something more creative, because I was sure there was going to be another instance when I was going to have to lie to her.
And that sucked.
Besides the fact that I liked her and enjoyed how genuinely kind she was, being around Jo Ann made me feel . . . normal. Like I was any twenty-one-year-old about to turn twenty-two in two months. That I could have things like a degree and a boyfriend. Like I wasn’t shirking my duty by enrolling in classes at Loyola—classes I was most likely going to fail.
That served as a cold reminder that I wasn’t normal.
I spent the bulk of Thursday dealing with my rather ineffective attempt at being normal. I’d tracked down the syllabus, but only managed to get a return call from my statistics professor, of all people. After bluntly telling me I’d missed way too much time, he explained I needed to talk to my advisor and then mic-dropped on me by hanging up.
My advisor didn’t call me back until Thursday afternoon, and it wasn’t a good call, but honestly, out of everything else, it almost felt like not a big deal. Just another reason to eat my feelings through the last box of pralines.
I’d missed too much time, a week here and a few days there, and I had a choice that really wasn’t much of a choice at all. Fail classes due to already missing so much time, and it was only the beginning of October, or withdrawal from the semester.
I was going to have to withdraw, and it was hard not to laugh at the tiny, almost pathetic voice that said I could reregister in the spring or once things calmed down. As if things were ever going to calm down.
As I tossed my phone on the couch cushion, I told myself that I was still Ivy Morgan. I was still her even if I had to drop out of college, even though I was a halfling. I was still her. No matter what.
I had to keep telling myself that.
So I stayed in my apartment, on my couch, Thursday and Friday. Ren and Tink were relieved about that. Their reasoning for me “taking it easy” came from two very different places.
Ren worried about my health—physical and mental. He didn’t want me back on the streets until I was ready for both.
Tink didn’t want me stepping out of the apartment, because he feared I’d be exposed as a halfling or snatched up by the prince.
But I wasn’t going to stay hidden away forever. I couldn’t. I just had to be smart about all of this. The bruises were fading, and in probably another day or two I could go out in public without people staring at me. The ache deep in my body was also fading. I could protect myself if necessary, and I was pretty sure by Sunday I’d be fine enough to get back out there.
> I hoped so at least, because I was already going stir crazy. I had too much time to think and try to figure things out. There were a lot of things I didn’t understand. If I sat down and started listing them, I’d be doing it for the next week, but one of the biggest things was why the prince hadn’t come knocking or busting down my door. According to Tink, after the prince got way too familiar with my blood, he could sense me out, so he had to know where I lived.
I asked Tink that question when Friday evening rolled around and Ren was out on the streets. “Why hasn’t the prince showed up here?”
“Huh?” he murmured, squinting at the TV.
I sighed.
Tink was sitting on the couch beside me and he’d commandeered my laptop at some point. The Walking Dead was on the television—well, it was on the Amazon Fire Stick TV thingy that the little bastard had ordered a few days ago unbeknownst to me. On my laptop, he was watching old episodes of Supernatural. I think he was on season three judging by the current length of Sam Winchester’s hair.
At least it wasn’t Harry Potter and Twilight this time, because I was getting really tired of hearing him quote Edward Cullen and Ron Weasley at the same time.
“Why are you watching both of them?” I asked, folding my arms loosely across my chest as I leaned back against the cushion.
“I think it’s good to be prepared,” he said from his cross-legged position.
“Prepared for what?”
He stopped the show on his laptop. “Zombie apocalypse or a demon infestation. You’ll thank me when people start eating each other or when a yellow-eyed demon shows up and starts burning people alive on ceilings. I’m going to be like Daryl and Dean and grab a bucket of salt and a bow with unlimited arrows—hold up!” He held up his hand as he zipped into the air above the laptop, focused on the TV.
Everyone was standing in front of a barn and psycho Shane was pacing in front of the locked barn doors. Psycho Shane went full crazy after he shaved his head. At least, that was my opinion.
“‘Things ain’t the way they used to be!’” Tink shouted at the same time Shane did, thrusting his little brownie fist into the air. He then turned to me, expression serious. “Things ain’t the way they used to be, Ivy!”
“Oh my God,” I muttered, pinching the bridge of my nose.
“God doesn’t have anything to do with it, Ivy Divy.”
“Can you just answer my question?”
He tilted his head to the side as he buzzed out over the coffee table. “What question?”
Taking a deep breath, I counted to ten, then reached over and snatched up the remote. Tink shouted like I had taken away his favorite toy and shattered it in front of him. All I did was pause the TV. I held on to the remote. “I was thinking—”
“That’s what I smelled!”
I stared at him.
“You know, the smell of wheels burning as they try to turn over . . .” He drifted up toward the ceiling and rolled his eyes. “Never mind. Carry on.”
My fingers tightened around the slender remote. “I was thinking that if the prince can sense me, why hasn’t he showed up here?”
“I don’t know.” Tink came down to the coffee table and started marching across it. “I’m not the prince, but if I was the prince, I’d be buying time.”
“Buying time?” I scooted to the edge of the couch.
“Yeah, because he’s got to win you over.” Tink swiped up the straw he’d had in his Coke. It was nearly the size of him. “That’s basically what he has to do if he wants to impregnate you.”
I cringed, like a full body cringe. “Please do not use the word impregnate ever again.”
“Why? That’s what he wants to do.” He started dancing with the straw, the kind of dancing you see in the clubs. Hips gyrating all over the place. “He knows coercing or tricking you isn’t going to get the deed done, so he’s probably trying to learn how not to be a sexed up dickhead.”
“Sexed up dickhead?” I repeated.
“Uh-huh.” Tink dipped the straw as one would a dancer. “Remember when I was telling you how I saw the prince getting it on with three females once? He’s totes sexed up. And he’s a dickhead. In other words, he has no empathy or compassion. No humanity.”
“Most fae don’t.”
Tink twirled the straw. “Yeah, but the ancients are worse. They’re as far away from human as you can get. He’s going to have to work on wooing you.”
I slowly shook my head. “That’s . . .” There were no words.
“That’s what I’d do.” Tink dropped the straw and whipped around toward me. “Or he’s plotting something major and any moment he’s going to knock down the front door and storm the place.”
“Wow.” A fine shiver curled down my spine. “That’s really a relaxing thought.”
He zipped over to the couch and sat on the arm. He tipped his head back and stared up at me. “Don’t worry. I’m here to protect you.”
I just looked at him, because other than ordering shit off of Amazon, the only strength he had was the unique ability to annoy the crap out of me while somehow still managing to be endearing.
Tink grinned. “Trust me, Ivy. The Prince is not going to want to mess with me.”
~
My body was the first to wake, and I was slow to open my eyes. At first I didn’t understand why I felt so hot. I could feel the blankets pushed down to my hips and my shirt was bunched up. Cool air caressed my belly, but pressed to my side was a hard, warm body, and a rough, calloused palm glided back and forth below my navel. Soft lips brushed my temple.
Ren.
Air caught in my lungs as every sense I had fully awakened. He was in bed with me, and I wasn’t sure when that happened. Normally, he was off on the weekend, but with members down, it was all hands on deck. I’d fallen asleep Saturday night a little after midnight, and he’d still been out. Home. It felt so strange and wonderful to think of Ren and home in the same sentence.
“Ivy.” He murmured my name in that deep, smooth voice of his. His hand stopped at the loose band on my pajama bottoms, with the tips of his fingers just under them.
A deep flutter kicked around in my belly as I tipped my head back. “Hey.”
It was dark in the room, and I had no idea what time it was, but I had a feeling he was smiling, and I bet his dimples were out. “I didn’t want to wake you.” His hand slid down an inch and the muscles low in my stomach tightened. “But you were making these sounds.”
I was super close to making all kinds of sounds. “I was?”
“Yeah.” He brushed his lips over the curve of my cheek as I reached over, placing my hand on his hard stomach. The muscles and skin seemed to jump in response. “These soft, little, breathy moans.”
My eyes widened. “Really?”
“I would not lie about something that was so fucking sexy.” His hand was venturing further south. “I’d just about dozed off when you started. Those moans went straight to my cock.”
Heat swept through my blood. “Sorry?”
He chuckled and then the sound faded away in the darkness. “I want to kiss you.”
Air lodged in my throat. I wanted that. “You don’t need my permission for that. Just assume it’s always granted.”
“I like the sound of that, but your lip—”
“My lips are fine,” I told him as I lowered my hand, loving the way his body stiffened against mine when I reached the band of his briefs. “Actually, they’re not okay. They’re lonely and they feel abandoned by—”
Ren’s mouth silenced me. His kiss was soft, and it felt like it had been so long since I got to enjoy this that I felt the kiss all the way to the tips of my toes. When I didn’t scream in pain or anything, he deepened the kiss, nudging my lips apart. His tongue moved against mine. I loved the feel of his mouth on mine, and the way he tasted.
“Goddamn, you’re so sweet,” he said against my mouth. “I got another request. I want to touch you. I need to.”
My breaths w
ere coming in short pants and my hips rocked even though he hadn’t even touched me there yet. “That’s another thing you can assume you have permission for.”
“You just made my night. Hell, my week.” He kissed me again, dragging his tongue over the roof of my mouth. “Fuck it. You made my life.”
Those words lit me up more than any touch could. His hand slipped down between my legs and his mouth covered mine, silencing the moan that ripped from my lungs. Sensation flooded my body, acute and delicious, but a horrible thought snapped at its heels.
Was this wrong?
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