Page 115 of Death Game: Supernatural Battle

I sighed. “Maybe. Kyros more than me.”

Laurel shook her head. “Do you remember when I asked you what would happen to your loyalties when Kyros claimed you for the sixth time?”

The thought of him biting me nearly elicited a groan.

She quirked a brow. “You assured me that you’d do what needed to be done because you loved your grandmother.”

I stilled.

“It can’t have been easy to find yourself between that love and a new love. Not when both loves are immortal. When I say you both needed time, I mean it. There has been a change in you since the theme park. Am I to take it that you decided on a side?”

My grandmother.

Or Kyros.

That’s what she was asking me.

I tipped my head back, interlacing my fingers. “No sides. Just what’s right.”

“And what’s right, Basi?”

Right was freeing two thousand slaves.

Right was ending a battle over a child that never should have started.

Right was doing what made me and those I loved happy.

“I can’t win the game, Laurel,” I said softly.

That ship had sailed well and truly.

Her eyes were on me. “Do you need to win? This was never your game to play.”

From the moment I met Kyros, it was.

“He will live.” Laurel pressed. “You’ll have protection of a Vissimo army.Youcould take him back by force.”

I had considered that. Part of me would love to take what I wanted.

Except that would hurt the Indebted.

And… “If I don’t save Kyros’s family, he’ll never look at me again.”

She pulled a face. “He offered the sixth exchange. Don’t you wonder why?”

The thought had kept me up since his visit.

“He’s angry at you,” Laurel said. “He feels betrayed and hurt. Just as you did not so long ago. But you overcame that. So will he in time.”

This vampire was two hundred and eighty years old. Ishouldbelieve her. Except I could feel what Kyros felt, and enough had happened to me that I knew some scars never left. I would always be haunted by imagining how the triplets killed my grandmother. I’d always relive that terrified, desperate moment when I’d dropped the bomb into Theodore’s open jacket. I’d never forget the call from Theodore telling me he had Tommy or the way the floor seemed to disappear beneath me.

Kyros was meant to justget overthe slaughtering of his family? What then? We’d live happily ever after until I died and he went berserk?

No.

Maybe the game had spanned generations before I came along. But this was different for the same reason Trenit and Tynan were at each other’s throats after Theodore’s death. I’d dropped the bomb, but Trenit clicked the button.

There had been bombs around the necks of the Fyrlia and Sundulus royals for one hundred and fifty years.

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