Page 81 of Cursed Shadows 3

Her smirk lingers before she pushes her empty chalice aside.

Dare tips the jug’s pourer to his mug. The slosh of the refill is interrupted by Aleana as she asks, “How was your adventure?”

The dark glimmer in her pale eyes brings a smug look to my own face.

Dare slams the copper jug down on the edge of the bench. He keeps it close to him, close enough that I wonder if anyone reached for it, how many fingers they would be left with.

Just as Daxeel’s fingertips burrow deeper into my hair, his cheek turned to me, I add, “Get any sleep?”

Hunched over, Dare lifts the gold flakes he has for eyes. They glitter with unspoken grouchy threats from behind the tips of his tousled locks, inky tendrils that are somewhere between waves like my own and curls like Daxeel’s.

“I got some hours.” The gravelly undertone of his voice surprises me.

Dare always speaks so smoothly, even his growled words are somehow drawled at the same time. But now, it’s like someone took a fistful of sandpaper to his throat and scrubbed, hard.

“I feel like you,” and he jerks his chin at Aleana, “after a phase at the Gloaming.”

In answer, she scoffs a rude sound and runs him over with her icy gaze. He only tips the refill down his throat, emptying his mug.

A frown tugs at my brow. “How much drink did you have?”

Dare doesn’t look at me as he adds his third and final pour of coffee until the jug is empty. “It wasn’t the drink. Bee had some white powder at her abode. We indulged.”

“I have never stepped between you and your conquests,” Rune growls out the words with a twitch of his upper lip. “But a kinta? A kinta who chooses to live as a human in their world?”

Daxeel’s snort catches in his throat.

I throw him a withering look.

Aleana stretches her arms above her head. “Did you have the sex?”

An eager grin steals my face. I aim it at the hybrid.

“Didn’t get the chance,” he says and with the sigh he exhales, his shoulders slump. He presses one hand into his knee, as if to keep himself sitting upright, however slouched, and he tosses aside the mug he’s drained clean of all droplets of coffee. “The white powder knocked us out, then she had some meeting to attend come morning. We didn’t quite get to the bedding.”

A clatter draws in our gazes.

Across the kitchens, on the other side of the bench, Samick looks up from the stack of frying pans he’s neatly arranged. “She booted you?”

Maybe it’s that we are so familiar, or merely that I’m already looking in that direction, but I home in like a predator on the glint in Eamon’s eyes; the one that turns them amber.

I suspect the tightly set line of his mouth is to fight off a smile.

For a beat, I watch my brother of the soul, I watch him lay out strips of fresh meat over the frying pans. He doesn’t speak the words I’m certain he chews on.

Dare has his back to Eamon, so he sees no such secrets dancing over his face. He just threads his pale, slender fingers through his messy hair. “Suppose you could say that.”

Then Eamon asks, and he keeps his tone light, “Lose anything?”

A flicker of silence tenses the kitchens.

Dare’s inhale is a slow, steady one that expands the muscles of his chest enough that they push against the thin, costly material of his grey sweater. The hand that presses down on his knee tightens into a grip I’m sure will bruise his porcelain complexion—but it’s the sudden shift of his eyes that gives him away, how those pots of liquid gold harden to gilded blades.

His tongue rolls out the answer between his bared teeth, “Yes.”

No one speaks.

Silence has us in an ice-grip.

---