Page 55 of Dragon in Denial
“A couple days ago,” Antoinette supplied. “We’re still hashing everything out.”
“That explains the pissed off look on your face,” Gabe said. “Wait. No, it doesn’t.”
“Well, itisKetu,” Rahu said, and then laughed when Ketu narrowed his eyes.
“You are never going to get through this story,” Petra said to Antoinette.
“She’s right,” Rahu said. “And I’m starved. Can we order room service?”
“I have a better idea,” Ketu said. Hell, his friends had learned this much about his life, he might as well go all the way.
“Why don’t we go to my parents’ house? My mother always has something simmering on the stove.”
Rahu leaped off the bed and rubbed his hands together. “Let’s go!”
Ketu texted his mom, warning her of impending company, and the group piled into two rental SUVs. Gabe’s phone rang just as they were pulling out of the hotel’s parking lot.
“What do you need, Rahu?” Gabe asked. After he listened for a moment, he pressed the speaker button and then said, “Rahu suggests you try to finish your story while we’re en route.”
Ketu was driving, with Gabe in the passenger seat. Gabe had tried to convince Antoinette to sit up front, but she insisted his position as reeve meant he should sit there instead. Ketu was pretty sure she’d done it because she hadn’t wanted to sit next to him.
“So,” Rahu’s voice said over the phone, “Ketu’s sister was dating the reeve’s kid?”
“Yes,” Antoinette said. “We’ve known him forever, of course. He’s closer to my and Eulalie’s age than Ketu’s, and we went to school with him. Eulalie was eighteen when he began paying attention to her.”
“Then what happened?” Rahu asked.
“Well, he’d always been kind of a jerk, so I never understood why she gave him the time of day, to be honest. But I guess when the reeve’s son notices you, that’s sort of attractive.”
“I happen to find reeves quite attractive,” Talia quipped.
“I think you mean one reeve in particular, right?” Gabe replied.
Talia laughed and winked.
“We didn’t know it at the time, but Darius had already come up with the recipe for dragon’s blood.” She glanced at Ketu, held his gaze. “He used his friends to test it, to determine how people reacted, how addicting it was. After what happened to you yesterday, I wonder if he forced it on Eulalie too.”
Ketu’s blood felt like it was boiling in his veins. “He tested that shit on my sister?”
“I don’t know for certain, but I do know that in the beginning she kept swearing she didn’t want to do it anymore. But then she’d get high again anyway.”
“Why didn’t she say anything?”
“Probably because she knew you’d do something crazy, like go after Darius.”
“Well, duh,” came Rahu’s voice over the cellular line.
“Except going after Darius is a death sentence,” Antoinette said. “Eulalie thought she was protecting us. And she thought she could handle it, handle Darius. But she wasn’t strong enough. She became addicted. And then…”
“She wasted away,” Ketu finished for her. Eulalie had basically stopped eating at the end. And she kept increasing her doses, taking them closer together, trying to stay high, because coming down was so damn hard. The official cause of death was heart attack, but Ketu knew the drug had caused it. Her body hadn’t been able to handle the amount she’d ingested that last time.
He squeezed the steering wheel and glanced in the rearview mirror in time to see Antoinette swipe tears from her cheeks. He wanted to pull the vehicle over and climb into the backseat and hold her in his arms. Damn it, this should have been a moment between just the two of them.
“Hey, man, I’m really sorry,” Rahu said, all teasing stripped from his voice.
“That’s why you moved to Detroit,” Noah’s voice broke across the line. “You were running away from your demons.”
Noah had lost his mom at a young age, and his family had basically fallen apart afterward. So yeah, he understood.
