Page 6 of Reckless Hearts

“How about we just enjoy your birthday tonight, yeah?”

She smiles wryly and gives me another hug.

“Not to mention the glorious death of your late and unlamented arranged marriage.”

A weird sort of look flashes across her face, but just as quickly disappears.

“Oh, definitely,” she blurts. “We’re definitely drinking to that.”

A second later, though, she’s being pulled away for pictures with her grandmother. I smile as I watch the Drakos clan joke with and jostle each other. Next to them, the Kildares—Eilish, Neve, their uncle Cillian and his wife Una, and of course their former bodyguard who might as well be their older brother, Castle—do the same thing.

Sometimes—okay, a lot of times—I’m jealous of the big families my friends have and have had their whole lives. But then I remind myself just how lucky I am to be a part of all this, even only on the periphery.

So, I smile as they all take photos, sipping my champagne as I turn to the side table Dimitra has had set up near where we’re all eating, filled with framed pictures of Callie and her family growing up. I grin at one of her at maybe age ten wearing the infamous “Drakos birthday hat”—this absurd Cat-in-the-Hat looking monstrosity that for some reason they all traditionally wear on birthdays, and that Calliehates.

There’s one of Ares and Hades riding their bikes as kids. Another of a teenaged but alreadymassiveKratos hoisting Callie out of a pool. Another, of baby Callie in her grandmother’s arms, has my lips spreading into a wide grin.

And then I get to the next framed photo, and my heart turns to stone.

It’shim.

The shot is of six-year-old Callie, with Deimos’ arm slung around her shoulders.

And he’s positivelyglaringinto the camera.

My pulse thuds in my veins as I swallow thickly. He must only be something like twelve in the photo.Twelve, and he’s already got the look of a combat veteran with several hellish tours of duty under his belt. The look of a full-grown man who knows death far too intimately.

The haunted look of the very devil himself.

Mydevil, staring right into my soul.

I swallow the sudden hard lump in the back of my throat with a largish gulp of bubbly. That same ominous feeling, like I had when I first walked in, returns with a vengeance. It’s as if having a picture of him here has conjured his malevolent spirit here, too.

It’s like I canfeelhim.

Like I can sense him.

A dark, inky spirit of death slipping between the branches of a gnarled tree with outstretched claws ready to sink into my jugular. I shiver in the chilly fall air and start to go back to the warmth of the heat lamps and the smiles of my friends.

But I don’t make it.

Because the second I turn, something tall, dark and venomous slides between me and everyone else, like a dark cloud blotting out the moon.

Like a dragon swallowing the sun.

Like black ink on wet paper, slowly bleeding into the pulp.

Something broad-shouldered and looming with fierce dark eyes, chiseled cheekbones, and a lethally sharp jaw. Something that smells like bergamot, pine, leather and spice, with black tattoos swirling like warning signs up his neck.

Something with a lean, muscled arm with the sleeve rolled halfway up that stabs out, stealing my breath and arresting my pulse when a powerful hand wraps its iron grip around my throat.

Everything dims. The rest of the world goes silent and frozen as Deimos lowers his terrifying and illegally beautiful face to my chilled and horrified one, his black eyes narrowed at me like death itself.

“Exactly what thefuckare you doing here?”

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DAHLIA

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