Page 58 of Beautiful Sinners

“But I thought…” I thought Cillian was the one who saved me.

He never actually said he did. Only that he was there.

And so, apparently, was Alana. She brought me back from death. Her arms tenderly held me as I bled all over the living room rug, still smoking from the fire that had charred the left side of my body. So much horrific pain. I wanted to die. I wanted it all to end. But she wouldn’t let me go.

Black occludes my vision and circles around me, fading everything away in a fog of gray. I’m back in that room at the mercy of the constellation man who took everything from me.

“So, you and Tristan?”

Like coming out of a trance, I snap to attention. “What?” My head swivels around so fast I get dizzy. Or maybe the effects of the tequila are hitting me faster than I thought.

“You and Tristan,” she repeats, but it’s the biting way she says it that tells me she doesn’t like the idea of me and her brother together.

Regardless, there is no way I’m telling my adoptive mother that I’m in a relationship and sleeping with three men.

“Pass,” I reply.

Andie grins devilishly. “Drink up, cuz.”

I draw back from the table as far as my chair will let me. “I didn’t agree to a truth.”

“So, you want a dare?” Andie counters just as my basket of fries gets plunked down in front of me. I take a fry, still hot, and bite into it.

“Yep,” I robotically reply before realizing my faux pas and say, “No.”

God only knows what dare she’d demand I do.

Andie taps a black-polished fingernail to one of the shot glasses. Dammit.

I drink that one and immediately feel its compounded effects when it mingles with the other two in my stomach. My thoughts go a little fuzzy, and my mood seems to mellow like melted candle wax. The tension in my body eases, and I slump forward, elbow on the table and propping my chin in my hand, as the world around me goes soft and a little fuzzy. Tequila isn’t so bad.

Or maybe tequila is the devil because the next thing I know, when Andie asks me truth or dare, my slightly inebriated brain chooses dare.

CHAPTER 20

“Will you calm down?” Tristan says as we follow Rafe and Keane down a busy sidewalk heading to who knows where the hell Andie took Syn.

The five of us bulldoze our way through slow ambling pedestrians who are too busy looking at their phones and not where they’re going.

“You fucking calm down.”

I couldn’t leave our floor because I couldn’t access the elevator or stairwell door. I hate feeling trapped, and he damn well knows it.

Con brushes up beside me, a gentle shoulder bump, but it’s enough to recenter me. I release an irritated breath that I regret immediately when my lungs fill with the exhaust fumes from idling cars stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic. The sooty emissions choke the air from a mass exodus of people trying to flee downtown and get back home. The ones who stick around after their nine to five workday stay for the restaurants and bars that litter the city, wanting an extra hour or two before they venture back to their chaotic suburban lives of familial responsibility, a nagging spouse or hyperactive kids they want to avoid. Others, the single ones, stay because being around people is better than returning to an empty apartment alone.

“How do you know where they are?” Tristan asks.

Keane smirks over his shoulder. “Tracking device implanted in her arm. You should get Aoife one.”

That actually horrifies me. “No one is chipping Syn like a goddamn dog.”

Tristan, however, gets a thoughtful look on his face. “It’s not much different than location share on her phone.”

“Which she gets the choice to turn on and off,” I point out. Having something inserted into your body that you have no control over takes away that choice.

“We’re here,” Rafe says.

The heavy beat of music thumps out into the street from the nondescript bar whose only obvious accoutrement, other than the name of the establishment, is a giant neon sign that decorates the front window, flashing “Girls, Beer, and a Good Time” in bright, blinding hot pink.

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