“Dunno,” he told me, and I felt the honesty in that one word roll over my skin like a fresh breeze. “I don’t think so. Fionn is old, but not fucking senile … yet.” Reece chuckled and shook his head. “I just think as much as they moan and complain about missin’ da old world? They kind of like the shit they got goin’ on in this one and you being here? You change everything they come to know, you.”
“Once the Veil is open … what happens?” I asked, because although I was slowly regaining Gràinne’s memories, slowly regaining my own, I didn’t know the answer to that question. “We go home?”
“We go home,” Reece said, but his voice had that slight off quality to it, like he was telling the truth so far as he knew it … but maybe he didn’t believe it in his heart? Maybe, like me, Reece didn’t feel like he had a home.
Home.
I wasn’t sure if I’d ever had one.
Not as Le Gardien du Voile, not as Ciarah.
Not now.
But I could make one, couldn’t I?
Glancing over at Reece, I felt this warmth inside my chest. He was still a stranger to me, but he also had this … comforting presence to him. For such a big, gruff man, there was a tenderness and a gentleness inside of him that made his alpha male attitude and strength that much more appealing.
“Strippers, pot, coke, and alcohol. Sounds familiar. Am I certain I wasn’t a biker before all this?”
Reece grinned, his teeth white in his tanned face, and knocked back the cup of alcohol in his hand.
“You forgot to mention sex, gambling, and fights. But girl, you too sweet to be a biker or one of dem clubwhores.”
I smiled and it felt like a dark shadow passing across my face. Reece noticed and cocked a questioning brow at me.
“Don’t be so sure about that,” I said, and took another sip of wine.
The door to my bedroom flew open and I hopped out of bed, fully-clothed and ready to fight. But it wasn’t one of my mother’s boyfriends, not this time. It was the bitch herself.
“Get up,” she screamed, obviously drunk. I actually prefered it when she was on heroin. Then all I had to worry about was whether she would die on the couch and stink up the house. When she was guzzling tourists’ discarded hurricanes from the trash can outside (like, she actually went out and stole souvenir fish bowls that thirsty tourists had left in the garbage with leftover alcohol in them), she was a raging bitch beyond comparison.
She screamed obscenities at me. Insults. She hit me. She pulled my hair and threw stuff at me, broke my things and tried to break me. But she never did, never could. Because every time I looked in her eyes, I saw what a broken person looked like and I knew I’d never let that happen to me.
Never.
“Get a fucking job, you piece of shit, worst mistake I ever made …” Laura—because I wouldn’t call her Mom—drawled, sloshing alcohol across the already stained carpet.
“Why don’t you get a job!” I screamed back at her, because I had been working for the last few months, down at a bar on Bourbon Street, slinging drinks for tourists with a fake ID I got from my last boyfriend. It was quality, good enough to pass intense inspection. But I wouldn’t tell her that. If I did, not only would she steal my money, but she’d come down to the bar while I was working and harass me for free drinks. She’d gotten me fired at places before and I didn’t doubt her ability to do it again. “You’re the mom—it’s YOUR job to work. It’s your job to pay the rent and buy the food and clean the house. I’ve been doing all those things by myself for YEARS and I’m done.”
I grabbed my backpack off the old, scratched metal desk under my bedroom window. I might’ve only been seventeen but I could live at the library and shower at the school. Fuck this. I was done putting up with Laura’s crap. I was supposed to love my mother, but I hated her. I hated her. I fucking HATED her.
Pain exploded in the back of my skull and I stumbled forward, dropping my bag with a grunt, curling over the edge of the table as white spots danced in my vision. The shock of pain came again and again and again, curses exploding from my mother’s mouth like the violent shrieks of a dying crane, torn apart by a fucking gator.
That’s how little I meant to her—as little as a decaying carcass in a swamp.
She was hitting me with her liquor bottle and as I fought to turn around, she got me right in the temple and sent me crashing to my knees, darkness sweeping over and consuming me.
I wasn’t out long, not even long enough to feel my face hit the floor because suddenly, I was not lying on the ground anymore … I was sitting.
In a chair of spikes.
When I tried to relax and take some of the pressure off my arms, pain spiked through me and I gasped. Laughter echoed in the dark room around me and I knew I was not in my room anymore. I was not seventeen and I was not just Ciarah now.
I was the Veil Keeper, too.
‘Ciarah, this is a dream,’ someone said to me. ‘Wake up.’
But I couldn’t wake up because there were eyes everywhere, eyes and smiles glinting in the darkness, looking at me like they couldn’t decide if they wanted to violate me or eat me. Or both. I screamed, but my voice as so ragged and broken, no sound came out.
That was how low I’d fallen.
First, a carcass to my mother.
Now, a broken doll without a voice.
They’d stolen away my words, my opinions, my emotions.
They’d silenced me.
They wanted to break me.
But I’d already promised I wouldn’t be broken. By anyone.
‘Ciarah, can you hear me?’ the voice asked again, the sound a cool breeze against my heated skin. ‘You need to wake up, mon cher.’
It was Killian, I realized as the sharp gazes and the awful smiles came closer.
My arms hurt so goddamn badly, I knew I was about to give in. I was about to let go and be impaled on so many spikes, the weight of my own body crushing me into the blades.
And then … my mouth bloomed with a kiss that was both cold and hot at the same time, scalding, searing, aching.
And I woke up.
“Killian.” His name sighed from my lips like a prayer. “Thank you.”
“Nothing to thank, chère, you were dreaming and it didn't look like a particularly pleasant dream, no?” His face blocked my view of the room, his lips still close enough to mine that I could feel the heat from them.
“No,” I replied in a small voice, still trembling from the horrors of my dream. My soul knew it was no dream though. Those had been flashbacks. Memories.
What a horrible life I must have led. Maybe those memories were better left gone, after all?
“Sorry, Kill.” I smiled into his gentle blue eyes as his thumb stroked my jaw.“I must have drunk more than I realized.”
The sounds around us indicated we were still in the communal clubhouse, and the party was nowhere close to its natural end. Dimly, I remembered having crawled into a booth to take my little nap, so we were out of the way a bit.
“Faerie wine, Ciarah,” Killian grinned, releasing my face and shifting to sit back a bit further, allowing me to see the rest of the room. “It sneaks up on you if you don't expect it. How's your head? That stuff can be known to leave a nasty hangover, too.”