Ashayla decided to walk home from Gran’s funeral.
The ceremony had been a small, private gathering. A handful of neighbors whose lives Gran had touched with her kindness over the years, and a few Nephilim cousins from the area who’d come to pay their respects.
Although Asha missed her grandmother’s company already, she couldn’t find it in her to mourn her passing. Gran had lived a long, full life. And in the end, she’d slipped away with grace and calm.
And peace.
Asha had known the return of the pendant would be a relief for her grandmother. The expression on the dying Nephilim’s face when she saw the pale blue stone dangling from its silver chain had been nothing short of beatific.
“Oh, my dear child…you’ve found it!” Gran had exclaimed from her sickbed as Asha had brought the pendant to her when she returned home from Ebarron. Though Gran had been weak and near death, she’d sat up to receive the heirloom with bright eyes and eager hands. “All this time, I feared it was gone forever. I worried that our family had failed Leila in our promise to safeguard Inanna’s Tear.”
Asha hadn’t understood what Gran meant. The names were unfamiliar, something Gran had never mentioned before. She’d suspected the old woman’s mind had been fading.
The truth was something far different.
The pendant was an heirloom, an extraordinary one. A priceless one, if Gran’s explanation of its history proved to be fact.
Inanna’s Tear.
That’s what the female who’d created it had called the unusual piece. Her name was Leila, and she had been the last living Succubus.
Before she was slain along with the rest of her Succubus sisters and cousins in the last great war over the Obsidian Throne, Leila entrusted Inanna’s Tear to the women of Asha’s line, with the promise that they would keep it safe until the time came to use it.
But to use it for what?
Gran didn’t know.
And now it was up to Asha to ensure the pendant’s safekeeping.
She wore it around her neck now, beneath her blouse as she strolled back home under a sunny afternoon sky. As much as she ached to be away from Sorin and the incredible night they’d shared, as much as it shredded her not to have heard from him in the days since, the familiarity of the old neighborhood she’d grown up in was a welcome balm.
Since she’d been back, she’d drafted a dozen messages to him, only to throw them all away. She didn’t know what to say to him. Even worse, she didn’t know if there was anything she could say…other than she was sorry. But that was a message she hoped to deliver in person.
If he would ever want to see her again.
That uncertainty made her steps heavy as she approached a farm stand about a block from her house. She would never be as good a cook as Gran, but the lure of fresh produce drew her to the stand to collect a few things for dinner. She put a squash and some bright peppers in her basket, then drifted over to the bins of fresh fruit.
The strawberries smelled amazing, as did the peaches. She lifted one of the velvet-skinned fruits and brought it to her nose. Eyes closed, she breathed in its sweet perfume, recalling all too vividly the sound of Sorin’s voice when he had his head buried between her thighs and described the taste of her.
Peaches and cream.
She moaned at the memory, and at the longing she still felt when she thought of him.
A longing she knew would stay with her for the rest of her life. In the days she’d been away from Ebarron, Asha had felt bereft, empty. And as much as she had wanted to deny her desire for him when they first met, what she felt for Sorin now was irrefutable. She cared for him like she had no other man. Like she never would for another.
As impossible as it seemed, she had fallen halfway in love with him already. Heaven help her, she’d fallen more than halfway.
Asha sighed and started to place the peach in her basket.
That’s when her gaze snagged on something unusual in the bin.
A coin with a griffin emblem on it.
No, not a coin. A chip from the Ebarron casino.
She glanced up on a gasp, her heart climbing into her throat. Sorin?
She searched all around her, a frantic visual pan of the sidewalk and street as she pivoted where she stood, praying she wasn’t hallucinating.
And then…there he was.
He stepped out of the entrance alcove of the building next door, dressed in an open-collared, white button-down and charcoal suit pants, his golden hair gleaming in the sunlight as he strode toward her.
“You’re here,” she whispered, unable to think beyond the fact that he was standing there, in Chicago, his topaz eyes locked on her in that stare that always reached out to her like a physical embrace. “Sorin, I didn’t think you would… What are you doing here?”