Sin Undone

She went up on her tiptoes, but she still only reached his shoulders. “I. Said. No. If I were a brother instead of a sister, you wouldn’t be this crazy about protecting me, and you know it. I will not be treated differently just because I don’t have a dick.”


“Sin—” She cut off Eidolon by slamming her beer down on the counter, spraying foam everywhere. “I will not put you at risk.” She’d done that by accepting Lore’s help with her ex-master, Detharu, and it had cost her brother years of suffering. She wouldn’t do that to a sibling again, and neither would she allow herself to grow close to them. If she was stuck with them twenty-four-seven…

She shuddered. They were overbearing and protective enough as it was. If they got to know her, she’d be screwed.

“You don’t have to do this alone.” Shade’s fingers circled her wrist, his hold gentle but as unyielding as shackles. “You are ours—” You are mine. The voice of her first master, the one who had taken her off the streets where she’d been starving, craving things she didn’t understand, pounded in her head. He’d run an underworld crime ring that mostly operated in the human world—gambling, prostitution, murder for hire, drug and slave trafficking. He’d been the first to own her, but he hadn’t been the last.

You are mine. You belong to me. You are ours. The words of past masters kept clanging around in her skull until her throat tightened and her heart kicked madly against her ribs. “Yours?” Sin broke Shade’s hold and stumbled back so fast she bumped into Con. “I belong to no one.” God, she was trembling all over, and her breath had backed up in her lungs as anxiety swamped her.

“Whoa.” Shade’s hands came up. “Hey, it’s okay.”

Con rested his palms on her shoulders, his grip strangely comforting when it should have made her feel even more trapped. “I think you boys should back off.” Eidolon and Shade glared at Con, glints of gold breaking the surfaces of their dark eyes as anger sparked. “I appreciate what you’ve done for her,” Eidolon said, his voice scraping gravel, “but she is our sister, and we can handle this.”

Tension pinged off Sin’s skin like buckshot. She opened her mouth to tell them all off, but Con spoke first. “She needs you,” he said, in that soothing paramedic voice he’d used on her in the ambulance. “You know that. She knows that.” He squeezed her shoulder, a silent message to roll with what he was saying. “But it might be best if you let me stay by her side while you handle things from UG.”

Everyone stared, motionless, until Eidolon finally took a long swig of his beer and nodded. “You’ll check in every couple of hours.”

Sin clenched her fists at the command, but she resisted the urge to mouth off. Antagonizing E and Shade now would be stupid, and she wouldn’t put it past Eidolon to change his mind. “I might only have a couple of days, maybe hours, before I have to take care of some clan business, but we’ll do what we can until then,” Con promised.

“Good.” Eidolon propped his hip against the kitchen’s island countertop and cursed with annoyance when the beer that had spilled out of her bottle soaked his pants. “Since you’ll be moving around a lot, can you take her to warg areas that might be infected? I can give you the locations of the packs where my patients came from.”

Con frowned. “Why?” “Because before the Carceris interrupted us, we were working on reversing the disease in an infected warg. Sin failed, in part because too much of the virus was in the warg’s blood, and what was there had degraded too badly to be useful in the lab. If she can try the same thing with someone who has been infected for only a few hours, she might have a shot at success. I need a sample of freshly killed, intact virus.”

“Interesting.” Con slid her a glance, one that was almost approving, and for some reason, she felt like a happy puppy that had been praised for piddling outside instead of on the carpet. Annoying. “Yeah, we can do that.”

“Lore plugged all the cases into a computer program the R-XR developed to track outbreaks and cross-check them with known populations of canine-based underworld beings—” “I thought only turned wargs were affected,” Sin interrupted. “Why track anyone else?” “Just a precaution, in case the disease mutates. Like it did with Con.” Eidolon handed Con a slip of paper, Lore’s handwriting scrawled on it. “That’s the log-in and password.” Sin’s heart lurched in her chest. “How is Lore?”

Shade cocked a dark eyebrow. “Flipping out.”