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Delores screeches as she hugs me tight again. “Thank you, hon.” She pulls back, and her brow arches again as she eyes me.
“What?”
She smiles curiously. “You look…different. I mean…” She shakes her head. “It’s like a vibe about you.”
I feel my cheeks flush. “I’m sure it’s nothing.”
She chuckles. “My mistake. You go off and see that handsome brother of yours.”
“Thanks, Delores.”
I start to head down the hall.
“Hey—Freya?”
I turn back to her. She’s got a shit-eating grin on her face.
“By ‘vibe’, I meant ‘giant fucking hickey on your neck’. Just an FYI.”
Heat explodes across my face and my hand jerks up to the bruising on my neck I’vetriedto cover with concealer. Fuck.
Delores chuckles. “Unless you got into a fight with a chain, I’dloveto hear about your hot date.” She nods her chin past me. “Your brother might not, though…”
“You look like shit,”Damian croaks, his voice scratchy but still laced with that teasing edge I know and love.
I roll my eyes, moving closer. “Thanks. You look like a corpse.”
He’s sitting up in bed, no longer with all the unnerving feeding and breathing tubes snaking out of his mouth. His supernaturally white hair catches the light, making him look almost otherworldly, like a ghost.
His eerie, purplish eyes lock on mine. With Anni and I, they’re always filled with smiles and charm.
With most other people, they’re filled with pure darkness.
He chuckles, the sound a little strained but genuine. “Still better looking than most, I’d say.”
I roll my eyes. “I see weeks of hovering near death have done nothing to diminish your ego.”
“Mercifully, not my dick either. I checked.”
I make a puking face and gag.
“Oh my God, could younot?”
Damian grins widely as I slap his arm.
Despite the humor in his words, there’s an undercurrent of darkness in him lurking just beneath the surface. It’s always there, a part of him that he can’t hide, no matter how hard he tries. But he walks that tightrope between charm and danger perfectly, somehow balancing the two with ease.
“Hey, don’t hit me,” he grunts. “The whole ‘near-death’ thing, in case you’ve forgotten already?”
“Yeah, well, you’renotdead, which is kind of an inconvenience for pretty much everyone else, including me.”
Damian flips me off. I do the same right back.
Then he smirks at me. “You’re lucky I’m too weak to strangle you.”
I chuckle, but the warmth of the moment fades quickly. The weight of everything that’s happened—the wedding attack, the uncertainty of what comes next—presses down on us, casting a pall over our conversation. To make things worse, we just heard that Annika is going to be flying back to Japan with Kenzo. He’s pulling out of New York in the wake of all the violence, not to mention uncertainty about who the enemy even is.
On the plus side, it means my best friend is going to beutterlysafe. Kenzo commands an army back in Kyoto, and lives in afortress-like mansion. And even though this marriage is just one giant peace treaty, and he and Annika don’t even like each other very much, I know Kenzo is old-school when it comes to certain things. Like marriage.
