Promises to Keep

songbird if you want. That’s fine.”

“Do you know where you are?” he asked.

Kendra’s manor. The Heathen Holiday. Several pairs of eyes were fixed on her with varying amounts of concern or annoyance. One of the most concerned was also one of her favorites.

“Exequias,” she greeted the Italian vampire. He had first come to work for her as a model, many years ago, when he was still human. Daryl had tried to convince him to stay longer, after his contract had expired, but he had disappeared.

Brina had always regretted that she hadn’t been the one who’d changed him.

“I need to borrow Jay for a bit,” Exequias said, with the same charming but fake smile that he liked to use for fans and cameras.

Brina held on tighter to her knight, until he let out a grunt that reminded her that he needed to breathe. She let go of him reluctantly, and he pulled away to go with Exequias, saying, “My lady, if you’ll excuse me.”

She nodded. She wouldn’t embarrass herself by asking him to stay. He left with Exequias’s arm across his shoulders.

No help for it. He was mortal, and mortals at Kendra’s Heathen Holiday were there only by coveted invitation from one of her line. If this “Jay” came here with Exequias, then that was who he would stay with for the evening.

She was still watching where they had gone, when Kaleo knelt beside her. Brina glanced up to see Kendra standing in the opposite doorway, probably having sent Brina’s maker here to clean up the mess and avoid future drama.

“I’m fine now,” she snapped, rising to her feet.

Kaleo caught her shoulders and turned her to face him.

“I see,” he said, looking around at the carnage left by her wild fit.

“It’s my own work,” she pointed out when he crouched to examine the shattered frame of one of the paintings.

“The canvas on some of these is still sound,” he remarked. “We’ll see if Kendra’s staff can repair any of them.”

“Don’t bother.” Kaleo had dragged these pieces from her studio after she had tried to tell him she didn’t have anything to display this year.

Despite her protest, Kaleo started handing bits of wreckage to the slaves who materialized at his hands, anticipating his needs.

“Let’s get you cleaned up,” he said. “I’m sorry I left you alone earlier. I should have realized how much distress you were in.” He lifted her hand and examined her fingertips, which were smeared with the coppery dust that remained when vampiric blood dried. Somewhere in her frantic destruction of her own work, she must have torn fingernails and flesh. Those wounds had healed now.

“I would rather be alone.” She had embarrassed herself enough for one day.

“Nonsense.”

Three and a half centuries ago, his arrogance had drawn her like a magnet drew iron filings. She had fallen helplessly into the well of his charisma, and hopelessly in love. Daryl had warned her that Kaleo’s affections were as deep as paint on a canvas, but she hadn’t listened. Hadn’t cared.

Now he brought her back to her home, dragging her like dust in his wake as he blinked out of Kendra’s home and reappeared in Brina’s living room across town. He shook his head at the doors she had left wide open after she had ordered the slave who’d cut her down out of her sight.

“Do you have a lady’s maid?” he asked as he poked through her wardrobe, searching for something more acceptable to wear back to Kendra’s gala.

“No,” she lied, though of course she did. That servant had been a gift from her brother. Brina’s whole household would certainly fall apart without Brina’s lady’s maid. But she had also been the only one with the temerity to cut Brina down earlier, and Brina didn’t want to face her just yet.

Kaleo looked at Brina with a familiar expression that asked, Why must you be so difficult?

“I don’t want to go back to the party,” she announced when Kaleo pulled out a crimson sheath dress that was perfectly his taste and absolutely the opposite of hers.

He sighed in frustration. “Brina, I am trying to help you. You obviously can’t be alone right now.”

“I’m better alone than with you.”

He grabbed her arm when she tried to sweep past him. “Get dressed, Brina. Come back to the party. By the time you get back here, your studio will be repaired and you can pretend none of this ever happened.”

Will a clean dress and a canape bring my brother back, too? she wanted to demand.

No. She knew better than to mention Daryl to Kaleo, who would only use it as an opportunity to twist the knife. Kaleo didn’t care about her grief or her dead brother. He cared about his image, and the fact that her breakdown reflected poorly on him. Now her “tantrum” was causing him to miss his precious party.

“Believe it or not,” she snapped, “playing dress-up and hanging paintings I despise to make you feel better is not my priority.” If her heart could beat, it would have been pounding with the exhilaration of standing up to him. If only she had done so when he had first swept into her home that afternoon, demanding that she and her art put in an appearance. Though if she hadn’t been at the party, she wouldn’t have met that intriguing stranger. “Who was Exequias’s toy tonight?” she asked, cutting off Kaleo’s saccharine retort. “I haven’t seen him before.”

“If I heard right, he’s a witch, and a hunter,” Kaleo replied, shaking his head at her abrupt change of subject. “They’re better left alone.”

Her own laugh was so sudden, so sharp, that it made her jump. “Oh?” she challenged. “And what was the name of that witch you wooed, back before Midnight fell? You know the one. You took her from her family. Left behind her human husband and two darling infants … mm, Rachel and something. I can’t remember the boy’s name. How many times did Rachel try to kill you?”

Her words finally hit their mark.

“Fine,” he whispered, his temper coming out not in volume or violence but in his words. “Go throw yourself at the witch. If nothing else, I’m sure he can help you kill yourself.”

Kaleo disappeared, leaving her to absorb the echo of his words.

I’m sure he can help you kill yourself.

She turned that last sharp retort over in her head, examining it. Before the witch had come to her, she had wanted to kill herself.

What had he done to her?

She thought back to her suicide attempt, and shuddered. At the time, it had seemed like the only option. Now the heavy yoke of grief wasn’t gone, but she could start to see past it, as if the witch’s magic had lanced the worst of the poison from her spirit.

CHAPTER 5

“THAT WAS BRINA?” Jay asked as Xeke led him away. The vampire’s arm across his shoulders was meant to look possessive, so Brina would let him go. Jay was grateful that it helped him stay upright despite the pounding in his head.

“She tends to conveniently forget that laws such as freeblood status exist,” Xeke said quietly as Jay walked with him back to the room where they had first spoken.

Freeblood laws had been an invention of the original Midnight, back in the sixteen hundreds. Humans could be abducted into the empire by anyone’s whim, but witches and shapeshifters were given the right to remain free