“You seem all right with this.” Daimon sounded bitter, his deep voice colder than she had ever heard it, and the air around him chilled a few degrees.
“It’s tradition.” And she wasn’t all right with it. Not anymore.
She wanted to tell him that, but her voice failed her. Her coven was her everything. Her family. Everyone did their part to keep it strong, and she wasn’t going to be the one to break from tradition. She couldn’t.
But it didn’t mean she didn’t have her reservations, her doubts.
Even fears.
She had never known her parents. Her loyalty to her coven and her belief in their system had been unwavering before she had met Eric and Mari had come into the world. Since then, she had often wondered if her life would have been different if she had known her parents, even just her mother.
When Mari had discovered Eric wasn’t her biological father, the conflict inside Cass had only grown. She had started to wish she’d had parents, a father in her life, even one who had chosen to have her as his daughter as Eric had with Mari, had chosen to raise her and love her.
Seeing Mari’s life from the moment she had been born, how being raised in a warm, beautiful part of France, and in a loving family, had shaped her into a good woman, one who was very balanced and kind, had made Cass question what she was doing even before she had been summoned by her coven on her two-hundredth birthday.
Before Eric and Mari, she had been happy to do her duty, viewing it as only a minor inconvenience in her life, a year sacrificed for the greater good of her coven.
Now, she couldn’t imagine doing it, even when she was resolved to go through with it.
Even when being around everyone in this damned house was only making her more aware of how little she knew about being part of a family.
She didn’t know how a family really functioned, and discovering the ups and downs of one, witnessing the love and the fighting, the reconciliations and the protectiveness of everyone in this one was only making things harder for her.
She closed her eyes and forced a confession, admitted something she had been denying, too afraid to allow herself to voice it, even to herself.
Too afraid of how much it would hurt her.
Cass opened her eyes and looked at Daimon, wishing she was brave enough to put a voice behind what she was about to admit to herself.
She didn’t want to bring a child into a cold world like her coven, where it would never know her, where she would have to stand by and watch her daughter grow up never knowing who she was and not allowed to tell her either. Several witches would bear children along with her, and those babies would be given the same birth date regardless of when they had been born, and would be kept away in a nursery until they were all one year old.
Something the coven did to ensure none of the mothers knew which one was their child.
A battle raged inside her, fiercer than ever, a war between duty and desire. She owed her coven everything. They had raised her, taught her all she needed to know to succeed in the world, and had given her the freedom she had desired, passing contracts to her that had kept her in enough money to do as she wished and had given her the opportunity to see the world.
In return for all that, she could do this one thing, couldn’t she?
She stared into Daimon’s eyes as they slowly softened, concern surfacing in them, and cursed him.
Being around him had only made things harder for her.
The scent of snow and spice came from him, a smell that reminded her of home, but with him, it wasn’t cold that she felt.
He made her feel warm.
He made her question everything.
He made her feel everything.
And that was bad.
She couldn’t—wouldn’t—fall for him.
He was meant to be a pleasant distraction, whatever they shared all about fulfilling lust and having fun while it lasted.
But she had the terrible feeling it was too late and he was already so much more than that to her.
That the frozen heart that was melting wasn’t his.
It was hers.
Chapter 17
Daimon grunted as he ducked and rolled, came up onto his feet and reached beneath his left arm at the same time. He slipped his finger into the ring on the hilt of one of his throwing knives, funnelled his power into it and let it fly. It shot across the gently undulating grassy hill and nailed a daemon in his shoulder.
The male went down.
Two others jumped over his body and rushed Daimon. Lightning struck the one on the left. The daemon exploded, showering his comrade in black blood and bits of flesh and bone, and the ground rocked as a boom echoed across the hilly landscape of Lantau Island, rolling into the pitch darkness.
The second daemon reached him and Daimon threw his hand forwards, unleashing three spears of ice that pierced the male in his thigh, stomach and chest at a diagonal.
Daimon breathed hard as the male hit the dirt, sliding to a halt just a few feet from him.
There were too many of them.
He checked on his brothers, tracking Cal and Valen as they battled the daemons who were attempting to keep them away from the gate.
A gate which the two Erinyes were trying to open.
A wall of daemons stood between him and his brothers and the goddesses. So far, the two furies had only managed to make the gate appear, at which point Daimon had felt it and had ordered Cal and Valen to come with him while Ares remained with the women. He hadn’t expected to find the Erinyes here, with at least four dozen daemons surrounding
