Marshall drops my hand like a bad phone line and lifts a brow, doesn’t say a word and yet says everything.
A low growl emits from me. “I bet she took it like a champ, too.”
His lips curve upward like a pair of wicked horns, affirming so much. “Back to you and me. It just so happens that—”
“As I was about to say”—I’m quick to cut him off—“you have to realize that there’s no way my mother is going to let Logan leave this planet early again if ever. She is absolutely smitten with him.”
Marshall is right back to glowering. “And you are suggesting—”
“I’m not suggesting. I’m being honest. You and I might not get our time.”
A dark laugh gurgles from his chest. “Oh, my dear love.” Marshall rakes his fingers through my hair. “Even if that dolt you’ve spiritually leashed yourself to proves to be indestructible”—his finger glides over my cheek, slow and heated—and in combination with those vibratronics he’s suddenly turned back up on blast, it feels like the most erotic move I’ve ever felt—“I will still conquer you in every manner. We will bear good fruit regardless or not if I have to tie the Pretty One to a chair and make him watch. It’s not for me to determine his fate, but ours has been sealed. You have been promised to me, so you see, Ms. Messenger, I don’t take kindly to people stealing what’s mine. Regardless of his state of being, you and I will find the time to yoke ourselves together in every carnal way. And if the Pretty One is alive for the main event, I suggest he go along with it, lest he find himself in the aforementioned unpleasant bind.” A crooked grin appears from nowhere. “Fear not. You will enjoy every moment of our time together.”
The boys run up in all their miniature Gage Oliver glory. There is no denying he fathered these precious somewhat naughty beings. Barron whines and cries as soon as he attaches himself to my leg.
“Mommeee!” I’ve gone from Mama to Mommy in a single bound and I love it. The boys have been chatting up a storm since Christmas, and some of the ways they mispronounce things are so adorable I don’t have the heart to correct them, likekillowforpillow,fuckfortruck—I let Emma grapple with that one—andsilly pillyfor theSillyPutty—the stuff that Bree insists on purchasing by the gallon. Apparently, it was her favorite form of entertainment when she was a kid and she wanted to pass down the sticky stuff to younger generations. “Nate is hitting on me!” Barron kicks his brother like a donkey and Nathan is quick to pull his hair.
Marshall gurgles with a laugh. “Enough of that. Be kind and I might have a treat for the two of you.”
The boys laugh slap Marshall’s leg as if he were a piñata. The boys love their UncleMarshyto death. They take off running for the family room because Marshall has been known to spoil them wildly with the smallest of trinkets.
I frown up at him. “Nothing from the seventeenth century, please. All of that crap is loaded with mercury and lead. That plague they had might have been demonized but, face it, they were doomed either way.”
He shakes a fist and opens his palm to reveal a handful of small plastic toys, men and women, a few cats and dogs. Marshall gives his hand a quick shake, and much to my horror the tiny toys yawn to life and begin to move and look up at us in wonder.
“Marshall!”
He takes off for the hall, disregarding my blatant worry over the psychological effects a gift like that can give a child.
“And Skyla?” He turns abruptly. There’s a wicked gleam in his eyes and I can practically feel the zinger coming. “You’ll take it like a champ, too.”
“Nice,” I mutter just as another knock erupts at the door and I head over and swing it wide open, only to reveal a couple of faces I never wish to see again.
“Chloe and Gage,” I say their names in an effort to show I really don’t care if they’re a couple—of idiots.
Chloe scoffs as if I had smeared it with sarcasm, and come to think of it, I might have.
“Nice to see you’re growing up, Skyla.” She secures her growing belly with her hand as she strides past me. Honestly, there is hardly anything there, but with that tent she’s donned and the way she seems to be struggling to walk, it’s a believable act.
Gage comes in and I don’t wait to shut the door behind him. I figure if he can kidnap over two dozen of my people, he can figure out the basic mechanics of a door hinge.
“Skyla.” His sad eyes rake over me, up and down as if he had the right. “I wanted to talk about the boys. I think we need to get them in beds, here at the house.”
“My translator is in the other room. I can’t understand you. Anything that has to do with anything goes through Logan.” I’m about to take off when Brody and Brielle’s sister, Brookelynn, and their mother, Darla, hop in, whooping and hollering as if it were midnight New Year’s Eve. Brody, however, is doing none of the above.
Brody shuts the door behind him and glares from Gage to me. “I was just briefed by one of our contacts on where those thirty Celestra ended up.” Brody glares at Gage a good long while. I had asked him to figure it out, and apparently, he’s made quick work of it.
“Where, Brody?” At this point I couldn’t care less that the enemy was standing in my presence.
“Raven’s Eye.” He gives Gage a hard shove to the chest before making his way down the hall.
“Messenger!” Bree shouts from the family room. “Get your ass over here. You’re holding up my wedding!”
“Raven’s Eye,” I whisper the horror to myself as I struggle to keep from passing out. Raven’s Eye is an island just past our own that the government runs as a testing facility for paranormal activity. I don’t know what their cover is, but I know what the truth is.
I glance to Gage and my eyes meet up with his and I’m far more horrified than I’ve ever been before. But Gage doesn’t say a word. He expels a breath, his eyes flitting to the wall behind me. So cold, so very unlike the boy I fell in love with.
“It’s true.,” I hiss. “You are a monster. When you came back from the dead, the very first thing you said to me was that you came back to kill, steal, and destroy. And that was the last truth you ever told me.”
