“What’s he doing here in the middle of the night?” James asked, already pulling on his own clothes.
He tried to follow me out the door, but I stopped him with a hand on his chest. “I don’t know, but could you give us a minute?”
James didn’t answer right away. I didn’t need the bond to understand his reluctance: I was his mate, and if his protectiveness over me was even close to what I felt for him, theneverything we’d been through only made him more nervous to let me out of his sight.
I curled my hand around James’s hip and tugged him close. He let me, which meant that he was about to give in. “I know you’re just trying to protect me, baby, but it’s Kian. He already knows you’ll hear everything we talk about, and you’ll be right here if we need you.”
I could only hope that Kian had learned his lesson about getting involved with shady people—who only met him at night and didn’t show their faces—after he’d nearly lost his life and taken others down with him.
James closed his eyes and unclenched his jaw. When he looked at me again, he nodded his head slowly.
“I won’t be long,” I assured him with a kiss to his cheek.
Kian was standing at the front door when I opened it. I stepped aside to let him in, using my body to block Carlos from bolting out. Kian knelt by the door, scrubbing Carlos behind the ear and allowing him to lick his face for a few moments.
When Kian finally looked up at me, his watery hazel eyes told me everything I needed to know: This wasn’t good.
“Is everything all right?” I asked. Then I remembered Hannah had been driving him everywhere during his recovery. “How did you get here?”
“No one’s hurt,” he blurted before I could assume the worst. “Hannah’s home in bed. I was cleared to drive earlier today, and I needed to tell you something that I couldn’t say at the bar in case they were listening.”
What?“Kian, slow down. Who would be listening?”
He straightened and guided Carlos to the couch, where he continued to soothe his anxiety by petting the dog. “Those vampires that have been coming to the bar.”
It took me a moment to realize who he was referring to. “Gabriel and his sister?”
“Sisters,” he corrected, stressing the word meaningfully.
Abigail hadn’t been to Liz’s, so how did Kian know Rebecca was a twin? A chill went through me. “What about them?” I asked, already fearing the answer. James didn’t appear by my side as I expected he would, but I knew he was listening to everything.
“They… they’re, um…” Kian was pale. “They’re the ones who gave me the cursed diamonds. They were at James’s house the night Dani attacked me.”
My mind flashed back to the events of that night, months ago, before we ended up in the hospital in an attack that almost killed James and Kian.
Two sets of evil, glowing red eyes. A low voice hissing, “He knows who we are.”
My pulse increased, and I broke out in a cold sweat. “You’re sure?”
He nodded. “I didn’t know they were vampires until that night,” he explained. “Whenever I met with them before, they had brown eyes, not red, and they must have been darkening their skin with makeup. They said they worked with my brother, but I thought he was hunting vampires. Why would the society Luke worked for involve vampires?”
I scrubbed a hand over my face. This only confirmed Luke’s theory further.
Kian flinched as James appeared behind me. His arm wound around my waist, his hand flattening over my stomach.
“How do you deal with him doing that?” Kian asked, clutching his chest for breath.
“You get used to it,” I answered fondly, remembering an eerily similar conversation I’d had with Angel before I even met James.
“How do you live with him creeping around like that?”
“I always know when he walks into a room.”
At the time, I didn’t quite get it. I’d even rolled my eyes at them. Now, I practically swooned the same way Raleigh had.
“I heard everything,” James said, pulling me from my thoughts. “You’re sure that Abigail and Rebecca were the ones you met with?”
Kian nodded, swallowing. “They disguised themselves, but it was them.”
