“What’s really going on, Blade?”
Blade lifted his gaze to Mace’s, his dark eyes troubled. “I want her, Mace.”
It was as if an infection had been lanced, releasing the poison. Months—if not years—of lying to themselves had come to an end. In a way, it was a relief. Everything was out in the open now. Or, it would be, once Mace confessed as well.
“I know,” he said. “So do I.”
“Fuck.” Blade sank down onto a barstool, his hands in his hair as if he wanted to tear it out. “She’s all I can think about. I can’t be with anyone else…not even Masumi. I’ve been shooting myself up with so much suppressant that my balls are going to fall off or some shit.” He barked out a bitter laugh. “I used to think Stryke was a fool for using suppressants until he almost died. Now, I’m standing at the edge of that same hellmouth.”
Mace got it. He so got it. “I’ve been doing the same,” he admitted. But he’d only needed one injection since being with Scotty. Blade was a week in, a point where the injections would be barely effective. He had to be strung out. And now that Mace was paying attention, yeah, Blade’s hands were shaking. “Scotty is the only female I want.”
“We can’t continue like this.” Blade looked up. “It’ll kill us both.”
He was right. The injections would, eventually, kill them. But so would having sex with another female who wasn’t Scotty…just in a different way. “So, what do we do?”
Blade blew out a long, ragged breath. “She has to make a choice. She’s got to choose one of us, so the other can move on.”
Mace stared at his friend—his friend who had lost his mind. “Are you serious?”
“Yeah.”
The lid on the pot of chili began to rattle, but Mace ignored it, unable to comprehend Blade’s line of thought. “Are you saying you’d be okay with her choosing me? Like, totally cool? No problem?”
Blade white-knuckled his beer. “Obviously, I want her to choose me,” he said, his voice and fingers relaxing in slow increments as he spoke. “But, Mace, I’d rather she be with you than some rando. At least my two best friends would be happy, and I could stop obsessing.”
It made sense, but Mace was still having a hard time processing it. “I think it’s better if we’re all on the same team, still friends, and everything is back the way it was.”
“You know that’s not possible,” Blade said quietly. And yeah, Mace did know that. But sometimes, he was really good at glossing over the bad stuff and burying his head in the sand.
“You’re just like Dad.”
Talon had said that to Mace more times than he could count, often when Mace did exactly what he was doing now: burying his head in the sand. So sure, good old Talon had a point sometimes, but Mace also excelled at ignoring his brother.
Woodenly, Mace went to the stove. “So, what do we say to Scotty?”
“We tell her what we just talked about.”
Mace tasted the chili, not because he was hungry but because he needed a distraction. “You don’t think we’ll be blindsiding her?”
“She’s smarter than both of us combined. She knows we need to do something.”
No doubt Blade was right. And the chili needed more salt. “Let’s do it, then. Let her know we need to see her.”
And then, gods help them all.
Chapter 27
Everyone was there.
Everything was in place.
Eva, with Logan at her side, sat curled up in a blanket in Thanatos’s great leather chair—a relic he’d maintained for a gazillion years. Aleka knew the exact number, but Scotty had never listened to the boring stories from the past that all her relatives seemed to delight in sharing.
All fourHorsepeople, as Wraith called them, stood near the head of the great hall’s dining table, and Idess had placed Scotty, along with her cousins Amber and Leilani, at the four corners.
The bowl of dried blood Wraith and Serena had procured sat in the center of the table, where Aleka, Raika, and Idess had placed a bunch of mystical crap that, again, Scotty didn’t care about. Dried herbs, vessels containing various-colored liquids, some crystals, a shard of bone, and a couple of bowls of stinky organic matter Scotty didn’t ask about, because, ugh,just get on with it, already.
“Everyone,” Aleka called out. “We’re starting. We need you all to step straight back but remain relative to your positions at the table. It’s possible that if this goes wrong, there could be an explosion.”
