Page 68 of Bond of Passion

Tavin looked down at his hand. “I have,” he murmured.

“Seriously? Female?”

“Yeah.” Tavin’s tone held enough I-don’t-want-to-talk-about-it vibes that Lore let it go.

But Deja didn’t. His feelings on the subject weren’t coming through clearly enough. “Did you know her well? Were you lovers?”

His head rose sharply, and he studied her for a second before lowering his gaze again. “Yeah.”

Now, something was coming through the bond. Grief? Nah, it couldn’t be.

Lore whistled. “Dude. I’ve cozied up with a Neethul female a couple of times. Amazing in bed if you like pain. And bleeding. And wondering if you’re going to at least get your rocks off before she kills you.”

He was exaggerating, but not by much. Blood and pain were very much a part of mating rituals. Once again, Deja was an outlier. She didn’t like pain. Or blood, although she’d gotten over most of her squeamishness in nursing school.

“Gristlen wasn’t like that,” Tavin said, and her heart skipped a beat. To hear him say her name again…

Stop it. He killed Gristlen. He stabbed her in the chest and let her bleed out on the shower tiles.

“Okay, whatever, dude. Just remember what we talked about. None of us is safe right now.” Lore pushed away his coffee cup and stood. “I’m out of here. Let me know if you need anything.”

Lore took off, and Deja took the cup of coffee Tavin offered. “Thank you for cleaning up the house,” he said. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“It was no problem.” She spooned loads of sugar into her coffee. Tavin had introduced her to it before, and after she’d figured out that it was drinkable with lots of sugar, she’d come to love it. Practically lived on it during nursing school. “So…this Gristlen.” She hesitated, doing her best to school her emotions as she waited for him to look over at her. “Who was she?”

Lore splashed a little more coffee into his mug. “She was a Neethul princess.”

Her heart skidded to a stop. She knew that hearing him talk about her would be weird, but she hadn’t thought about it being painful. Her nursing school books hadn’t spent a lot of time on how to deal with opening old wounds.

Stay calm, she told herself. Neutral.

“A princess,” she said into her cup. “You told Lore you were lovers. But were you in love?”

“Yes. Very much so.”

Liar!

Keep it together, keep it together…

She wrapped her fingers tightly around the mug to keep from ripping out his lying tongue. If he’d loved her, he wouldn’t have stabbed her to death. “Where is she now?”

“She’s dead.” His voice sounded like it had gone through a meat grinder, and the trickle of grief she’d sensed in him earlier became a river. Which pissed her off. He had no right to be sad.

“That must have been very difficult for you,” she said through clenched teeth, trying to control her emotions. “What happened?”

He got some eggs from the fridge and set them on the counter. He hadn’t looked at her once. “She was murdered.”

She feigned surprise while tamping down her anger. “I’m so sorry. Do you know who did it?”

“Yeah.” He started cracking eggs into a bowl. “Yeah, I do.”

“Did they pay for what they did?”

He stilled with an egg in his hand. His gaze lifted to hers, and a haunted shadow flickered in the depths of his eyes. “They didn’t pay nearly enough.”

Pain came through the bond, powerful enough to steal her breath. But she wouldn’t let him off the hook. He was right; he hadn’t paid nearly enough for what he’d done to her.

“Did you kill the person who did it?” she asked, hoping disingenuousness didn’t pass through the bond.