Omens (The Dark in You #6) - Suzanne Wright Page 0,71

was pleased that she’d be out of the picture from then on.” He trailed his fingers down Khloé’s back, tracing the bumps of her spine. “She turned up again six years ago. She came out with the same spiel, but her words meant nothing to me. I wasn’t even tempted to buy her promises. I told her I was done, and I wasn’t nice about it. She could see that I meant it, and she left in tears. I wasn’t moved by them. The sad thing for her is that … her promises might not have been empty that time.”

“Why do you say that?”

“A few weeks later, she joined another lair. Soon after that, she took a mate, and she eventually had a child with him.”

Ah. Khloé fingered the small, bumpy logo on his tee. “Do you regret not giving her one last chance?”

“No. I was glad she was done with the stray lifestyle—it’s fucking dangerous. But little by little over the years, she’d killed everything I felt for her. I’d never have been able to trust a word she said. Trust is important to me.”

Khloé had sensed that much for herself. “Why did she come to your building just now?”

He pinned her gaze with his. “If I answer that question, you’d need to keep the story to yourself. Only a select number of people in my lair know about this. If you don’t feel comfortable keeping secrets from your Prime or your girls, you need to let this go.”

“I would never betray a person’s confidence. Whatever you tell me stays between us.”

Keenan figured that, given how jaded and cynical he was, he should have experienced a moment of doubt. But he found that he trusted Khloé to keep his secrets, and so did his demon.

Nodding, he started doodling circles on her lower back. “Thea came to our lair recently, seeking sanctuary.” He told her everything—about the death of Thea’s mate, about Gavril’s accusation, about Thea’s claim that her Prime was telling lies and simply wanted to get his hands on her son. “It makes me a bastard, I know, but I probably would have turned her away if it hadn’t been for her kid. You see, I know what it’s like to be that kid.”

Khloé smoothed her hands over his shoulders. “What do you mean?”

He hated revisiting his past. Hated it. But he worried that Khloé would think he hadn’t objected to Thea’s request for sanctuary because he still cared for her. He needed his little imp to understand why he’d felt unable to turn his back on the boy.

“My mother got pregnant to a mated demon in her lair,” he said. “The son of the Prime. He’d seduced her with his gifts, putting her into a suggestible state—incubi can do that. My mother was a chameleon. She could change her appearance, become anyone. And he lied and said that she had posed as his mate. Said mate believed him and insisted on her being tossed out of the lair.”

“Fucking assholes.”

Keenan couldn’t agree more. “We mostly lived on the streets. She sought help and protection from many people, especially if we encountered trouble with other demons, but they always turned her—us—away. Being a stray demon is shit, Khloé. There are so many dangers out there, and you have no protection at all. If my mother had been given help, maybe she wouldn’t have been assaulted and killed by a group of twisted male demons.”

Khloé gasped, her face a mask of compassion. “And you feel that turning away Thea and Lane would make you as bad as the people who turned their backs on you and your mother.”

“Yeah,” he replied, relieved that she got it.

“I think you’re right; I think Thea was counting on that. Manipulative bitch.”

“She isn’t a bad person, Khloé, she just—”

“Oh, I disagree. I’m sorry if she had a bad childhood. I can’t even imagine how hard life at Ramsbrook must have been for you guys. Every one of you is strong for surviving it. But having issues doesn’t give a person the right to trample over others. She knew you had issues too, and she didn’t let that stop her from playing you again and again.

“Maybe she wanted to mean the spiel she fed you, but she didn’t mean it. And she shouldn’t have made promises to you if she couldn’t be sure she’d keep them. Hell, she didn’t even have the decency to tell you when she was leaving—she’d just up and go. If she