Dark Champion (Flirting with Monsters #4) - Eva Chase Page 0,69

that fond of every one of those shadowkind, but I wasn’t the type to wish them dead either. I vastly preferred it if they stayed alive and at a distance where they wouldn’t weigh on my limited conscience.

And if I was going to make sure of that, I’d damn well better be at my best. No niggling splinters of shame and doubt, no nagging memories I should have put to rest before Sorsha had ever come into my life.

Danae had lived in a hilltop villa with a view of the distant sea—the sort of home I’d now have said looked more believable as a movie set than in reality. But it was still here, the pale stucco walls of the house rising amid the bushes no longer in bloom. A few cracks and patches of repaired plaster showed here and there that hadn’t existed before, but the place was in much better condition than Danae herself would be these days, wherever they’d laid her old bones to rest.

I left Charlotte at a safe distance and traveled around the matching garden walls through the darkness. The gnarled old olive tree I’d once playfully called to my one-time lover from had gone as kaput as she had, but I found a rocky protrusion a few feet from the wall that allowed me nearly as good a glimpse into the yard. As I clambered onto it, my chest tightened.

If my memories of Danae were a splinter, then that shard of noxious wood was digging into my gut right now, prodding out trickles of embarrassment and shame. The way she’d looked at me when I’d made the proposition that we take our relationship beyond mere physical pleasures—the way she’d laughed…

What should it matter now? I was here, and she wasn’t. My capacity for love had endured after all, despite my nature, despite her dismissal of it. Still, I braced myself as I peered into the garden, preparing for a more wrenching wave of pain.

The current owners had changed the landscaping quite a bit. The only feature I recognized was the marble fountain dribbling water in the center of the space. The poor cupid poised over the pool had lost his head, which gave the whole piece a much more macabre look.

A newer wrought-iron bench stood nearby beneath the shade of a lemon tree, and the bushes stood scattered across the terrain in abandon rather than their former neat order. The varying shades of green in their leaves made for a delight of color even without their flowers. An herbal scent carried on the breeze thickly enough that I could taste it even from the shadows.

The sky had deepened into the indigo of night, but a few windows on the villa still gleamed with light. I was about to slip over the wall to spy through the glass when the woman I’d come to see saved me the trouble by strolling out.

It had to be the granddaughter—Demi, the miraculous internet had informed me. She was a tad taller and a shade slimmer than her grandmother had been, but her hair shone the same honey-brown, loose across her shoulders. Here and there the light caught a strand of gray—she was a decade or so older than Danae had been during our… acquaintance. But that only meant there were a few more lines around her graceful features, which held an echo of the woman who’d come before her. I could have believed I was seeing Danae herself in her middle age.

I took all that in—and my pulse beat evenly onward. The shame had faded away into the tranquility of the night. No jab of loss or regret ran through me. I couldn’t even say I felt a twinge of anger at the reminder of the woman who’d seen me as little more than a very animated, multi-featured dildo.

No, mostly what I felt was a mild curiosity. How far had the apple fallen from the tree?

Not all that far in some respects, if the book she held was anything to go by. She lifted the canvas-covered volume, the frayed ribbon placeholder dangling, and spoke in a low, sweet voice. Reciting the lines to a play—one of Aristophanes’, if my sketchy recollection served.

She must have picked up that hobby from her grandmother. That was how I’d fallen for Danae—watching her stride around her garden, making impassioned speeches and cracking the best of ancient Grecian jokes. She hadn’t wanted to act professionally, just to live out those scenes at her