His voice tight, Dagan said, “I…I’m sorry if you’re pissed, but we fought and, well, it was either him or me.”
“Damn right I’m pissed.” She squeezed the tumbler once again, and this time she heard a slight crack.
Shit.
Lina quickly tossed back the contents before they could begin to leak out. “I’m pissed because I wanted to be the one to kill his sorry ass.”
The look of relief on Dagan’s face would have been comical if the whole situation wasn’t so damn sad. Lina tossed the cracked glass into the fireplace.
“Dagan, the man abandoned me when I needed him most. Me and our daughter. He drugged me, knowing that I’ve been in recovery for two years, and sold me to some sick bastard for a couple of bucks. Yes, I loved him once; I’ll be damned if I know why. But I’m not sorry he’s dead. Not by a long shot.”
“Thank the devil,” he breathed, the tension leaving his body. “I wasn’t sure how you’d feel about it.”
“Mostly just pissed,” she said honestly. When a knot of tension formed in her temple, she rubbed at the spot and moved to the couch with a heavy sigh. “You have to understand, when I met Thorne I was a broken shell.”
He moved swiftly across the room, padding with fluid, silent steps until he sat right next to her, his gaze bright and steady. “Tell me about it.”
“I…I’d lost everything I ever loved. Starting with my parents. Then, just when I’d recovered, just when I began to think all was right in the world again, Xander, as I knew Ronin then, vanished.”
An old, familiar pain clenched her heart. Fighting back the moisture in her eyes, she gazed down to where the hem of her shirt met the bare skin of her thighs and trailed slow circles on her flesh.
“I loved Mama Flavia. I did.” The woman had been kind to her, a surrogate mother when she’d had no one else. “But Ronin was the one who helped me heal. Helped me see the light in the world again. He was my brother at heart. When he left…”
Dagan’s hand hooked under her chin and turned her head so their gazes met, effectively granting her distance from her painful memories. His blazing eyes bored into her, lending her heat and strength.
“I’m so sorry,” he murmured.
“Me too.”
Her eyes locked on his full lips, on the curve of his jaw that was punctuated by a sexy five o’clock shadow. She lost track of how much time they spent there, with their gazes sealed on each other, before he spoke again.
“What happened next?”
She gave him an absent smile. “Flavia and I eventually came to terms with the fact that Ronin wasn’t coming back. We adjusted, in our own way. She was a good woman, a good mother to me. But then, five years ago, our town was all but leveled by a plague.”
Dagan frowned. “She didn’t make it.”
“Hardly anyone did. There were maybe a handful of us left when it was all over.” Each of them wondering why they’d been among the ones to survive. The horror of that feeling would never escape her.
“What did you do?” he murmured, his hand trailing down her arm and his fingers absently locking with hers.
She sucked in her breath at the sparks of electricity Dagan’s touch elicited. Shaking her head to dispel the haze brought on by being in his proximity, she said, “We all went our separate ways. We couldn’t stand living in a ghost town. I…I went to ground.”
Dagan let out a soft noise. “That had to have been strange, not to mention dangerous. A creature of the sky down on the hellish soil. You must have been scared.”
“Yes.” And now, with the distance of time, she could recognize what she hadn’t back then. She’d had a death wish. Everyone she’d cared for had abandoned her, and she’d subconsciously been searching for an escape from the pain.
Well, she’d found it, but not in the form she’d envisioned. “That was how I met Thorne.”
Dagan’s lips curled in clear distaste. “He took advantage of your suffering.”
He would see it that way, she supposed. “From my perspective, he was a relief from the pain I felt. A young, good-looking demon who seemed more carefree than anyone I’d ever known.”
Damn, what an idiot she’d been.
“We’d only dated for a few weeks before he convinced me to try what he called his ‘happy medicine’. He told me I’d never see the world in the same way again.”
And fool that she was, she’d bought it. She was so ashamed.
Casting her gaze down, she shrugged. “I was instantly hooked, as so many score users are. And he was right. It was a happy drug, for a while. I forgot about everything other than the next high.”