Wasn’t it you who branded me a coward just a few hours ago? Which is it—am I supposed to feel or not feel? Make up your mind, I shot back at Alexis.

  There is no good end to this, and we both know it. But if coming face-to-face with that fact is what you need, please, proceed.

  I sucked in a breath and squared my shoulders, then headed for the side door where a hulking man stood with his arms crossed in front of him. When he recognized me, his face lit up and revealed the teddy bear hiding beneath his forbidding exterior.

  “Lexi Balefire. Hello stranger.” The man closed the distance between us to envelop me in an overwhelming hug. “I haven’t seen you in ages. Where have you been?” He demanded.

  I couldn’t help but soften. As half of one of the first matches made when I was just starting out, and prior to opening FootSwept, Tim held a special place in my heart.

  “Oh, here and there.” I said, noncommittally, my tone light. “How’s Sandy?”

  An indulgent grin spread across Tim’s face, “Good and ready to be done being pregnant, and spending all my money on Hot Fries and ice cream.”

  “Interesting combination.” I grimaced, and then smiled, suddenly grateful I hadn’t given in to my second thoughts and circled around to the front entrance. The mundane conversation with Tim brought me back to earth, and when I took my leave and strode into Driven, it was with the confidence of the old Lexi, who had been on a first name basis with everyone who worked and frequented there.

  Even in the darkened atmosphere, my eyes were drawn to Kin as he stood near the sound equipment next to the stage and talked animatedly with one of the crew. A gust of wind that came either from the back door or the force of my attention, I wasn’t sure which, blew a golden ringlet from his forehead and caused him to rake his hand through his hair in a gesture so familiar my stomach dropped into my shoes. When he looked up and caught my eye, I waved hello and indicated a seat at the bar where I’d be until he was finished with his set.

  It struck me, absently, that I’d been out of the loop at Driven for longer than I’d realized when an unfamiliar bartender leaned over and asked for my order. The request for a cranberry and ginger ale died on my lips when Alexis piped up with a wry, You’re going to need a real drink for this, and you know it.

  “Vodka cranberry, please, and make it a double.” I took her warning for truth but vowed to nurse it and avoid saying something either stupid or too familiar to Kin. I was wading into dangerous territory, but continued plodding down the path as though it were lined with roses and daisies.

  Kin did his thing on stage, bringing back a flood of memories that were both horrific and sublime. When he got to the point in his set where he was slated to sing the song he’d written for me, I closed my eyes and sent a spell his way even though I knew changing his will might garner me an unpleasant cosmic kickback.

  We witches live by the rule of reciprocity; whatever you put out into the world comes back to you threefold. Gods, however, are a bit more flexible on that particular guideline, and I figured whatever might happen couldn’t be worse than the effect of hearing Kin sing the words he no longer remembered were meant for me. Okay, it could, but I’d just have to suck it up if my punishment was to hear the same annoying tune on repeat for a week or something. He played another song instead, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

  Somewhere during the last half of Kin’s set, the air in the club suddenly changed, turned cold as ice, and I had to check the exits to make sure someone wasn’t holding the doors wide open. They hadn’t, and as my eyes swept back across the dance floor I noticed a woman dancing. Actually, noticed isn’t the right word. This woman was born to stand out, and she demanded to be stared at.

  Jet-black hair hung in wild curls, framing a face that could easily have graced a magazine cover or a Paris runway. Piercing eyes beneath a dark brow presided over chiseled cheekbones that slashed toward full, blood-red lips. Strips of some sort of spandex material clung to her curvy figure, leaving little to the imagination. Lethal was the word that came to mind, and it referred not only to her ability to render a man tongue-tied with lust but the fact that she appeared fully capable of kicking physical ass if the necessity arose too.

  Her cold beauty reminded me of the man I’d seen outside, and my supernatural senses went on full alert. As if she felt my gaze, the striking woman’s eyes met mine and the chill intensified for a fleeting moment before she turned on her heel and retreated into the crowd. Once she was gone, the effect dissipated and I shook my head as if to dislodge an uncomfortable thought, then returned my attention to Kin.

  When the set ended, he slowly wended his way through the throng to where I was waiting.

  “Hey, you came.” Kin said when he approached.

  “I’m a woman of my word.” I replied, “Want to find a place to sit?” Without waiting for an answer, I headed around the corner of the curved bar to the one booth insulated enough to hold a conversation even with the loud music.

  Kin shot me a funny look. “Tell me, Lexi Balefire, are you some kind of mind reader?”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head, “though that would be an excellent super power to have.” I almost mentioned that I’d been here before, but remembered in the nick of time that I had already lied to Kin about that fact. Suddenly, I was pleased that very few of the people who would recognize me were present tonight.

  “Want to know what I’m thinking right now?” The husky timber of his voice made my head spin.

  I felt like a planet caught in his orbit. Unable to break free, but knowing if I got too close, I’d burn up in the fire and heat of him. Part of me didn’t care about the pain of flaming out of control as long as he was the sun that consumed my soul. The rest of me thought this was just the worst kind of torture, and when his hand rose, a gentle finger poised to stroke my cheek, I knew exactly what was on his mind. Dimpled smiles, a low pitch to his voice, the tilted head. All signs I’d seen before.

  Quickly, I pulled away before his hand could make contact. This time, I was certain Kin was flirting with me, and that wasn’t even the thing that freaked me out the most.

  You’re probably wondering why, when the man I loved more than life itself was standing right in front of me practically holding a sign that said Yours for the taking, I couldn’t just sit back and enjoy myself. It stood to reason that, since he had loved me before, it was possible that Kin could love me again. I could have everything I ever wanted, if I was willing to reach out and take it.

  And he wanted me to do that very thing.

  Except I wasn’t. I wasn’t willing to spend the rest of my life living a lie, and pretending that the months we’d shared as a couple had never happened definitely fell into that category. Yes, I probably could find the right time to tell him everything, and we probably could move past our past. Everything probably would work out just fine. Or, he wouldn’t believe me, freak out, and dump me again. Nope.

  Besides, somewhere in the deepest recesses of my heart, I could hear a little voice telling me that if I walked away now, Kin could never be hurt by me and my crazy life ever again.

  He’d been cursed, nearly killed, battered, and broken more than once, and for me, once was too many times. I’d rather see him find someone who wouldn’t put him in mortal danger on a regular basis than drag him back into my insane supernatural world. And no, it didn’t occur to me to consider what Kin might want, because as far as I was concerned, the Kin I knew was already gone.

  This was his second chance, and it was mine to give him even if he would never know. Even if my heart shattered, there was no other way.

  Are you nuts? Alexis broke her silence. He’s your ex and you want to help him find someone else to love?

  I love him and I want him to be happy. He deserves a good life and none of what happened was his fault. We have to help him. Lexi insisted.

  No. We’re not doing this. Alexis tried to put her mental foot down before I let a pipe dream shatter me to pieces too small for her to pick up. See a symbol, point and shoot. With Kin it had to be that simple. He carried no symbol, so helping him would mean more contact than I could handle. We are absolutely not doing this. She tried to protect me, I’ll give her that.

  I chose to ignore her completely, but I could hear her thinking that if I wanted to play with fire, maybe I deserved to get burned.

  Fine, if that’s the way you want it, but this is going to go bad, and don’t say I didn’t warn you. You’re on your own.

  It might kill me to learn he had another fated match, but I had to try.

  Loving him meant putting his happiness above my own, but there was no symbol hovering over his head, so this meant going old school.

  Before the Bow of Destiny and learning about my goddess heritage turned my life upside down, I used my gut and heightened sense of intuition to successfully match couples. The problem for me now was that I needed to touch Kin to activate my internal LPS (Love Positioning System) and I didn’t know if I could handle casual contact without freaking out.

  Rather than focus on my worries, I scanned the area around Kin’s head in case his floating heart symbol was hiding somewhere. No such luck.

  In some part of my brain, I managed to keep a level of conversation going while experiencing my internal freakout. Kin said something amusing and I used my laugh as a cover to steel myself and then lay a hand on his arm.

  Only because Alexis hadn’t forsaken me did I manage the brief touch at all. She tightened my gut, straightened my spine, and did the dirty deed.

  Nothing.

  No intuitive pull in the belly toward a match. Not even a tingle. Okay, maybe a jolt of electricity, but not the kind that would help me find his match. What was I supposed to do with this?

  If Kin truly believed his soul mate had passed him by—and I knew that to be true, since, well, she was me—I’d have to find a way to divest him of that notion before his heart would open for another. True love of the fairytale variety was forever, but the real world didn’t always work that way. People die or life happens, and sometimes soul mates part. The Bow of Destiny and its heart-shaped arrows made ironclad matches. Otherwise, things happen.

  We are the product of our experiences. Sounds glib, but it’s true. No one is limited to a single soul mate except by choice. That was why I would engage in this madness even if it would kill something inside me to know there was another choice for him. It didn’t matter that there would never be one for me.

  You’re going to get hurt, she fired back at me. And then what? Crawl back into your cave and leave the mess for me? Can you handle losing him a second time?

  I ignored her and plodded on, though it would have made more sense to listen to her this time. The road to hell, and all that, but now that my feet were pointed down the path of good intentions, I couldn’t go back. Finding him a mate was the last thing I wanted to do, and the only gift I had left to give him. Alexis couldn’t stop me; I wasn’t sure anyone or anything could, not even me.

  Addicts know they shouldn’t indulge in what they crave. I was no different when I rested my elbow on the table, my chin in my palm, and stared my fill at the one man I could never resist.

  “Tell me about you, Lexi Balefire,” he said, looking at me like I was the only woman in the club. “You make me feel like I’m in a fantasy world whenever you’re in the room. Like magic exists and I’m under your spell.”

  Kin picked the exact phrase to throw metaphoric water in my face.

  The undertow of pain sucked me down again. It burned a path through me, leaving nothing but the aching thunder of devastation, and suddenly I realized what a colossal idiot I’d been to have come here in the first place. And so, I did something I knew I might regret later but was my only way out of an unbearable situation: I dove back down into my subconscious and left the problem for Alexis to solve.

  I hate you.

  That was a lie. I didn’t hate the witch, just the way she ignored all my advice, got herself into trouble, then bailed. Kin was staring at me like he knew something had changed and she’d gone so deep I couldn’t even hear her thoughts.

  But I could read her feelings and the cherry that sat atop the sundae of my life was that I’d begun to feel something for Kin, too. Not love, mind you. More like a little flutter of softness in the region of my heart. An emotional cancer that needed to be sliced ruthlessly from the whole and destroyed before it spread.

  “Well, this has been fun,” I lied, “but I have other clients to see tonight.” Also a lie. There still wasn’t the faintest glimmer of a symbol in the place. Even if I wanted to make a match, there were none to be made by my preferred method. At that moment, I longed to send a shining arrow into the heart of an unsuspecting target just to feel the rush and release of living gold carving a painless, bloodless path into flesh.

  Better yet to sink my weapon into Kin’s heart and be rid of the one thing Lexi clung to above all else. Hope.

  “Stay. I’d like to dance with you, Lexi Balefire.”

  “Not tonight.” Or any other. “I’ll line up some dates and give you a call.” In uncharted territory, I had no other choice. Kin sported no symbol and my LPS wasn’t working. All that was left was to fling date spaghetti against the wall and hope something stuck.

  I felt his eyes on my back as I dodged my way through the crowd, and it took every ounce of willpower not to look back.

  Chapter 13

  Sylvana

  As I sat in the shadows, Kin’s singing slid under my defenses and tried to pull my most bittersweet memories out into the light where I’d have no choice but to look at them. His fingers slid over the guitar strings, tweaking them into notes of both sadness and mourning. This was a man who had known loss.

  I knew plenty about loss. First, my father went out for the proverbial pack of smokes and never came back. Then my mother, well, that was a complicated story, but I hadn’t lost her so much as thrown her away, and Lexi along with her. All for the love of a god among men. Literally.

  Oh, and did I mention he left me, too?

  Only now was I coming to understand the price might not have been worth it, but even so, my heart craved him, and here I was, with no idea my daughter was experiencing similar pain, staring at her with an ulterior motive for getting my man back. Could I be any more pathetic?

  “What are you doing here, Sylvana?”

  I nearly jumped out of my seat when a mini tornado deposited one of Lexi’s faeries in the second seat of my shadowed—magically enhanced shadows no less—booth at Driven.

  “Vaeta, right?” Made sense, given the flair of her entrance. “Aren’t you worried someone might have seen you popping in like that?”

  She waved a hand and cocked an elegantly shaped gray eyebrow at me. “Please. With the glamour you’re casting over this table, I could have ridden in on a rainbow-farting unicorn and no one would have batted an eye.”

  I’d always considered my glamours impenetrable, so her seeing right through one was disconcerting. “Well, I had to do something. Back in my day, bars were darker, smoke-filled places. Easier to go unnoticed.” My twenty-five years in a cage had seen a lot of changes ushered into the world.

  “You didn’t answer my question. I know you’ve been following Lexi around, and I’d like to hear your intentions.” Her magic raised the tiny hairs on my arms, tickled across the back of my neck, and tingled across my tongue.

  Well, two could play that game, so I pulled up a little power, channeled it into the palm of my hand, and let the witchfire flicker into a marble-sized ball. Deliberately, I held Vaeta’s gaze and played the ball across my knuckles, letting it grow larger as it rippled back and forth.

  “And what exactly did you see? Nothing nefarious, because all I’ve been doing is keeping an eye on my daughter. Making sure she’s safe.”

  Vaeta shot me a skeptical look, nipped a stale peanut from the bowl on the table, and said, “Your intentions haven’t been honorable thus far, so you’ll excuse me if I seem skeptical. We’ve been the ones looking out for her, and we’ll continue to do so even if it means removing you from the equation.”

  The threat chafed. Lexi was my daughter, but these faeries seemed to think they had the bigger claim. The worst part was I couldn’t even be pissed off about it. They’d taken her in and protected her when I couldn’t. Owing debts to faeries is tricky enough business when there’s time to hammer out ironclad terms. Even then, a person could end up needing to pay the proverbial arm and a leg in actual arms and legs if a deal went wrong.

  So far, the godmothers had asked for nothing in return, but that didn’t mean I had to like them. “Cool your jets. I’m trying to help Lexi. No ulterior motives, I swear.” Mostly truth. My motives were a little more complicated, but that was none of Vaeta’s concern.

  Still, telling an air faerie to cool it down was a bad idea. She did, and I shivered in the frosty results of her magic.

  Crooking her finger, Vaeta called an empty glass from behind the bar and poured a beer from the pitcher I’d ordered but barely touched. “And how did that work out for you last time?” Had to give her credit for the level of snark in her tone. Really top notch. I could probably like her if I didn’t hate her.

  She sipped, grimaced, and blew on the beer as if it were hot and she wanted to cool it down. An icy ring formed around the rim of the glass. A handy talent.

  “Okay, I made some bad choices.” An understatement. Bad choices seemed to be my default. “But I’m trying to make up for my mistakes, so cut me some slack.”

  The chill eased along with the set of Vaeta’s shoulders and I let my gaze travel back to where Lexi sat across from the man I didn’t think was good enough for her. But what did I know? My love life ranked right up there on the top ten list of tragic failures.

  “Was he good to her?” Needing to ask was a bitter pill, but I had to know. I might not have been there for my daughter when she needed me most, but I could feel the pain of his loss inside her now. Whether because I’d lost my own love, or because she was my flesh and blood, I couldn’t say and I didn’t care. Under the collected exterior, Lexi’s cries echoed in my heart. “Tell me what happened. I know Diana Diamond was to blame, but I’d like to hear the rest of the story.”