Page 15 of Ruby Red Sky

My witness statement would damn me for sure seeing as I wasn’t upset the man was gone. The only thing I wanted to do was go hide in a hotel. First, I had to figure out what these men wanted. The whole respect and honor thing was ridiculous. They didn’t know me from a hole in the wall.

Lukas’s eyes traveled to my duffel. Then he held his hand out, palm downward toward the bag. When he dropped his arm, the gore had disappeared.

“Take your bag,” he told me.

My arm shook as I reached for it and tugged it to me. The leather was squeaky clean, other than a couple drips the corner had collected when I pulled it over.

“Is this really happening?” I asked quietly, the question not really directed at anyone but myself.

“Where are you going to go?” Kiam asked.

“I’m going to a hotel,” I said.

“Home,” Lukas replied to his friend.

“The Second?”

“No, home,” Lukas repeated.

Kiam took his hands out of his pockets and faced him. “I’m going with you.”

He scoffed. “No, you’re not. It isn’t possible.”

“What makes you think that?” Kiam’s voice held a thread of warning, and I stopped my progression toward the front door, riveted by the stand off between two predators.

The air crackled with static electricity, the sensation creeping up the back of my neck and causing my eyes to water. “It isn’t permitted. You’re turned.”

“And you think Cassia will be allowed?” My head swiveled back and forth between the two of them while they discussed me as if I was going anywhere with them.

“That’s different and you know it. You are not so ignorant, are you magician?”

Kiam laughed. “’Magician.’ Maybe one day I will tell you. You can’t stop me from following, no matter what you try. You take her with you; I’ll be there as well.”

The man’s pupils spread, blackening the green shade before the color spilled through the whites of his eyes, like ink leaking into water.

“I’m not scared of you Lukas—do your worst.”

He snarled at Kiam before he roughly grabbed my hands, yanking me to his chest. He stared down at me with the two black pools. They looked like tar.

A crawling sensation covered my skin, and a sharp heat ran up my sternum. My heart thundered beneath my rib cage, threatening to burst through my bones. Never mind whatever these men had planned for me, I was about to have a massive coronary event.

My ears rang so loudly it drowned out any more words between the two of them.

And then I fell.

CHAPTER 6

Lukas

I hadn’t given nearly as much thought as I should have over what I was going to do with Cassia once I had her. All that mattered at the time was that I wanted her.

She was obviously broken; a mere shell subjected to abominable behavior by her boyfriend. Her emptiness was spread all around her, filling the ether with a heavy weight.

Normally, broken humans such as her sought whatever they could reach to fill the void within, but not Cassia.

As far as I could tell, given her behavior at the coffee shop, she was a civilized, responsible human.

And beautiful, with her long, shiny brown hair, oval face and bright blue eyes. Her neck was slender, my fingers nearly touching when I wrapped my hand around, resting my thumb on her pulsing veins. As soon as we’d arrived in the First Realm, I’d placed her unconscious body on my bed.