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Probably.

It’s been so long since I’ve actually acted like my kind that I’m not sure I’d remember how if I needed to, but natural instincts would most likely take over and I’d be fine.

Not that I think it’ll come to that.

She’s been emailing me almost daily and sent her last one a few days ago, but I haven’t heard from Zia since then. And the desperate for attention and connection side of me is butt hurt over it, which is exactly why I did what I did tonight.

Still smiling, I start to put away my equipment and check to make sure everything is saved on my laptop.

I might have finally chosen one of Zia’s words for Crude Corner, and I might have used a slightly deeper tone while I discussed impact play and how it can be incorporated into many facets of sex, including degradation and praise kinks. And that’s why I threw in the bit about good boys and girls. It felt right after an episode where I somewhat gave into the overall interest the show has piqued, but it was mostly to get a rise out of Zia.

I want to see if she’ll email me again after hearing her requests on air, and after I addressed the masses instead of just her. She seems to struggle with that based on the needier aspects of her emails.

Egging on a potential stalker isn’t the best line of thinking, but I’m lonely and bored, and thanks to this new segment of my show, I’m horny as hell.

“You know you had someone trying to break in through the back door?”

I nearly jump out of my skin and spin in my chair at the voice coming from behind me. “Jesus fuck, Silas. You scared the shit out of me.”

“If you didn’t hear me, that means you’ve been living up here way too long,” he says with a raised brow. “Your senses are taking a hit.”

Giving him my back, I finish taking care of my mess from recording. “And where am I supposed to go? Back to Purgatory? That’ll go over real well, considering I was all but banished from there.”

“You weren’t banished,” Silas scoffs just before I hear the click of his lighter.

“Exiled, then.”

“Hardly.”

“Sent away?”

“Eh, kind of.”

“Well, what the hell do you call it when the ruler of Purgatory has had enough of the complaints about someone and boots them permanently to the surface?” I get to my feet with a grunt, annoyed as hell that we’re having this conversation again after years of it getting us nowhere. “I’m here against my will, because I didn’t have any other choice, and because no one down there wanted the freak around anymore.”

“You could have gone to Hell.”

Silas smirks as I whip around to face him, my irritation growing by the second, but I just huff instead of continuing the argument.

We’ve been through this before, so many times, and it does nothing but piss me off and make him laugh.

“Brought you something.”

My brow furrows as he tosses a smallish rectangular package wrapped in brown paper at me. One I carefully start to open before I let out a sigh. “Silas, you know I—”

“I know,” he says as he takes a hit off his cigarette. “Call me what you will, but it drives me nuts thinking about you living off that damn coconut milk.”

I turn the pouch of blood over in my hands with a small, genuine smile, the thing obviously packaged and frozen by Silas himself at home.

Call me what you will.

I’ve secretly called him my best friend, my brother, even though we don’t share genetics, and I’ve done so ever since we were kids. Silas knows it too. He just won’t acknowledge it because he’s not into that sappy shit.

And frankly, neither am I. I’m just more prone to letting it slip than he is.

But after one hundred and ninety-eight years of this guy coming to my defense and trying to take care of me in some way—by choice—it’s hard not to get a little up in my feels over things. Especially when I know how much Silas is risking to come up here every night so he can check on me. He could lose a lot more than just his job by leaving Purgatory so frequently, and doing that on top of the impromptu and unexplained visits to Hell? Yeah, Silas deserves those titles I give him in secret. Even if he is a huge dickhead most of the time.

“You gonna acknowledge what I said when I got here?”