Page 80 of Heartless Heathens

“And what were you trying to do?” she asked him again.

“Just making sure we were on track. Sometimes destiny steers you off its course to see if you can get back by yourself.

“And if you don’t?” she asked. “If you don’t make it back to your destiny?”

“Then a new, shittier one is created for you,” he said and I noticed the way her eyebrows frowned.

“Don’t listen to him,” I told her, coming in from behind her.

“It’s believable,” she whispered. “I can’t imagine I would have been worse off had my mother not died.”

“Can’t dwell on the past, Mina,” I said into her ear before planting a kiss on her cheek.

“Sonny isn’t hurt?” she asked.

“You know nothing can hurt that asshole.” Corvin shook his head, and she hid a little half smile and dropped her chin down. “You’re not scared are you, lamb?” He asked, lifting her chin back up to his gaze with his fingers.

She shook her head a little too hard, blurring the line between exaggerating and convincing.

“I…I read your book,” she said, making Corvin’s eyebrows lift high up on his face.

“Which book?”

She jumped off the countertop and scampered away into the hallway, running back with the Satanic Shrine’s grimoire in hand. God of Lies.

“I took it, before I ever met you three,” she said looking down like she was ashamed of who she was before us.

“You read it?” I asked.

She nodded.

“And you understood it?” Corvin asked.

“Around the tenth time it stopped seeming like another language. Now it makes more.”

“And it didn’t scare you?” I asked again.

“Should I be scared?” Her face twisted in confusion.

“Someone rational would be.” Sonny startled us all from the dark of the hallway.

“Am I supposed to be rational?” she asked, raising the tattoo above his eye.

“The sky is supposed to be blue, the night is supposed to be dark…You Romina… You’re notsupposedto be anything. You’re perfect as you are,” I whispered in her ears, low enough for only her to hear.

My fingers trailed the back of her neck, eliciting a shudder from her as I grazed the sensitive skin.

“Will you tell me about the binding ritual in the book?” she asked innocently and we all froze.

“No,” Sonny said to her and I exhaled a breath of relief when she didn’t fight him on it.

Binding rituals couldn’t be taken back. If you bound yourself to someone, orsomeones, it was forever. Cursed to spend a lifetime unable to part from the person you bound yourself to. It revealed the truest of loves or the truest of hates, depending on how you felt about the person you bound yourself to.

“Let’s go for a walk.” I suggested, redirecting from the disappointment of Sonny’s denial and seeing her eyes brighten once again.

She pranced off to her room to change her clothes and Corvin cocked an eyebrow at me, ready to pass judgment.

“What?” I asked and he shrugged, picking up a nearby glass.