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Chapter 14

Kostas

K ostas was about to wrap Malcolm up in his arms, let him cry, when Otis grabbed his elbow to stop them. He needed rest, the man said, but Kostas knew better. Malcolm needed more.

He needed fucking everything, and there was something deep and primal in his chest, resonating same as a song, that told him to give Malcolm exactly that. Every single thing. Whatever he needed.

He was in a right foul mood when Otis took him into the kitchen and set him to cubing potatoes. The knife was sharp, and if Kostas used it a little too dramatically, well, it was better than taking claws to the old man who was, in all honesty, helping them out.

“You’re worried about him,” Otis said when he came back in, finding a pile of potato chunks and a few more scratches on his wooden cutting board than it’d had ten minutes ago.

“They took him off the street, right near where I work. That’s my home. My territory. And some shady fucking humans are treating it like their hunting ground. What they wanted from him?—”

Kostas broke off. He couldn’t say it. Couldn’t even think of anybody hurting Malcolm that way—using Malcolm to hurt others that way. Gods.

Otis handed him a couple onions. He was preparing the stock, the venison, and even piled carrots up beside a second cutting board.

“He’s holding it together,” Kostas said. “Hell, better than I would. Better than I am .” He glanced up, and Otis was just standing there, waiting patiently for him to elaborate. Kostas hung his head. “I want to kill those guys. Rip their warm, beating hearts out their chests and eat them while their widows scream.”

“Well then.” Otis blinked. “You really like to paint a picture, don’t you? So what are you? No incubi I’ve heard of has ever been into nibbling on arteries.”

Otis turned back to chopping carrots, startlingly unbothered by turning his back on a monster.

Kostas sighed, rubbing the base of his palm up the bridge of his nose, all the way up to comb his fingers through his hair. “I’m a siren.”

Otis laughed. “Like a shark on land with a prettier song. Hot damn. Never met one of you before.”

“Good. We’re not friendly.”

“’cept to incubi in trouble?” Otis raised a light brow Kostas’s way, but he went back to chopping before his face got hot. “It’s okay. I get it. You wanna protect him. That ain’t a bad thing. Seems like he needs it.”

Kostas frowned. He stared down at his onion until his eyes started to sting. “He’s like an urchin. All prickly and spiky on the outside, so you think that’s all there is. But he’s soft . He’s hurt.” And Kostas couldn’t stand it. He wanted to tear the world apart for every blow it’d dealt Malcolm, and he couldn’t place why. It wasn’t that he was beautiful, or even that he needed help. He’d assumed Malcolm was a monster, like him, but when he’d learned that wasn’t the case at all, he’d become someone to protect—someone who needed a real monster at his back. “He’s just so much more fragile than I thought.”

Otis’s brows jumped up his forehead. “Is he? I don’t see it that way. That boy’s steel that’s been quenched too many times. Gets harder and harder and harder till it cracks. But in the right hands, you can mend that kind of steel. Let it be something other than what it thinks it is, what it was made for.”

Otis lifted his cutting board and slid the carrots into the pot. “Shah had a bit of that. It’s hard, thinking you’re normal, hitting puberty, and suddenly everybody and their mother wants to jump your bones.”

“Seriously?”

Otis laughed. “Hell yeah. Every time Shah came ’round, my ma’d start biting her lip and acting all coy. It was fucking traumatic, let me tell you.”

Kostas finished chopping the onions, and Otis came over to pick up the board.

“Bet it’s harder with a dick of an incubus for a dad,” Kostas muttered.

Otis scoffed. “You said it first.”

He dumped the onions into the pot. Potatoes too.

“But they’re good if you let ‘em be. Incubi, I mean. Got a lot to give. Loyal when they find what it is they want...” Otis got a faraway look in his eyes.

“Who was Shah, to you?”

Otis shook himself out of it. “’nother time. It’ll be a while before the soup’s ready. Why don’t you go check on Malcolm. Tell him he can rest in the bedroom if he wants. You too. You’ve both been through hell, sounds like.”

Kostas blinked. He had, a little. He hadn’t been thinking of it like that, more worried about Malcolm and, well, murder.

But since he’d left Phaze the night before, he’d been scared, he’d been angry, he’d been bloodthirsty. All that’d happened was cracking the seal on a part of himself he’d spent years trying to push down.

Worst of it all was that he’d been a mess, and he didn’t know how to tell Malcolm how sorry he was for being a jerk, for not saving him sooner, for letting the whole world get like this. Sure, it wasn’t his fault exactly, but he felt responsible.

He wanted Malcolm to know that he cared, that he’d have his back. He just had no idea how to make Malcolm believe it.