Page 38 of Sire

Literally.

For a minute, I can’t breathe. I just stare like a kid in a candy store, my clit tingling so sweet.

From behind the long bar, where staff in black T-shirts and pants diligently clean, Ms. Nadine Faye walks our way in a Chanel pink skirt suit with her arms held open for me.

“There she is.” Her blue eyes sparkle like her son’s. “My dear, you look like a modern-day Audrey Hepburn.”

A blush hits my cheeks as she pecks them. “Thank you,” I beam.

She gives me the warmest hug, too, before Sire gives her one, along with a quick peck on her cheek. “Hey, Mom.”

But he sounds mad, and she picks up on it. “What’s wrong?”

He gestures to me. “She shouldn’t be in here. It’s inappropriate. I don’t know why we’re meeting here.”

The wise smile that lifts her lips makes me worship her. Nannie did the same thing when someone questioned her power.

Arching one of her groomed brows, Ms. Faye calmly answers, “If I didn’t think Wren could handle being in my club, she wouldn’t be here.”

She turns to me. “Wren, dear, look around. Explore. Ask my staff all your questions. They’re professional and informed. And please excuse us while I talk the ears off of my stubborn mule of a son.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

SIRE

“Look at her,”Mom admires Wren. “She’s like a swan to water.”

We stand by the one-way glass window in her third-floor office overlooking the main floor below. I loom beside her, watching Wren sip a soda at the bar while animatedly talking to Lucy, the head bartender.

It looks perfectly innocent … except there’s a new shipment of giant boxed dildos on the bar beside Wren.

I say flatly, “She’s too young to be in here.”

In return, I expect a dose of Southern sass from my mom. She’s the queen of it, an art she perfected to blend in.

But she sighs, touching my arm. “I love how protective you are of her, and I love how you saved her, too. That’s why I wanted to meet here.”

She glances down at my hand. I’m not wearing a bandage. My stitches have dissolved. The scar on my partial pinky is raw, making tears well in her eyes, as if my wound is hers.

I guess, for a mom, it is.

“Sergei, you’ve always been the one who hurt the mostand?—”

“No, mom.Youdid.”

As her eldest son, I have the most memories. Many horrific. A few, sweet. Mom and I were so close in age, I became like her best friend, too. I could always make her smile.

“Yes, I did,” she answers, “and I was years younger than Wren is now when I had you. In this world, perhaps fourteen is too young to become a mother, but Wren is like me; we were girls in a world where our innocence was taken from us so we could survive. I was married to an evil monster who gave me three sweet sons by the time I was her age, and the only reason we survived,” she points between us, “is because every girl is born with an army of women inside her who will fight back, so donotunderestimate her.”

I swallow the lump in my throat, remembering every black eye my mom had, every sweet song she’d sing to me, despite her pain.

“So, what are you saying, my Queen?”

I mean it. I worship my mother. All of my brothers do.

She’s wise and warm, a badass and brutal. I know this “lunch date” is Mom trying to set me up with Wren…

And it’s working.