Page 99 of Sleeping Redemption

Rook looked defeated, and I felt equally downtrodden.

“Let’s see what she feels like when she gets back,” I proposed. There had to be a middle ground somewhere between Kinley becoming a recluse, hiding from the world, and even remotely becoming a vision of her former self. I would take Kinley on a day when she was torturing humans over a day when she was a goddamn ghost.

Another round of silence came over our table before suddenly, a familiar voice interrupted all our thoughts.

“Sorry, I’m late. Round two went a bit longer than I anticipated. I’m a sucker for a girl who can use her tongue.” Zorah stood there with a sated flush still lingering on her cheeks.

Rook seemed to sink into a state of grumpiness at his twin’s sultry confession.

Our stern archangel pretended as though he had heard nothing.

Fortunately, Zorah pushed the conversation further away from our minds as she looked around the table and then asked the obvious. “Where’s Lee-Lee?”

“She went to the bathroom,” I spoke up quietly.

Zorah looked at each one of us and then shook her head. “No. She didn’t. I hit the little girls’ room on the way in here; it was as empty as a liquor store on the first day of Lent.”

Each of us shared looks with each other. Before I could put the question out there, Rook interrupted me.

“On it,” he stated with a voice of understanding. Immediately, the focus appeared on his features before his eyes popped wide open.

I couldn’t quite explain the tremor in his lips as they tried to form words. It may have been worry, or maybe even shock, but in either scenario, it was clear that it wasn’t something he wanted to see when he traced our little fallen angel to her current setting.

Looking over at Sylas, a partial growl left my throat while I attempted to obtain clarity on just what our trickster companion had discovered.

“Where is she, Rook?” My eyes darted over to him.

He had the grace to grow uncomfortable with what he had seen.

“Not far. She’s at a nightclub a few doors down.”

Sy’s gaze was as serious as I’d ever seen it. “What’s she doing there?”

Rook sat there silently, not having a response for him. Thankfully, his sister had more sense than he did. “She’s…” Zorah looked defeatedly at the ground. “Empty.”

“Empty?” I repeated the word back to her. How could she beempty?

Zorah nodded once more as she never tore her eyes from the ground. “Empty. Perhaps not physically, but I feel nothing but fabricated bad energy radiating off her soul as it called to me.”

Rook’s jaw dropped partially. “Are you trying to say that she’s stuck in her own imaginings?”

Shifting uncomfortably in her stance, Zorah searched for a response that didn’t downplay the situation.

“I’m saying that nothing is tethering her to reality as we see it.” Zorah looked at all of us with an apologetic and yet fearful look in her eyes.

“Goddamnit,” I said under my breath in frustration. “We need to get to her before she does something she will regret.”

Placing a hand on my shoulder, Rook looked at me square in the eyes. “Mate, we need to be smart about this. We don’t know what we’re walking into.”

“As much as I hate to admit it, the trickster is right. A crowded club is far from ideal for discretion. There’s too much liability that we’ll make this worse if we barge in there without a plan,” Sy pointed out.

Zorah’s eyes flicked between the three of us as we tried to come up with a plan that resulted in the least amount of carnage.

Finally, she spoke up with a question none of us wanted to consider. “And if she is too far gone?”

Sy rubbed his fingers over his eyelids. Rook gave a shaken look at me, one that preceded the moment of telling someone really bad fucking news.

I blew out a breath of air harshly and shook my head. “No, that’s not a possibility. I won’t let it be.”