Page 118 of The Forgotten

“Sucks that I forgot my sweatshirt then,” I say. “Let’s get ready for company.”

The sirens are getting louder as they come closer, and my brothers move until they’re flanking me on either side.

“Welcome to the keys to the kingdom, boys,” I say under my breath. “The king is dead.”

“May he burn in hell,” Balor whispers.

“Was Róisin really caught in the fire?” Dorian asks as the fire trucks scream through the open gates.

Everyone moves out of the way, and we all spill out into the road.

“Yes and no,” I reply. “As far as I know, she’s alive.”

“Will we go find her?” Balor asks, limping.

“Did you hurt yourself?” I ask, my eyes on his sweatpant covered leg.

“I checked. I didn’t, but it aches,” he explains. “No fucking idea why.”

I think I know.The bond can act in really odd ways. We may have lived and breathed at the pleasure of my father, but our internet searches aren’t something he’s ever thought to monitor.

When a bond isn’t completed, it finds a way to make you pay attention to it.

“Hmm,” I grunt. “We have some shit to take care of here, and then we’ll go hunting.”

My brothers murmur in assent as we prepare for the shit show that’ll be our circus for the near future. There will be lots of questions, and at some point I’ll need to see if these kill switches can be dug out of our bodies, or if they’ll need to remain there forever.

Some souvenirs are a constant reminder of how life has fucked you over, and I have a bad feeling my father’s memory will linger like a bad smell.

One year later

BALOR

Sitting in the VIP section of Club Serene, my eyes are glued to the cage being lifted up. There are other dancers in cages, but I don’t care about them.

I only care about my tiny dancer. It took ages to find her while we were cleaning up the fallout from my father’s death. She’s done very well disappearing from the world. Dorian has been scouring the video cameras with her photo around the world, and nothing has been picked up. Not until a few weeks ago.

Róisin works four days a week, and we only come in for two of them so as not to attract attention. It’s been difficult to keep our distance, but it won’t be for long.

I find it strange that she chooses to cage dance after spending two years inside of one. Her dancing has also evolved from classic dance to more modern dancing as she loses herself to the club music. Yet, she still wears ballet shoes as she goes en pointe as she leans back and raises her leg straight up in a stretch.

Every one of us in the club is entranced as we watch her. She’s wearing a pair of tiny shorts and a corset, and her legs seem impossibly long. There’s a tattoo on the leg that Deacon told me was burned, and it’s a ballet dancer rising from the flames. It covers the skin that melted from the fire, and I’m almost certain it needed multiple skin grafts to get to this point. I’ve been researching burns since Deacon told me about it, desperate to know what she may be experiencing. My leg aches in solidarity. Deacon thinks it might stop once I fully bond with her one day, but I don’t know if it will.

It’s a constant reminder that we didn’t act fast enough. We didn’t find a window to save her and ourselves in time. Deacon keeps the kill switch button as a reminder of it, though the battery is dismantled in it.

Róisin dances in her cage, ignoring the crowd that dances below her. The floor is full of people writhing and kissing, yet she’s untouchable. The club owner has a very strong stance on not touching her employees without consent, and there are rumors about the time that Cerenity beat the fuck out of a man with a bat for bothering Róisin.

I appreciate her feral protective nature. There are bouncers who walk her dancers out to their marks, and I imagine that she chewed out the bouncer who didn’t do his job. Still, my brothers and I don’t want to make her suspicious, so we maintain a respectful distance from Róisin.

The more I watch our tiny dancer, the more I can see that she feels safe in the cage. She’s untouchable here. No one is asking her questions, forcing her to do anything, and her boss pays her very well for doing her job.

Deacon, Dorian, and I leave when staying any longer will draw attention to us, and wait in the truck for Róisin to finish with her shift. She walks to work, having left Deacon’s SUV at the hospital.

She didn’t want any part of us, and I don’t blame her for it. I wonder achingly how she’s getting through her heats, if she’s found someone else who cares about her as much as we do.

“There’s no one else,” Dorian says, watching as Róisin steps out of the club at the end of the night. Oh, I said that out loud. Fuck. “Now that I’ve been able to pinpoint her location, I watch her on every camera she passes during her day. Róisin is completely alone.”

“Not completely,” I grunt. “She just doesn’t know she has us yet.”