Page 14

Four Months Later

JARED

I t’s been too busy to worry about why Elijah is jumping at shadows, or why Theo is working on a secret project on his computer. They both reassured me that their minds were fully invested.

“I keep seeing ghosts,” Elijah says, blowing out a breath as he stretches in bed with me.

The house is almost fully furnished now, a king sized for in the room Theo claimed but we all sleep in. My arms wrap around his waist as I bury my face in his neck.

“Figurative ghosts because of guilt, or real ones?” I ask, determined to get him to start talking.

I refuse to be too busy permanently for him and Theo. Our parents are like this, embroiled in the next deal or tangled in the need to kiss up to their friends. We have a few minutes where it’s just us, so I want to know what’s going on.

“Can ghosts run you over?” he asks in a small voice.

“I don’t believe so,” I drawl, my heart beginning to beat faster with worry. “Care to explain?”

“Remember when I went to check out the club and then get pizza?” he asks, leaning into my body.

“That was forever ago,” I say. “What about it?”

“A girl that looked an awful lot like Rachelle hit the accelerator like she was fucking Cruella Deville and almost mowed me over when I was crossing the street,” Elijah says. “I’m fine, but the experience is haunting me.”

“What’s haunting you?” Theo asks, walking out of the bathroom with a low slung towel around his waist. He got into the shower first in an effort to get us in gear.

Unfortunately, Elijah is warm and I can’t get the motivation to move. My erection rocks against his ass, his sigh is my reward as he presses back against me. We haven’t had sex in a disturbing amount of time.

I could always blame our time constraints, but it’s a mixture of guilt and depression.

“This is going to sound insane,” Elijah sighs. “Can we just have sex so we don’t have to have this conversation?”

My hand plunges down his boxers and I grip his dick tightly.

“After you tell us. Don’t think I haven’t noticed the secrets. Tell Daddy everything, and I’ll let you come,” I grunt.

Elijah fucking whimpers as I smirk, and Theo shrugs as he drops his towel. This is going to devolve into a threesome very quickly. While I wouldn’t be mad about it, I need some answers.

“I’ll suck your dick if you’re a good boy,” Theo croons, tugging down the blankets. My hand begins to jack Elijah off, loving the way his hips jerk upward with every stroke. “But only if you answer his question.”

“Fuck, God that feels so good,” Elijah moans.

“We aren’t going to judge you,” I remind him as Theo pulls down Elijah’s boxers. Theo’s pierced cock bobs in front of him proudly, and Elijah licks his lips. “Tell us.”

“She… fuck, this is going to fuck up the mood,” he sighs. “I swear, I keep seeing Rachelle.”

Theo gazes at him for a long moment before nodding. “Me too,” he says. “There’s got to be a lot of girls that look like her, though. She didn’t come back from the dead to run you over.”

“I saw her at the truck stop when we stopped on the way down here too,” Elijah confesses. “It’s fucking with my sleep.”

I release his dick to rub his thigh, and Theo shrugs.

“We live with our mistakes,” he says. “I don’t know that I’d have done things the same if I had to do it over again, knowing what I do now.

I’d have told Nacio that setting his stepsister up for the bet was wrong.

You don’t set your family up for the slaughter, yet we’ve had to do it twice. ”

“Never again,” I promise, breathing Elijah’s scent in. “We’re free, we stay that way, and we find a way to live with our sins.”

“To the future and no secrets,” Theo says, capturing Elijah’s lips to kiss him hard. “Let’s be better men, yeah?”

It feels like a heavy promise, one that we should have made ages ago. Instead, it’s been implied, but still broken.

“Yeah,” Elijah and I say.

“Let’s get ready for the day, and we’ll go grab a drink after class together. Opening night is tomorrow,” I say, kissing Elijah’s lips before moving away to get up.

He blows out a breath, nodding, and gets up as well.

“Everything is ready to go,” Elijah says. “The social media videos are going viral, and our opening night list invitations went out several months ago.”

“All the paperwork is done, Cellie’s Mystics is fully stocked, and our manager for the shop said she’s good to work the first night alone. We haven’t found anyone to work with her,” Theo sighs. “Brea has a good head on her shoulders.”

While the name for the shop is made up, it seemed important to have it named in a way that invites people to come in to browse. Cellie may not exist, but she’s a fictional figure we’ll be using in our shop. It’s all marketing.

“We’re good,” I promise. “No shop talk anymore. We’ve got this all figured out. Any hiccups, we’ll be there to clear up.”

Fuck, this is nerve wracking, but the million details of getting this business launched are taken care of. Now, whatever happens, we won’t be able to account for it until we’re in the thick of things.

A night off is exactly what we need.

“A college bar,” Theo says with a smirk as he drinks his beer. Even though we’re not twenty-one yet, our fake identification cards more than cover us for it.

“It’s so nice to just sit and not dash from place to place,” Elijah says with a sigh.

“We have a semester down at least,” I confirm with a smirk. “Shall we play pool or throw darts and pretend it’s our parents’ faces?”

A girl glances at me with an odd mixture of horror and disgust, but if she knew our parents, she’d be offering to play with us. Ignoring her, I raise a brow at the guys as I take a sip of beer.

It’s not the best thing I’ve ever put in my mouth, though not the worst. For a college bar, I can’t ask for much more than this.

Elijah and Theo vote to throw pointy things at a dart board, and I walk over there. We play round after round, getting competitive as fuck and teasing each other to accept stupid bets we’ll never cash in.

I’m laughing as I look around for a bathroom, the beer finally hitting my bladder. This place is actually within walking distance from our house, so we didn’t bring the car.

Seeing the wood sign for the restroom, I jerk my chin in the direction of it.

“I’ll be back,” I tell them. Theo cranes his neck to see where I’m going before nodding.

No matter what, he is always ensuring that we’re safe, or where we said we’d be. There’s a good chance something bad happened if we’re not, or at least that’s how things work in his head.

Theo is very analytical, his mind taking things at face value until he can reject it as wrong, and then he’ll try to confirm why it’s different than it should be. It’s also why Rachelle piqued his interest.

My footsteps take me away from the guys, and people move out of my way as I walk around the corner to the restroom. Unsurprisingly, there’s not a line for the men’s though the line is long for the women’s bathroom.

Ducking inside, I do my business quickly, sighing in relief. Beer runs through me at a certain point of the night, and that’s usually a sign that I have about an hour left in me before I begin to feel the effects of the alcohol.

It’s odd, but just how my body processes it. It’s a very delayed response. Washing my hands quickly, I pull a paper towel and dry them before tossing it and pushing out the door. Glancing to my left, I see glossy black hair pulled back into a ponytail, and it’s attached to a fairly tall girl.

Frowning, I take a step after her, shaking my head.

“Lili!” I call out, wondering if it’s her. The girl keeps walking, pushing out the back door as I stand there, feeling dumb.

Is that the ghost Theo and Elijah are seeing? I don’t think she looks like Rachelle at all, from the oval of Liliana’s eyes to the way she walks. I suppose that their eyes could be playing tricks on them, but that feels too easy.

Something is going on here.

“Hey man, excuse me,” says a voice. “I need to go after my girlfriend.”

Turning, I see that eyes are trained after the dark haired beauty that walked out the back door. Just because I’m swearing off women forever, doesn’t mean I don’t see the appeal. She didn’t glance back once, and this guy is frowning hard at the door as it slams shut.

“It doesn’t appear as if she’s waiting for you,” I drawl, crossing my arms. This area is pretty dark, and I noticed that there were a couple of streetlights out.

I’ll let the girl get as far away as possible. She can call him when cooler heads prevail in the morning if they’re really together.

“I… Okay, she’s not my girl, but I wanted to shoot my shot,” he complains. “Are you really going to cock block me?”

“Should have shot it sooner,” I state, turning him around and pushing him in the direction of the bar. “Leave the girl alone.”

She looks a lot like a girl I used to protect a long time ago, and I tell myself that that’s the reason I’m interfering now.

The guy sighs as if I’m the biggest pain in the ass and goes back to his friends, while I return to mine.

Now, hopefully she’s in her car and headed home, no matter if he chooses to stay at the bar or leave.

Elijah looks at me funny as I rejoin them, and I raise my brow.

“Did you see her this time?” he asks. “That guy over there was bothering her, and I felt really odd while watching them.”

“Elijah was going to go say something when she pulled away from the guy and walked down the back hallway,” Theo grunts. “It just felt weird, and she was so damn familiar.”

“Can we go home?” Elijah asks. “I don’t feel so hot.”

I have a feeling of dread that feels like anxiety, as if we’re standing on the cusp of something.

“Yeah, let’s get out of here and call it early,” I murmur. “Tomorrow’s a big day.”

Our trio strides through the bar, ducking around people as we leave. Voices raise as we walk, and I turn my head enough to see the guy I encouraged to come back into the bar get decked.