Burn

Beside her, Knox was leaning over the box on the table that contained the things Harper had rescued from the apartment. Meg had washed each one before placing them in a different box, ridding them all of the scent of decay. She really was fabulous.

“What are all these?” he asked.

“They’re just knickknacks. You know, sentimental stuff.” She lifted out a hand-painted skeleton-shaped trinket box. “I got this from a market in Mexico. We didn’t live there long, but I loved it there.” Returning the little box, she pulled out a tiny, beautiful piano replica. “This is from Switzerland. We didn’t stay there long, either. Lucian got me this when I told him I wanted a piano – his idea of a joke.” She carefully put the piano back and pointed to a wooden carved model of the Colosseum in Rome. “He bought me this when we were in Italy. We stayed there for over a year. I loved it there.”

Knox turned in his seat to face her, propping his elbow on the top of the sofa. “Jolene was right.”

“About what?”

“You have good memories of your time with Lucian.”

“I’ve told you before that I enjoyed the traveling, and that I wouldn’t change my upbringing.”

She had, but Knox hadn’t seen how that could be possible. He hadn’t seen how she could have enjoyed years of having no real say in basic things like where she lived. Knox tucked her hair behind her ear. “Tell me more about Lucian. I need reasons why I shouldn’t kill him.”

She shot him a mock scowl. “Lucian isn’t cruel. Self-centered and absentminded, yeah. At the core of all that, he’s very lonely.” All demons were plagued by loneliness, and Lucian felt it acutely, which made him seriously restless. “But he doesn’t have the emotional maturity to do anything about it or to connect with others. So he lives with a hole inside him. Once upon a time, he tried to fill it with drugs, alcohol, women, gambling, and all kinds of dangerous shit. He’s past that phase now, but he can’t fill that void. I’m not sure if he even knows exactly what he’s looking for in life, but he’s always searching for it, and he’s always searching in all the wrong places.”

Knox got it then. “Someone so lost can’t concentrate on the needs of another person.”

“That’s exactly it. Demons aren’t built to be alone. But he’s been alone for a very long time.”

So had Knox, but he didn’t see that as an excuse for the selfish behavior Lucian had shown. “He had you.”

“That’s not the same as having a mate, though, is it? And to be fair to him, he never tried to use me to fill that void. He could have clung to me the way some lonely parents do, could have held me tight to him to make him feel loved, cherished, and important. But he never did. I think that by raising me to not need anyone or anything to complete my life – to only enhance it – he was trying to make sure I didn’t turn out like him.”

While that made sense, Knox didn’t want it to make sense or he’d have to let some of his anger at Lucian go. He couldn’t deny one thing, though. “He does care for you.”

“I believe he does. When I first went to live with him, he told me that he’d done me a favor by leaving me with Jolene; that I was better off without having him around permanently. He warned me that he was going to screw up, and he apologized in advance for it. He really isn’t a bad person, Knox. Just unable to meet the needs of others, because he can’t even meet his own needs. So please don’t kill him,” she added with a smile.

Knox sighed. “It’s important to me that you were happy. I just need to be sure.”

Harper regarded him thoughtfully. “You didn’t have a great upbringing, did you? Ooh, he tenses,” she chuckled. “Come on, you can give me something. You once said you didn’t belong to a lair before you moved to the sanctuary. Where were you?”

Knox threaded his fingers through her damp hair; everything within him recoiled at the idea of revisiting that time in his life, but this was Harper. “People would nowadays describe it as a cult. Back then, it was just a group of demons that detached themselves from their lair and formed a Prime-less group, pooling all their resources and claiming a plot of land.”

That answer certainly threw Harper. “Why did you all leave the lair? Was the Prime a bastard or something?”

“I don’t remember a lot about the Prime, but I remember that everyone feared him. So some of them left as a group, but they didn’t join another lair, because they all rejected the idea of having a Prime. They didn’t want to be ruled, they wanted peace. They wanted to be free.”

“But they didn’t get that peace,” she guessed. He didn’t answer, just stared at her with eyes that gave away nothing. “You promised you’d try sharing,” she reminded him.

He sighed heavily. “From what I can remember, it wasn’t so bad in the beginning. The females and the children were treated like royalty. Everyone was happy and close and felt free.”

“What changed?”

“One of them, Riordan” – the name alone infuriated Knox’s demon – “appointed himself as a sort of messiah. He preached about the corruption of lairs; calling all Primes power-hungry authoritarians who didn’t care for the safety of those under their protection.” The bastard could have been talking about himself. “In effect, he was actually making himself their Prime. And they didn’t see it.”