Demon's Curse (Imnada Brotherhood) Read Free Page B

discover the extent of the danger.”
    Immediately his mind returned to Bianca Parrino. Her whispered words had set a queer pang jolting through him. Worry had taken root, and no amount of scoffing by these two chuckleheads would dissuade him.
    “You think Adam was killed because he was Imnada? None know the clans survive. The enforcers have seen to that.” David plunked himself down on a couch, dabbing at his cut with a handkerchief.
    “Would you bet your life and the lives of every man, woman, and child within the clans on that assumption, David? Would you bet the lives of your family? Your friends?” Mac argued.
    “Friends? Family? Where were they when the Gather pronounced our sentence? When our clan marks were obliterated and we were cast out half-dead into the world?”
    “Not all of them wished us ill. There were those who spoke against our exile.”
    “For all the good it did us. No, Mac. We’re emnil . Outlawed and living on sufferance. I say let the clans fend for themselves.”
    “Then forget the clans and remember Adam. He was our friend. We owe him justice, if nothing else,” Mac challenged.
    “Adam was no traitor,” Gray reiterated. “He understood the allegiance owed the Imnada and the dangers in exposure to the outside world.”
    “People change,” Mac shot back.
    David’s mouth twisted to a sneer. “Every night like clockwork, eh, Flannery?”
    Mac sighed before tossing back another brandy.
    They were a company again. The three of them. The accursed.
    With his death, Adam had bound them together once more.
    *   *   *
    Wiping Froissart’s seed from between her thighs, Renata stepped through the curtain into the inner chamber, dropping the heavy fabric into place behind her to muffle his snores and grunts. His foul breakingof wind. The creaks of the bed as he tossed and turned.
    Pitching aside the rag, she toyed with the thought of killing him. How easy it would be. How quick. None would question it. They would mourn with her—the young, grieving widow. A thought quickly dismissed. The man was a pig, but he’d served his purpose. She had succeeded where all had called her mad to try. She had tracked those who slaughtered her father to this horrid gutter of a city. After a year and a half, vengeance would finally be hers. Only then would Froissart meet his final reward. Until that moment, she would prevent what attentions she could and endure what she could not.
    “Is he asleep?”
    A figure stepped from the shadows. She had known he was there, had felt his arrival as a tremor in the air, a touch upon her mind. She even knew when he parted the curtains to watch as Froissart spent himself inside her, his great bulk jerking and wheezing as he came. She’d felt his eyes upon her and smiled, her husband thinking the pleasure was for his sake.
    “He is.” Taking up her brush, she sat before an enormous mirror, one of four, each covering a wall of her dressing chamber.
    Alonzo stepped behind her, pulling the brush gently from her hands. He slid it through her long black hair, tangle by tangle. He had always known how to soothe her. Milk-siblings, they’d shared a breast and then a nursery before he’d been packed off to the military and she to school with the priestesses of High Danu at Varennes. Until then, they’d been inseparable. As they were once again.
    Tonight he smelled of tobacco and wine and leather and sex, and she felt an instant’s jealousy for the whore who’d pleasured him. Then she looked up to catch his eager gaze upon her naked body, and her envy dissipated. She had nothing to worry about. He would always be hers.
    “Froissart is a pig,” he spat. “Why do you allow him to touch you?”
    She laughed at the echo of her thought on his lips. They were so close, their minds flowed in tandem. Sometimes a mere flash of shared reflection. Other times, it was as a stream coming together with a river, thoughts rippling and diving and curling upon each other so there was no