Maia's Magickal Mates [The Double R 3] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) Read Free

to work.
    Was he publicity shy, or had he never done anything of note?
    Prentice was prone to believe in the latter. Most people, unlike him, were average or even below average—intelligence, looks, accomplishments. Most people went through their whole lives never doing anything remarkable or important. Most people just lived lives of insignificant mediocrity in obscurity.
    Not him. He would be different, he vowed. He was different.
    Prentice resigned himself to working from scratch finding the older brother unless this PI he had hired was worth his pricey salary or better.
    The several coven members present each took a drink and poured some into the grave in turn, then ate something and placed part of the food in the grave.
    When Prentice’s turn came he took an obscene kind of pleasure in pouring some of his drink and placing some of his food in the grave, knowing that his parents would never again enjoy or partake in these basic, simple life functions.
    He closed his eyes, remembering their deaths, the moment when he knew that he held their lives in his hands and that they were his to do with as he pleased.
    The experience had been heady, even frightening at first. Sure he had used his gifts and position to obtain a measure of revenge against some former classmates and others who had wronged him over the years, but he had never exercised his gifts to the extent that he had used them on his parents. However, as he continued pushing for the truth, pushing for additional information, pushing for more , something inside him changed, snapped…grew.
    He realized with a sense of invulnerability and satisfaction that he had absorbed his parents’ powers as they’d died.
    The final outcome had proved more than a power trip. It had been a serious rush, one he found himself eagerly wanting to repeat.
    Prentice knew exactly who he would use his augmented, developing powers on next.

Chapter 2
     
    McCoy, Colorado
    Current day
     
    Thayne Malloy woke up in a cold sweat, limbs tangled in his Egyptian cotton sheets as he bolted upright, panting.
    He listened to the mostly innocuous noises of the modern ranch house settling around him in the night and waited to hear the commotion that he was sure had woken him out of a sound sleep.
    The more seconds ticked by with him hearing nothing untoward, however, the more sure he became that a noise hadn’t woken him at all. It must have been a now-dissipating nightmare.
    He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, trying to reconnect with that moment when he first became aware he dreamed. He saw them, his mother and father, as they had been more than two decades ago—young and alive.
    Thayne hadn’t dreamed about his parents in a long time, and it had been even longer since he had dreamed so vividly about the night of their murders. He refused to think of their deaths as the police had labeled them before closing the case—a murder-suicide.
    He had never believed that version of how his parents had died. He knew his father never would have killed his mom, nor would he have committed suicide. His dad had loved his mom too much to do that to her or the family.
    Thayne had been a kid though, too young for anyone with authority to take him seriously, too young for anyone to listen to what his gut told him.
    Someone had killed his parents. He didn’t know who, how, or why, but he knew that his mother and father had not died by their own hands despite seeing his mother’s blood and his father holding a smoking gun in his dreams that night.
    He remembered his aunt and uncle coming to his and Cade’s room the morning after he and Cade had spoken to their mother. They had ominous looks on their faces. Aunt Aura even had tears in her eyes. He knew then that something had happened to his parents, something too terrible to be believed.
    Thayne had pitied his aunt and uncle for having to deliver the news, but he’d pitied himself and Cade even more for having to live the rest of their lives without a