Our sister gasped.

Vespar froze. His eyes snapped to mine.

Then Kellan narrowed his and asked, calm, quietly, “Is that what he said?”

“Among a lot of other stuff.” I glared at him and then looked to Vespar. “I’d run if I were you. You killed too many. You’ve done too much.” Then I looked at Gus and saw the guilt in her eyes. I wondered if she had even told him the magnitude of what she’d done, how many bodies there had been. “They’re coming, and they’re coming for you two. I was told that you ‘must pay.’”

Vespar scoffed, “Who told you that?”

“A messenger.”

The smirk vanished.

Then I smiled. “Maybe you should pack your bags.”

He scowled. “We’re not going anywhere.”

Giuseppa shifted uncomfortably beside him.

And then Kellan stepped around them so it was just me and him. His back was to them, effectively warding them from our conversation as he asked, “What else did he say?”

The way he moved, how sensual it was, how unperturbed he seemed to be, made me uneasy. I hesitated to ask what I really wanted to, but I murmured, with less heat than I’d had in the beginning, “You changed everything. Matt’s the same. Leah doesn’t know she had parents. Dylan’s alive…”

Gus gasped and jerked forward. “You did?” Her hand clamped on to Kellan’s arm, but he glared at her. Her hand jerked back in the next second, but she tried to act like that little exchange hadn’t happened. She smiled and shifted on her hip. “That’s great. I don’t—you did something to him?”

“I wiped his memory. I wiped all of their memories—every one of them.”

Vespar was quiet, which said a lot. I narrowed my eyes at him. “No thanks for your big brother?”

He lifted frosty eyes at me, but didn’t say anything.

Kellan frowned at me, but also didn’t say a word.

That told me everything I needed to know—they both knew Kellan wasn’t related to us. If he hadn’t insisted the other two would kill me if they realized my blood roots, I would’ve assumed that Vespar also knew about my messenger parentage. I wanted to say something, judge their responses, but I held my tongue. If they didn’t know, I wasn’t ready to fight my real brother and sister any time soon.

Kellan seemed to have been assessing me the whole time. He saw my surrender and swooped in to turn toward Gus and Vespar. “I’m sorry. I have been watching you, but only the last day. She’s right—you two did a lot of damage and they’re coming. I didn’t want to give them any more against you than they already have. I did what I could, but you still upset the balance. We’re not supposed to use our magic that much, and we’ve been using way too much. The consequences are coming our way.”

Then he looked at me with eyes that held a dark promise. It slithered down my body and wrapped tight inside. Kellan was furious, and he wasn’t going to be quiet. I only had a matter of time before he came to hash things out with me. I didn’t think he was going to back down how I had.

Vespar nodded, grave. “How long do we have?”

“They’ll come to talk first. They’ll find us, and they’ll inquire who did what. They’ll figure out who the leader is, etc. They’ll devise all of our roles, and then they’ll make a plan on how to handle us. If we fight them, they’ll fight back. They’ll swoop in and obliterate us all. If that happens…then we’ll have to see. We have some time.” He turned to leave.

Giuseppa asked, anxious, “What can we do before then?”

Kellan said darkly, “Get as strong as you can.” His eyes pierced mine for a second, and then he left. We stood behind, unsure of what just happened.

I hadn’t even shut my bedroom door or turned on my light before Kellan grabbed my arm. He whisked me against him, and everything swooshed around us. When I opened my eyes again, I saw that we were in the woods, near a lake.

“How—you can do that?”

He stared at me. “I can do a lot of things, Shay. I’m less human than you think.”

The way he said it, like it was a promise, sent the same shivers down my back that I’d always gotten around my brother. Then I sighed and turned away. He wasn’t my brother. He was a liar.

I started walking, even though I had no idea where I was going.

Kellan called after me, “Anywhere you go, I’ll find you. I can bring you right back here, anywhere I want, anywhere I choose. It’s on my turf, sister dear. This is my time right now.”

I turned sharply and glared. We both knew he wasn’t talking about our actual location right then and there. “What are you talking about? Your turf? This isn’t my turf? Are you trying to say that I don’t belong?”

He was in front of me in a flash, gripping my arms tight. “You belong to me.”

“I’m not even your sister. Am I?”

He quieted, but didn’t move away. His eyes gleamed softer, but I still saw the demon was fierce in him. There was something he wanted to say, but he held back. Why did he always hold back?

“Am I?”

Then he let go and stepped away. It felt like a rejection, though I didn’t understand why.

Kellan took a breath and calmed down. I watched as his body seemed to become more fluid, less rigid, in front of me and knew the demon was fighting him. The demon wanted to lash out, to do what it needed to do. Kellan took control then and looked back with a slight apology in his eyes.