She nearly laughed, because that hadn’t been easy at all.

“Come on.” His voice was gruff, commanding, but somehow encouraging. “Tell me about your parents.”

“Oh, that’s a good one.” Sin focused on his sharply defined pecs as she spoke. “My mom was human. And batshit crazy. She fucked a demon she thought she’d summoned, and when she learned she was pregnant, she tried to abort. She couldn’t, and she ended up giving birth to me and Lore.”

“She knew you were demons?”

“Yeah. She seriously believed she’d screwed Satan. Everyone thought she was insane. So after she tried to kill us by abandoning us in the snow as newborns, my grandparents adopted us, named us Sinead and Loren, and locked her up in an asylum.”

“Did you grow up thinking you were human?”

“Yeah.” Sometimes, when the doctors thought her mother’s treatments were working and she was getting better, they’d let Lore and Sin visit. But the visits always turned ugly. “The only time we questioned ourselves was when we got to see our mother, and when no one was around, she’d tell us she wished we were dead. That we were the spawn of the devil.”

Con’s hand froze on her back, and he swore. “That must have hurt.”

She shrugged, but yeah, it had hurt. Lore had handled it pretty well, but Sin would cry for days after the visits. “My grandparents helped us through it.”

“Your grandparents sound like they were good people.”

“They were.” When she tried hard enough, Sin could still smell her grandma’s homemade cookies. Could remember the hugs, the bedtime stories. The secret laughs her grandparents would sometimes share. They’d loved each other so much. They’d never had a lot of money, but the hard times only brought them closer.

“And then my mom escaped from the hospital. Lore and I were eighteen, two days from our nineteenth birthdays and still living with our grandparents when she broke in and killed them. The only reason she didn’t kill us, too, was that I rolled over just as she was trying to stab me in the heart. The knife went into my shoulder. I screamed, and Lore came from his bedroom to tackle her.”

Con pressed a kiss into her hair, and it was so tender, so intimate, that she sucked in a harsh breath. Con seemed to realize what he’d done, his big body going taut, as if he couldn’t believe his own action. “I’m sorry,” he said roughly, but whether he was sorry about kissing her like that or about her past, she didn’t know.

Either way, it made her uncomfortable. And maybe a little… warm.

“’S’okay. No big.” But her bravado was false, and she wondered if he knew that. The truth was that, at the time, she’d been devastated beyond consolation. She’d gone into some sort of shock that lasted for weeks. If not for Lore forcing her to eat, to live, she might have died. “Lore took care of me. We stayed in the house for a little over a year, and then we found out that everything our mom had said about us was true.”

She’d never forget that night. It was a full moon. Foggy. Creepy. Her right arm had started to burn, and she’d watched in horror as red welts boiled up in her skin. Lore had come home from his job at a factory, and he’d stumbled into the house, his face wrenched in pain, his arm burning like hers.

“Some of the memories are fuzzy.” She traced Con’s ribs with her fingers, needing to put her hands to work because she couldn’t reach her dagger, which she liked to flip out of nervous habit. “But some are crystal clear. We developed our dermoires, and a desperate… need. Lore had it the worst. He fought what was happening to him, and he went into this wild rage.” She shuddered, remembering how his skin had turned red, shot through with black, bulging veins. His eyes, glowing crimson fire, had targeted her for death. “I guess purebred Sems go kind of crazy during their first maturation cycle, and they need lots of sex to get through it. Lore… it was different for him.” At least, it was different while he was inside the house. After he left, she could only guess at what he’d done. “He tore the house apart. I think I only survived because I played dead. I left the house after he did, but I got home before him. It was a couple of days, I think. When he came back…” She took a deep, ragged breath.

“Where have you been?”

“I don’t know. Everywhere. Nowhere.” He looked around the kitchen. “I did this?”

She nodded.

“Sinead, I’m sorry.” He put his face in his hands. “I… killed and… I did terrible things.”

“So did I,” she whispered. Two days spent in Boston’s Irish Slums had left her shaken.

His head came up, and he reached for her. She flinched away from him, not wanting him to touch her filth, but he misunderstood, and his face fell. “I’m so sorry…”

“I—I need to—” She couldn’t finish. She just wanted to climb into bed and pray that when she woke up, this would all have been a nightmare.

She’d gone to bed, and when she got up the next morning, Lore was gone. The note on the table said, “I can’t risk hurting you. I love you.”

“He packed a bag and left. I didn’t see him again for more than three-quarters of a century.”

“Seventy-five years? Jesus. What happened to you?” When she didn’t answer, because her throat had clogged up, Con lifted her face to his and brushed his lips over hers, devastating her and making the lump in her throat even bigger. “You can tell me. Please, Sin.”

She had to swallow several times before her voice would work. Finally, she tucked her face against him and said, “I… told you I left the house for a couple of days right after our weird change, right after Lore hurt me.”

Con stiffened. “He didn’t—”

“No… God, no. He was enraged, insane, but there was nothing sexual.” As Con relaxed, she continued. “Afterward, I needed something, but I didn’t know what.” She clung to Con as if she were drowning. “I was a virgin. I hadn’t felt arousal before. Not like that, anyway. And sex wasn’t something my grandparents ever discussed. All I knew was that, inside, I was on fire. I was cramping and aching, and right away, I was drawn to every man I saw.”

She closed her eyes, hating to go back to the worst time of her life. “I was terrified. I ended up in one of Boston’s Irish slums…” She’d been feverish, in pain. She’d grabbed the hands of several men, begging them for something she didn’t even know how to put into words. She’d been spared the physical transformation Lore had suffered, but no doubt she’d seemed like a crazy person, and one man had struck her hard enough to make her nose bleed. Another had been seduced by the pheromones she’d been putting out, but when he’d tried to take her into an alley, a woman, presumably his wife, had caught them, and Sin had been forced to flee.

She’d finally made it into the seediest part of the slums, which smelled of slaughterhouses and factory smoke, and two young thugs had whisked her behind a corner store and given her what she’d needed.

She’d cried for hours, huddled behind some boxes, confused, afraid, and physically sated but mentally tormented.

“Gods,” Con whispered, and she realized she’d spoken aloud. “That was your introduction to sex?”

“Oh, it wasn’t all bad,” she said, unable to keep the sarcasm out of her voice. “Imagine my shock when they climaxed… and I did, too.” A hot tear squeezed from her eye. She was disgusting. A horrible creature who got off no matter who—or what—fucked her or how much they hurt her.

“You can’t fight your nature, Sin. You are what you are.”

“So there’s nothing about yourself that you hate?”

“Yeah,” he ground out. “Yeah, there is. What happened after that? Did you search for your own kind? Or try to?”

“I didn’t know what my kind was, and I never got the chance to find out.” She wiggled her toes against his, such a curiously intimate, random thing to do. Mainly because she’d never, not once, remained in bed with a man like this. Was rubbing toes something normal lovers did? “After Lore left for good that morning, I felt dirty and disgusting, not worthy of staying in my grandparents’ house any longer. I wandered around the city, living like a stray dog. You know, sleeping under bridges and doing tricks for scraps of food.”