Sin & Salvation (Demigod of San Francisco #3)(46)

“—but this time,” Daisy went on, not hearing the others, “her skin is like…legit glowing. Like one of those filters on the camera that makes your skin really nice. Seriously, he got you a different lotion, right? I want some.”

Bria put up her hands in defeat. “Alexis, honestly, just answer me one question: you’re cool with being a kept woman?”

“Kept woman?” Daisy reeled back. “Are you kidding me? Ain’t no one keeping my girl down.” She gestured around us. “A Demigod with too much money wants to buy us a house? Um yes, we’ll take it, thank you very much. He wants to buy us some new clothes, a bunch of shi…crap no one needs but is sure nice to have? Food? Yes, yes, and I’ll take another helping, please and thank you. That motherfucker—sorry Lexi, but you know that swear was warranted—doesn’t own us. If he thinks we can be bought, then he’s the chump. We can and will leave at any time. We’ll take the hand outs, but gifts with strings attached are for losers.” She gestured to Mordecai, and then me, and then back to herself. “We ain’t losers.”

I nodded with my lips pulled to the side, thinking. “Yeah, that’s about it. I don’t mind people buying me stuff. I encourage it, actually. Why do you think I took drinks from Miles for so long?”

“It helps us save our money,” Mordecai said, nodding.

“And it’s not like he’s in control,” Daisy continued. “We have all the paperwork on this house. If he tries to pull the rug out from under us?” She let the question hang in the air with her eyebrows lifted.

“We’ll burn it down,” Mordecai supplied helpfully.

Daisy’s expression fell and she reached over to punch Mordecai in the sweet spot on his arm. “Thanks a lot.”

“Ow! What?” he asked, rubbing the offending spot.

“You stole my thunder. I was going to say we’d burn it down.”

“Then run off to Australia,” he said expectantly. “I’m not stealing anything from you. Everyone knows that’s the best plan.”

A look of death crossed Daisy’s face.

“I just…” Bria leaned against the counter, worry in her eyes. “Look, I know you guys swear by Kieran”—she glanced up at Zorn—“and everyone who works with him wants to stay working for him. As a boss and usually as a man, he’s top notch. I’m a believer. I am. In almost all things, I am Team Kieran—”

“You worry that when it comes to a woman, he’ll turn into his dad,” Jack said quietly, all humor gone.

“Since day one, yeah,” Bria said. “Look, genetics is a tricky bitch. Kieran got a big heaping of genetics from Valens. He has skills that not many possess. He stole Valens’s prized possession out from under him, and after two months Valens still has no idea he was the one who did it. That takes a certain sort of a cunning. A Valens sort of cunning. And now here Kieran is, buying Alexis a new life, just like his dad did for his mom. He’s also marked her without asking. Maybe he didn’t do it on purpose, and maybe I’m in the minority here, but that’s got me worried.”

Silence fell through the kitchen, so thick I could barely breathe. She’d just dug up all the worries and concerns that had plagued me. Had this been a huge, irreversible mistake?

“I’ve known Kieran most of my life,” Zorn said, his low voice filling up the room. “He found me in a gutter outside of a pub, beaten senseless. I should’ve been in the hospital, but my father wanted to get back to his pints and his dice. My attempt to drag him home hadn’t been appreciated.” He paused to take a steadying breath. “I was nothing. An unwanted nobody. There are very few high-powered magical people in the world, let alone in the magical elite, who would go out of their way to help a half-dead street kid. But Kieran ended his night out to take me home with him, and the Demigod’s wife allowed her son to carry a bleeding pulp of a kid into her house and set him down on a spotless cream sofa in the living room. It wasn’t a servant who nursed me back to health, though they had many. It was the two of them, taking turns. He might have a good helping of his father, but he was raised and nurtured by his mother.”

Bria opened her mouth to speak, but Zorn wasn’t finished.

“From that day forward, I’ve been a kept man. Kieran took me in, then bought me my first house. He bought the car I drive. He offered me a credit card, too, but by that time, he’d paid me enough salary, and taught me what to do with it, that I could stand on my own. He didn’t do any of it to gain favor or loyalty. He wasn’t attempting to buy me. He was offering to help me in the only few ways he knew how. I would go to the grave for that man and be brought back time and again to help him.”

“But you’re not a woman,” Jack cut in. “Bria has a reason to be wary. There’s a reason the Six is made up of all men, after all.”

“Kieran’s father did try to poison him to women, that’s true,” Zorn said. “He’s never fully trusted himself to have power over a woman. He doesn’t want to turn into Valens.”

“What about Bria?” Daisy asked.

“She came on as a highly recommended outsider,” Zorn said, “whom I personally interviewed—”

“He means banged.” Bria’s glimmer of mirth was short-lived. Her face soured again.