Page 96 of Love & Heart Braking

Predator ears switched on and attuned to my voice, she raised her head. I waved, and Soleil weaved and dodged her way out, jogging across the cobbled street.

“Where you at?” she said.

Not a hair was out of place. She wasn’t even breathless. Incredible.

“Keeping yourself busy?”

“You know it.”

Soleil took a bit to get drunk, but that’s not what tended to get her kicked out of bars in this mood. The violence was the problem. And now that two joints on Mercury’s Bend had denied her entry, she wouldn’t get in anywhere.

I knew better than to bring up Bain straight out the gate. “There’s a cheap flagon of wine and a gutter with our name on it, my friend.”

She grinned, her eyes filled with pain, and linked her arm in mine. “You sure know how to treat a lady.”

“Only the best for you.”

We found a dusty corner store and snagged two clay flagons. Finding an empty stretch of gutter wasn’t easy at this time of night, but we got lucky outside Trillings.

“Did you see that Duke’s Dive has reopened as the Wobbly Octave?” She swigged at her flagon.

I wrinkled my nose at the name. “The twelve own it now. They’ll never make it on the bend.”

Plenty of rich people were invested in the bars around here, but they had to be owned by someone who breathed jazz. Anything less and descendants would sniff out the lack of authenticity in seconds and stop showing up.

“Exactly what I told the vampire back there. He disagreed, and next thing I knew…”

Thirty people were in a brawl? I held up my flagon. “Cheers to being back where we started. In the gutter, on the brink of disaster, and drinking cheap wine. Long may we return.”

Soleil snorted, her breath catching slightly. She clinked her clay flagon against mine. “Seventeen and on the streets. The fates led us to each other that night.”

I’d tripped over her after my shift at B Sharp. “I thought you were going to eat me.”

She’d flashed fang and talon for me “daring to touch her legs with my sloppy uniform.”

Soleil tossed her red hair. “I considered it.”

“Then I calmed the wild beast.”

She choked on her wine. “Pretty sure you peed your B Sharp uniform.”

Not untrue. “And we got to talking.”

I’d been down and alone after losing my grandparents. Soleil had let it all out to a stranger hours after escaping the Hucses’ estate. That same night, she crashed on my couch, and the next day, I’d wrangled her a job at B Sharp. Months after, over a cheap flagon of wine much like the one in my hand, the idea for Yearning Hearts was born. We planned and planned, and saved and saved, and most importantly? We’d stuck by each other, dragging one another through the shit days and laughing our way through the good.

“Everything worked out just fine in the end, didn’t it?” I added softly. “It always does.”

She looked up at the moon. “Does it?”

“Always.”

Soleil wiped her mouth after a long slug at the flagon. “So, Bain’s an asshole.” She stared at the ground. “I don’t know how he can make me feel so good and so small at the same time. It almost feels worse than what my family did. At least with them, I knew it was all bad, ya know? There wasn’t that ‘what if he’s nice today’ factor to confuse me. I’m better off without him.”

I couldn’t do Bain’s work for him. Only he could fix their bond. But I could open Soleil to the idea again. Maybe. “You should have seen his face after your declaration at the end.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Total shock. And fear—for your safety.”

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