Free Reluctant Adept: Book Three of A Clairvoyant's Complicated Life by Katherine Bayless

men, even if they had saved my life.
    "You said Lorcán told you something before he issued his ultimatum," Tíereachán observed, sounding wary. "It obviously upset you. What was it?"
    I gritted my teeth, pressing my arms tighter to my abdomen. Nope. Not going there.
    "He revealed something," he pressed, ignoring my silent protest. "Something Kieran hadn't told you. Something that concerns Nuala and who you are."
    "You don't know?" Fisk's surprised inquiry pierced the night-dimmed interior. "She's descended from Nuala's father. They've tracked both sides of his line for generations, hoping the spark would manifest somewhere along the way, even with the years of diluted blood."
    I bit my lip. My relation to Kieran's former mate was less like a daughter and more like a half-sister. Although, genetically speaking, after two thousand years of intervening lineage, one could hardly say we were related. Not that it mattered, of course, since neither consideration made the situation with Kieran feel any less smarmy.
    "Kieran knew?" Tíereachán's voice rose. "He kept you ignorant and then seduced you?" He bit out a curse. "I should have suspected as much. When I get done with him, my cousin is going to wish Lorcán had gutted him." He spewed a long series of harshly bitten Silven words that I didn't have to work hard imagining as curses.
    When Tíereachán finished his rant, Fisk grunted his agreement and said, "At the soonest," and then, with a severity that almost surpassed Tíereachán's, he snapped, "I'll fucking help." Which, considering Fisk's surliness toward me, came as a shock.
    Call me crazy, but their threats eased some of my crushing worry. If they were imagining what they'd like to do to Kieran, both men must harbor little doubt that he'd survived the fight with Lorcán.
    It wasn't enough to distract me from the ongoing humiliation of Kieran's betrayal, however. It was one thing to have a preference for women with green eyes, quite another to seek out the distant relation of your former lover. I wondered whether doing so had bothered him. Had it made him feel guilty? Couldn't he see how creepy it was?
    I gritted my teeth. This constant emotional tug of war—fear and worry followed by humiliation and betrayal—had left me feeling wrung out and carsick.
    "I'm sorry," Tíereachán said, his words clipped by his remaining anger. "If I'd known Kieran had been keeping this from you … I'd have forced him to tell you."
    I nodded, relieved when he didn't pile on by using Kieran's mistake to paint himself as the better man. Both his and Fisk's reactions had already made that point painfully clear.
    Gaze firmly averted, I shifted in my seat. "So … I have to ask … is there, I don't know, maybe something I should know about Kieran's appearance?" I paused, tucking my hair behind my ear, not sure whether I wanted to know the answer, but nevertheless compelled to learn it. "Two of the strigoi said something bizarre about his looks, as though he was flawed somehow. What they said, it just— " I huffed. "It struck me as odd—crazy, in fact. And then Lorcán said something about Kieran wearing a mask, like it was something Kieran did for my benefit, since he and the strigoi could see through it."
    From the front seat, Fisk's muttered curses rose above the road noise, doing nothing to help my frame of mind. If I hadn't already melded myself to it, I might have shrunk further against the car door.
    Tíereachán didn't respond, but his silent outrage washed over me, the ominous calm before the mother of all storms. I held my breath, primed for his response, as if any second it would thunder through the car and startle me out of my seat.
    I couldn't stand it any longer. I gave up window gazing and peered across the seat.
    Tíereachán stared two holes into the car's ceiling, his arms folded across his chest, head pressed into the seat's neck rest. The darkness did nothing to hide the stark relief of his rigid posture and flexing