Read Sloe Ride for Free Online

leap?”
    “Yeah, just don’t say shit to anyone about it.” Damien dropped his voice down. “Nothing’s engraved in stone—well, we’ve been kicking it around for a month, and I’ve still got to convince Sinjun that he wants to sleep on hotel mattresses again. Such a fucking princess.”
    “I don’t give a shit where I sleep.” The singer made a face. “You’re the one with the five-million-thread-count sheets.”
    Damie lightly pushed his best friend. “Hey, you go live in Arkham for a bit, and you tell me how you like scratchy sheets.”
    The conversation with the three musicians felt… normal , as if he hadn’t fucked up his life so badly Satan didn’t want him around. He wasn’t used to it. Even in the milquetoast, sing-around-the-campfire lovefest of a rehab, he’d caught censure from the other so-called celebrities and spoiled children.
    “Shit, burn down one hotel room,” Rafe muttered to himself. “No one got hurt, and I put it out.”
    Yeah, it’d been more than the fire. The dead body in his hotel room had a lot to do with it. Mark, Rafe corrected. Not dead body. Guy had a name. He deserved to have a name after everything was all said and done. He hadn’t killed Mark. Not like a knife to the heart or a bullet to the brain kind of murder, but Rafe’d been the one to lure the man upstairs with a promise of a good time.
    He just hadn’t planned for it to be Mark’s last good time.
    Rehab hadn’t been easy. He’d fought it viciously at first. Then when the place began to lock down around him so tight he couldn’t move, Rafe went subversive. There’d been a lot of denial. Even as he sat in the middle of a group of addicts with everyone singing their tales of woe, Rafe refused to believe he was one of the fallen. He’d made a mistake. Everyone did. He’d just be more careful next time: do less, drink more water, pay more attention. What happened in Los Angeles was a fluke, and Mark’s death, while unfortunate, couldn’t be laid down at Rafe’s door.
    Disgusted, he’d broken his sobriety pact in small transgressions, tiny bits of pot or X picked up from other patients. Then a blowup at group drove him over the wall, and he’d said fuck it. He was going to spend an evening as numbed up as he could, just to take the edge off of his brain. A few bribes here and there scored Rafe a large bottle of vodka and prescription weight-loss pills, and he’d been determined to pump it all into himself until he saw flying kittens.
    That got him a weekend in the hospital and an extra fourteen days tacked onto his sentence.
    He’d woken up breathing in his own vomit, facedown on the cold, hard floor and choking. His lungs weren’t functioning, too wet from the fluids he’d aspirated, and Rafe found himself staring straight into Death’s face.
    And he didn’t like what he’d seen.
    The Sinners guys had been kind, but Rafe’d noticed the slight hesitation in Damien’s eyes before they shook hands. When even a guy who’d been dead knows about someone’s burned bridges, there wasn’t much else Rafe could say. He’d wasted his life. To be fair, wasted was an understatement. Decimated came closer, leaving destroyed a distant second. He’d gathered it up like he’d done to the artwork in the hotel room and set it on fire. Unlike the impromptu bonfire, he’d burned his life until there was nothing left of it but ashes and the stink of regret.
    Something in the crowd shifted, and the world went still, leaving Rafe with only the beat of his heart in his ears and the sudden awareness that Quinn Morgan had walked into the coffee shop. Even through a sea of cops and musicians, Rafe knew Connor’s younger brother had come through the door.
    But then, he’d always had a thing for the Morgans’ changeling.
    Then, much like his mother’d done an hour before, Quinn Morgan slipped out of thin air and appeared a few feet away, looking right at him.
    And it was all Rafe could do not to whisper fucking