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adrenaline had waned. When the kid was alone in his dressing room, after the fans—and the women—left, Kenny would remind the singer that this was all he had, right there.
    All you have is your soul .
    He would tell the kid that it was never a good idea to make a deal with the devil.
    Kenny had made a deal with the devil only once in his lifetime and considered it worth it to keep one of his three sons out of hell’s reach.
    “We did the right thing,” his wife, Maggie, had told him firmly thirteen years earlier as Kenny steered the SUV down the thruway that led from New York to Virginia.
    The three boys—Chris, Nick and Jake—had all been asleep in the backseat by that point, the trauma of the past days and weeks having taken its toll on each of them.
    “I know we did.” He’d held her hand, the way he had for all the years they’d been together, with no way of knowing she’d be dead nine months later, the cancer spreading quickly and quietly in an effort to evade both of their second sights. “I wish we could do this legally. Adopt Jake and Nick.”
    That wasn’t possible. Jake had recently lost his stepfather—an abusive man who’d nearly killed him—and going through the proper channels would’ve taken too long. Sad to say, the boy was never missed in the city, his disappearance had merely lightened an overworked social worker’s case file.
    No, Jake would have a good home with them now. There was no guilt in what they’d done.
    But things with Nick were far more complicated.
    “They’re still ours,” she’d said. “The way it was meant to be. That’s all that matters now.”
    That had been the truth. Although only Chris was their biological son, Kenny and Maggie had become involved in Nick’s and Jake’s lives quickly. They’d just moved to New York so Kenny could work with a new producer and record label he’d been developing, and Chris had met the two boys who would soon become his brothers on his very first day of school.
    The Waldron family had been there all of two weeks when Jake’s stepfather had died. And things were horribly wrong for Nick too, so Kenny had to work fast to stop that boy from running away.
    It had taken only a moment of concentration before Kenny’s gift of second sight led him to Nick, found him on the platform of the train station, ready to go and yet unable to actually leave.
    Kenny had watched as Nick let three different trains go by before he’d gone to sit next to him on the wooden bench and silently handed him the papers he’d had a lawyer draw up earlier that same day.
    They weren’t adoption papers, but they were the key to Nick’s emancipation in so many different ways.
    “Is this what you want?” he’d asked. Even at fourteen, Nick had been devastatingly handsome, an heir to a throne and part of a family so cursed Kenny knew Nick would spend a lifetime trying to escape it if he’d stayed.
    “It’s what I want.”
    “There’s no going back.” Kenny’s stomach had lurched every time he thought of what kind of man, what kind of father could blithely agree to publicly declare his son missing, believed dead, in exchange for an inheritance.
    “I don’t want to go back. I’m never going back,” Nick had ground out fiercely.
    “Then sign. And you never have to,” Kenny had told him quietly, felt Nick’s green eyes pierce through his in a silent thank you , for the way out he’d have never been able to achieve on his own. At least not back then.
    After Maggie’s death, Kenny had been as inconsolable as his sons, barely remembered the first years, when Chris went quiet and refused to acknowledge his own gift of second sight, when Jake pushed a paper at him and told him he was joining the military at fifteen. When Nick and Chris had tried to take themselves so far over the edge that there’d almost been no turning back for either of them.
    He’d woken up when both of them were arrested for stealing cars on the same night—what had started