by Page,Selena
He stared into his drink, as if it were a gateway to the past. "I was found not guilty in the eyes of the law, but in the eyes of the Catholic Church? In the eyes of the magical community?" He laughed bitterly. "That was a different story altogether. They set penance for me, and I gave my life trying to make it right. It wasn’t about the life I took, Nia, but about the lives I saved."
"You saved many." She shook her head, knocking back a good swallow of brandy for emphasis or maybe for courage. "You found me, found my talent to use the magical tools you created. Things like these." She lifted her wrist, the glowing moonstones nestling against her flesh like a raised tattoo. "I don’t even have to use words or rituals to activate these. And we’ve used them to track down some seriously bad customers, the kinds of monsters that human jails can’t handle on their own. Christ, do you know what would have happened if we let humans try to imprison a vampire or a ghoul without this kind of binding?"
"Immaterial," he dismissed with a sip of his brandy. "I was given penance. I had to keep going, to keep saving, and I would know when I’d done enough. I would know when God forgave me. But as the years progressed and the blood on my hands increased, I knew I would never be forgiven."
She was on her feet in a blink, anger riding the brandy’s warmth. "You don’t know that," she snapped. "I’ve killed in the line of duty, too. God forgives. He always forgives those that are truly repentant. Don’t let those idiots claiming to be priests twist what you know damn well is right."
One of his eyebrows rose, and the sadness in his eyes transformed into brittle hardness. "That would require one to ask forgiveness first, wouldn’t it? I thought I had. Years and years I spent trying to find my salvation, that moment when I knew I could put down the badge and live my life. I thought it had come with Marta. I thought I had found a woman to love me unconditionally, who wanted to try and have a family. Less than a month of wedded bliss and she was dead. Another woman lying in a pool of her own blood, killed by an uncaring man who honestly didn’t have anything better to do."
"Killed by the man you now confess your sins to," she put in. "Sanchez murdered Marta on your own brother’s orders. He held the ceremonial knife that sacrificed her on that altar. After everything you’ve told me, how could you forgive him? If I’m to believe the rumors about you, you’ve killed for less."
"Because he forgave himself. He pays his penance for his actions. He is an ordained priest now, Nia. God has forgiven him, taken him into his service."
"Because he asked for forgiveness." She shook her head in disbelief.
Iowin shrugged. "It is not my place to say who God forgives and who He doesn’t."
She finished her drink, slamming the glass down hard enough to nearly crack it. "This is why I hate religion. He can forgive a cold-blooded murderer, but you don’t think He would ever forgive you."
"I don’t believe I’m ready to ask Him." He cut off her objections with an upraised hand. "This is not a theological debate, Nia. This is a conversation you asked me to have with you. I would return to that, if you wouldn’t mind. Marta’s death started a chain of events that would show me the steps I needed to take in order to ensure those I loved wouldn’t suffer anymore. I would make it my penance to keep everyone I loved safe. To do that, I needed Sean."
It was the same argument that led to their breakup in the first place, the same sick devotion to a brother that didn't care if Iowin lived or die. And that same loyalty to his family, to his blood, had been the very thing that had drawn her to him in the first place. Alynia dug her fingers into the leather armrests, alternating between wanting to slap him until all sense returned and wanting to walk away.
To be the first to walk away this time. To choose her life and her family over him, not the other way around. The redemption of Sean Tintreach was impossible. But the stubborn son of a bitch that was the man she loved refused to see it. He had found comfort in another woman as she had found comfort in another man.
Mistakes and sins all around. Too many and too twisted to sort through, to figure out to whom which belonged and why.
The cop in her couldn’t sit still any longer. If he started to confess the Tintreach Empire without being Mirandized. . .
"Stop. Just stop now. I don’t want to hear anymore, especially if it has to do with your claiming the seat as head monster of the Tintreach Empire." She scrubbed her hands over her face. "You need a lawyer."
"Do I?"
"There’s only one way Sean would’ve handed over his empire, Iowin, and we both know that." She lifted her head, meeting his gaze. "Did you kill Sean Tintreach? Did you kill your own brother?"
He never even blinked. "Yes."
"Goodbye, Iowin. Get a good l--"
"Sit down, Alynia."
"No."
Lightning cracked through the sky again, the power in the massive house flickering and popping into silence. On reflex, she reached for the amulet around her neck. She lifted her right hand, wove it in a circle in the air and whispered a word of power. The beads tightened on her wrist, a grunt of pain escaping her lips.
No magelights for her. No magic to help her. No escape from what she was hearing, either. Only the angry glow of the beads as they dug into her flesh and reminded her how helpless she was. She was alone in the dark with Iowin, with a confessed murderer. With a man her heart ached to redeem even as her logical mind wanted nothing more than to run away screaming.
Iowin sighed, and in that faint illumination, she watched him replicate her hand motion. A glowing disk of white light answered his call, shining over them both. A simple spell for him and a power so beyond her reach at the moment that it might as well have been a star.
"You cannot leave yet," he whispered.
"I can go wherever the hell I want, Iowin."
"And your answers?"
She shook her head, turning away from him and heading in the general direction of the doors. "Not worth it anymore. None of this was worth it."
"Was I worth it?"
That brought her up short, made her spin around to face him. "Once. Once I would have died for you, Iowin. Once I . . . I even loved you. But you killed your own brother. You. I can’t even begin to get into the reasons why this has gone too far."
"Was his death really that horrible?"
"God, how can you say that? He was your brother."
"He was a murderer, a black warlock. And he had to be stopped," he snapped. Finally some kind of anger, some kind of emotion pushing through the stone in his chest pretending to be a heart. "The evidence would have shown self-defense on this one, too, if I ever let it come to light. But this was a magical death, Alynia. I used magic to kill him, to stop him. It was the only way. And as you put it, there is no human court or cage to bind my crime. I enjoyed killing him, for the lives he destroyed with his drugs, his gangs murdering with abandon. I stood over his body, watching his soul shred under my spell, and took vengeance for all the things he’d done. For all the wrongs I could never right. And do you know what I found?"
She shook her head again and then finally understood. "You found there was no ‘enough’ and no end to the ‘penance.’ There was always another asshole lining up to take Sean’s place. So you did, instead."
"Yes."
She raked her fingers through her hair, trying to make sense of it all. "But why? If you hated Sean and his empire so much, why become one of them?"
A bittersweet chuckle danced between the lightning strikes, between the shadows of past and present crashing together. "Did I become one of them, or did they become one of me?"
She stopped. Just stopped moving, stopped feeling, stopped fucking thinking. It was all falling together now in a way that made her nauseous. God, why hadn’t she seen this from the beginning? How the hell had she missed this?
"You reformed the Empire." She sank into a nearby chair, mind spinning out possibilities, and always circling back to the same conclusion. "You cleaned them up, changed the way business was performed. You got rid of
the magical drugs in favor of the mundane crap."
Again, he nodded slowly. "Taking over the Tintreach Empire was a simple matter after claiming Sean’s fortune. Money gave me the mobility and the means to purchase certain loyalties. What I couldn’t purchase . . ." He trailed off, looking deep into her eyes. "Well, if you live by the gun, you die by it. New rules were issued by my hand. No more selling drugs and guns or anything to kids. No more collateral damage of drive-by shootings. My soldiers were to be smart, educated, and deadly accurate. One way or the other, we were going to clean up the streets of Miami. We were going to make the city safe."
"Mercenaries. You turned the Tintreach Empire to mercenaries."
He had the audacity to shrug fractionally, slowing walking toward her. "My father and brother’s deaths taught me one thing, Nia. The system is broken. Every monster I put away bred ten more. Every monster that escaped on a technicality from human justice killed ten more people. I had to do something. Mercenaries hired for foreign conflicts and retrieval of ransomed individuals pay far more than drugs or illegal weapons. And it’s also clean and legal money in America."
"Which is why we couldn’t pin anything on you."
He smiled again, and it never reached his eyes. "Exactly. Once an enemy left America’s shores, they were mine for the taking."
Nothing he said could be pinned on him now, the bitter truth of it like ashes in her mouth. The magical community didn’t blink at Sean Tintreach’s death. They had applauded it, really. And had shunned an already shunned man for his methods. It was a win-win for everyone in that regard. What she could arrest him on, she had no proof to back up. It was his word against hers, and his money meant more lawyers, which in turn meant he would win. Ah, the joys of the mundane American capitalist society. He who has the gold makes the rules, or something like that.
"There is more, Alynia, so much more I want to tell you. But now is not the time."
Was there ever a great time to listen to the horrific acts of the man she loved? Probably not. Most especially not when he’d lobbed bombshell after bombshell at her heart, the explosions leaving her emotional landscape devastated. Numbly, she watched him strip his jacket off and toss it against a chair. Her gray eyes were riveted to his fingers as he undid the heavy silver cufflinks, and then the buttons of his silk shirt one at a time. That three-pronged lightning bolt glittered against his skin, permanently etched above his heart in silver.
He knelt before her, eyes shining with a light all their own. A light she remembered too well.
"Why?" she whispered, unable to turn away. One hand lifted, tracing over his tattoo, feeling the hot metal of it pulsing with the promise of magic. "Why tell me? Why me? Why after all this time?"
"You weren’t ready until now."
"Ready for what?"
His hands slid along her knees, and her eyes widened as he pushed them apart, yanking her forward until she was straddling him. Her hands landed on his shoulders to steady herself, her breath heaving in and out of her chest in fear and yet . . . God, was it true? Did she really want him? After everything he said, after how off-balance she was, did she really want him?
"This. And more. So much more."
That was all he said before his mouth was on hers in a crushing, soul-devouring kiss.
Chapter 5
She ate at his mouth in a play of hot tongue and firm, hard lips. Inwardly, she was screaming, telling herself not to do this. If she let him have her, it was all over. She’d lose all credibility as an officer of the law if this ever came out. Every defense attorney in the world would use it to discredit evidence she uncovered in any case she’d work from this point on.
So why was she still kissing him? Why were her hands sliding over his bare shoulders as if she couldn’t get enough of him?
Because she was human, that was why. Because she had wanted him from the first day she’d seen him, when she’d been assigned on a case and he was just a detective and she a rookie fresh from the Academy. Because she’d married the wrong man, and by the time she realized it, he’d married Marta. Because his power washed across hers with each sweep of his tongue, tunneled through the binding and stabbed into the core of her soul. Her body ignited, pulsing in time with her heartbeat. The beads on her wrist tightened of their own accord, fighting against the surge of magic in her blood. It hurt, the beads biting into her skin until blood welled in shiny scarlet droplets and turned the moonstones a dark and angry red.
His mouth left hers, trailed across her palm and found those crimson beads, his tongue lapping at the length of them. Tasting her power and bringing a moan from the tips of her toes upward. His heartbeat appeared in her mind, a ghostly echo of her own as the power surged higher and higher. And she needed it. God, how she needed it. She reached for it, gliding along her blood and into his soul, submerging herself in his power. The world exploded into colors, some for which words had yet to be invented. Colors no normal human could see. Her mouth burned against his throat, his arm wrapped around her waist like steel molded to her frame. And his tongue danced across the beads, soft words she couldn’t understand whispered deep in his throat.
It was so right, this moment. Stars in heaven, this was what she remembered and more.
The beads vibrated and twisted at his command, writhing on her flesh like a thing alive. Lightning struck again, this time somewhere against the house, and the beads exploded, flying from her skin and turning to ash. Power, raw and untamed floated in the air above them, the remnant of the artifact. Iowin pulled that power into his open palm. She had a second to wonder what he was doing, and a half-second for her eyes to widen, before he pushed that handful of iridescent power directly into her chest.
Her head snapped back, eyes rolling wildly as pleasure and pain assaulted her senses anew. Magic smashed into her body, great sucking gasps of air filling what felt like atrophied lungs. And still the magic wasn’t finished with either of them, pouring through their bond. His cry echoed hers, his body pushing her to the floor, one arm holding her close, the other bracing against the tiles.
"Alynia," he gasped her name. "Christ, Alynia, what we are together. Do you feel it?"
She had no words for him. No thoughts to combat the feelings inside, from what she knew was the truth. Five years had passed and she still wanted this man like oxygen. That was the whole reason she’d taken over his team. Because if she couldn’t have him, she could at least have a part of his world. Day in and day out she surrounded herself with his supposed crimes. She stared at his picture when walking into her office--his former office. She pushed herself into his mindset, trying to figure out what his next move was going to be, secretly hoping to catch a glimpse of him. To have him catch a glimpse of her, too.
Broken. She was so utterly broken.
"You knew," she half-gasped, half-accused as his mouth returned to its slow torture at her throat. "You knew all this time."
His reply was to unhook the front of her pants, the zipper parting with a casual slowness that took forever. And then his hand slid inside, fingers a feather-touch across her sex. It made her breath catch, eyes closing at the overload of sensations.
God, she was really going to do this, wasn’t she? She was going to have him.
Iowin’s hand disappeared and she found herself jerked to her feet. His mouth hit hers again as if he couldn’t get enough, and the world transformed into a dizzying display as he pulled her rapidly into an elevator. Part of her brain realized she hadn’t noticed an elevator before. It must have been concealed, and even that was a passing thought. He pushed her up against the wall, ripped the leather jacket from her arms, and pulled her T-shirt over her head.
The moment the shirt cleared her head, he twisted it in his hands, effectively pinning her arms. One free hand moved down her throat, dancing over her chest until he got to her bra. His jade eyes darkened with desire, his hand dipping inside to capture her left breast. Her head snapped back, spine bowing as little jolts of pleasure spiked through her. Thu
mb and forefinger caught her nipple, rolling it until she was panting.
Alynia tried to free her arms to touch him back, but he wasn’t having any of it. He pushed the bra up and replaced his fingers with his mouth. The world exploded in tiny sparks, and when her vision cleared, she was laying beneath him on the largest bed she’d ever seen. Her bra gone, her T-shirt somehow looped around her wrists, tying them behind her back.
She lay prone beneath him, and it was the hottest thing she could ever imagine.
That thought whispered across her soul, up into the part of her that held his heartbeat. He paused in the act of unbuttoning his pants, staring down at her. "Did you hear that?"
She blinked, trying to push enough sensation away to put thought into words. "I . . .I didn’t say."
You didn’t have to. I felt that thought.
Her eyes widened. Was that . . . did that come from him, within her mind?
His laughter danced along her nerve endings until she arched her back, mentally begging him to stop and to keep going at the same time. The ghostly mark of his heartbeat twisted in the back of her mind, transforming into some kind of sigil? Some kind of ward?
Iowin!
I’m here, Nia. I’ve always been here. Waiting for you. Waiting for this. Stars and suns, I couldn’t leave without you. I had to be here. We had to have a chance. Regardless of what has happened before.
And he surrendered the icy shields of his soul. She saw him watching her from a distance nearly all the time they’d known one another. Felt his anger and jealousy when she and Mark had married. Saw his sorrow when she and Mark had parted ways. And after Iowin left their team, he always watched out for her. Diverting the worst criminals from her path or providing anonymous tips to lead her to the right man.