“That’s a yes, she’ll like you more,” said Eliana. “She’s very easily swayed by food, in case you couldn’t tell. If you bring her chocolate, watch out.”
“Ah, an easy woman.” Alexi’s smile grew wider. “My absolute favorite.”
“I think the entire world is well aware of your fondness for easy women, Alexi,” Mel said dryly.
“On that note, I’m leaving,” said Eliana, rising from the bed. She looked to Alexi. “Where’s—”
“Godzilla Romeo is on the phone with someone downstairs, Butterfly.”
“How did you know I wasn’t asking about the doctor?”
He cut his gaze to hers, and his smile grew ironic. “Please. I didn’t get where I am in life by being clueless. But speaking of the doctor, will you send him in if you’re going? He’s just outside the door.”
She nodded, thought it best not to respond, and then blew Mel a kiss and walked to the door.
“Godzilla Romeo?” she heard Mel repeat as she left the room.
To which Alexi sighed and replied, “I know. There’s really no accounting for some people’s taste.”
She found Demetrius looking out a window in the vast, empty dining room on the main floor, gazing in silence at the spectacular view of the city beyond the glass. When she entered, he turned and looked at her.
And his face transformed.
It made her feel lighter, seeing the way his hard, sensuous mouth softened and curved, the way his eyes, settling on her face, lit up. His entire aspect changed as if he were bathed in sudden starlight, and his look of such obvious hope made her feel like she might float right out of her shoes. She wanted to curl up in that look and bask in it, like a cat in the sun.
To manage it, she bit the inside of her mouth.
Orgasms do not equal trust, Eliana. Don’t be a fool.
“Interesting outfit.”
She regarded the white silk robe he wore that was at least three sizes too small for him. It barely reached his knees, just barely managed to stay closed in front with a tie that was a little too strained, threatening to give at any moment and burst wide open, letting Demetrius in all his naked glory spill out.
“Clothes were wet. They’re in the dryer.” His smile turned into a smirk. “Pretty boy didn’t have anything that would fit me, so he gave me this.”
“Oh? No spare sets of giant black clothing hanging around in his closet? Strange.” She walked closer, slowly, a lifetime’s worth of ambivalence in every step.
He grinned. “No size seventeen shoes, either.”
She rolled her eyes. But now she was within arm’s reach, and he took advantage of it. He stretched out one long arm, caught hers, and pulled her against his body. He pressed his face to her neck, and they stood there like that for a moment, feeling each other’s heartbeats, their arms wrapped around one another, silent and still.
In another life, she thought, heart clenching, how I could have loved you. How beautiful it all could have been.
He murmured, “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“I’m thinking…” She sighed. No. Not going to go there. “Mel’s awake. She insulted me right off the bat, so I think she’s going to be okay.”
She felt his smile against her neck. “That’s good. And you? How are you?”
Confused. Conflicted. Worried. Unsettled. Unhinged.
She sighed again and pulled away. “I’m fine. But I have to go out for a while. There’s someone I have to go visit.”
He stiffened. He pulled back to stare at her, and his eyes, so soft and open only moments before, grew wary. “Someone? Who? Where? I’m coming with you.”
“No, you’re not. He’s a friend—”
“Another friend.” His voice had dropped dangerously low.
“Not like that, Demetrius. He helped me escape from the assassins—”
“What!” D hissed, suddenly livid and terrifying, even in the silly white robe. He gripped her upper arms. “When did that happen? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“We haven’t exactly been doing much talking,” she said sarcastically, but he cut her off.
“You can’t seriously think I’m letting you leave this house while they’re still out there. We haven’t figured out what we’re going to do yet—”
She yanked away from him. Anger blazed to life inside her, and the confusion she’d felt only moments before turned to hot, crackling indignation.
“We? There is no we, Demetrius. Just because we—” she waved her hand in the air, skipping the obvious, “doesn’t mean I have to ask your permission to do anything.”
His face hardened. A low, sinister growl rumbled through his chest. And just like that, they were back to where they’d been for years: enemies.
She scowled at him. “Don’t think you’re going to growl me into submission, either. I don’t belong to you—”
“Yes, you do!”
Suddenly, he was in her face. His arms wrapped around her, pinning hers behind her back. His hands encircled her wrists, hard. He stared down at her, enormous and frightening, his eyes burning with a dark, savage fury. “You do belong to me. You are mine and I am yours, and there is nothing on this Earth that can ever change that! Stop fighting it!”
“Let me go!” She trembled with fury and tried to break away, but there was no release from the iron bands of his arms.
“We’re bonded, baby girl, whether you like it or not, so you better get used to the idea.”
Her breath huffed out like she’d been punched in the stomach. “Bonded! You’re taking a hell of a lot for granted, Bellator!”
He put his mouth next to her ear and said deliberately, “Don’t make me put you over my knee.”
Because she hated, absolutely hated what the thought of that did to her, what his voice and strength and heat did to her, how weak he made her feel, she froze. Very, very quietly, she said, “And don’t make me remind you why we are in this situation in the first place.”
He jerked.
Still with that deadly softness, she said, “If you think we’re past the fact that I found you standing over my dead father with a gun, you’re wrong. If you think that just because we had sex I’ve forgotten the past three years and everything my people have been through, you’re wrong. And if you think that I would allow myself to trust someone who won’t even give me the courtesy of an explanation, you are very, very wrong.”
A tremor ran through him. His hands around her wrists loosened, and she broke away and stared at him. He was frozen, staring back at her without expression. All emotion had drained from his face, his eyes. He looked dead. When he spoke his voice was clipped, hard.
“You read your father’s journal. You know what Silas is—”
“Yes, I do. But what are you? Let’s just get it all out now, Demetrius, why don’t we?” Trying to speak over the fierce booming of her heartbeat, she hurried on. “Because I for one am sick of secrets. I’m sick of lies. I’m sick of not knowing the truth. You’ve helped me, you’ve helped Mel, but what about the rest of it? How do I really know what your endgame is, if there is one? If you won’t tell me the truth, how can I ever trust you?”
He stood there staring at her in silence for what felt like forever, his face flat, an icy stillness growing between them that felt like being slowly submerged in a sea of inky black water. Her body and blood were freezing from the feet up.
Finally, in Latin, slowly and deliberately, gazing into her eyes, he said, “Your life before mine. Your needs before mine. Your desires and hopes and dreams before mine. I pledge you my life, and upon my death I pledge the service of my everlasting soul. There shall be no others before you, now, until the end of all time. On my honor, I swear it.”
Her mouth fell open. She stared at him, stunned.
Ritual words. Bonding words. Words she’d only ever heard spoken in a ceremony that involved hands painted with henna and fastened together with silk ties, crowns of rosemary and candles and the exchange of rings.
&nb
sp; And his face still so flat, but his voice now was pure agony, reverberating with everything he wouldn’t allow his face to reveal. It was awful, almost too painful to hear.
But he wasn’t finished yet. He said, “You evidently are not bonded to me, but I am bonded to you. That is permanent. That is forever. I have no endgame except to love you, Eliana. And protect you, and keep you safe. It’s up to you if you believe that or not, but the truth of it remains.”
She swallowed, feeling like something very large and heavy had fallen on her head. Her heart didn’t know whether to stop or pound or explode, so it settled on a horrible kind of twisting that felt like an animal in death throes trapped inside her chest.
“Tell me what really happened that night,” she demanded, her voice harsh. “If you love me like you say you do, tell me what happened and let’s be done with it, once and for all.”
Eerie, the look he gave her then. His flat expression contorted into something truly dreadful to behold, something she knew all too well from years of avoiding it on her own face in the mirror: desolation.
She waited, she held her breath, and it felt like the air all around them held its breath, too, everything suspended like motes in the sunlight. Like her heartbeat.
But he didn’t speak. He held his silence and the raw, barren look on his face didn’t change, but no sound came out of his mouth and that was almost too much for her to bear. In that moment, she felt like something inside of her died.
She took a step back. Another.
He said, “I’ve never lied to you. Give me your trust and I can prove it.”
Her laugh was a bitter, ugly thing that she might have been ashamed of if she weren’t so choked with the ashes of her hope. “If you were in my shoes—if the roles were reversed—would you trust you?”
He stared at her, unmoving, miserable. His mouth twisted. He whispered, “No.”
She closed her eyes and briefly wondered how long it would take before her ravaged heart just decided to stop beating, bereft as it was of any reason to keep on.
“Finally.” She opened her eyes and looked at him. “Finally an honest answer.”
Then she Shifted to Vapor and left her clothes in a pile at his feet, leaking air.
The problem with Shifting to Vapor and leaving all your clothes in a heap on the floor is what happens when you Shift back.
In other words, if you’re anywhere except a nude beach or alone, people are going to stare.
Eliana crept, as slowly as she could without being noticed, over the smooth plaster ceiling of the hospital corridor. Nurses and doctors passed unawares beneath her as she flowed silently forth, navigating around buzzing light fixtures, trying to be as unobtrusive as a small cloud of mist slinking along a rough ceiling possibly can. She passed the visitors’ area and the information desk and swept into an elevator with a hugely pregnant woman holding the hand of a small boy.
Stretched thin as a breath of air, she hovered against the metal fixture on the roof of the car that held a row of florescent lights. The boy—towheaded, barely a toddler—looked up and smiled. To her horror, he pointed and said to his mother, “Thmoke.”
“There’s no smoke, honey.” The mother didn’t even look up. The elevator doors slid shut, and the car began a smooth climb. But the child would not be dissuaded.
“Thmoke!” he insisted, and stomped a foot. “Thmoke!”
Eliana shrank slowly to one corner.
The mother sighed—the heavy, defeated, I-never-signed-up-for-this-shit sigh of motherhood—dug through a large handbag slung over her shoulder, and produced a set of brightly colored plastic rings on a chain with bells. She dangled it over the boy’s head.
“Here, sweetie. Play with this.”
When the child snatched the rings from her hand and began to chew on them, instantly forgetting his fascination with the cloud of mist that was Eliana, she relaxed, profoundly grateful for short attention spans. The doors opened on the fourth floor, and mother and child disappeared down an empty corridor.
She took form for a millisecond as woman and pressed the button for floor six, then Shifted back to Vapor, drifted back up against the ceiling, and rode the rest of the way alone.
Once on Gregor’s floor, she found the nurses’ break room without too much trouble, and luck, for once, was on her side. Someone had left their uniform in a plastic dry cleaning bag slung over a chair.
Eliana smiled. She wouldn’t have to visit Gregor naked after all.
“Time for your sponge bath, Mr. MacGregor.”
Gregor opened his eyes, saw a somber Eliana in a nurse’s uniform and white hat perched on the metal rail at the foot of his bed, and wondered how a man of thirty-eight could survive a bullet to the chest but later die of heart failure from the simple pleasure of seeing a sexy woman in tight, fantasy-inducing clothing, mere feet away.
“Sweet Jesus,” he muttered, eyeing her. “Saint Nick was feeling generous this year.”
She tugged on the collar of the uniform, which appeared to be a size too small; she was bursting out in all the right places. “Better than a lump of coal in your stocking?”
He grinned. “I’ve got a lump all right—but sweetheart, it’s not in my stocking.”
This earned him a smile, small and wry. She slid off the railing and took a seat in the ugly green chair next to his bed. She had her hair tucked up under the hat, but a few messy strands escaped, blue-black and telling. He glanced at the door, at the two armed police officers still stationed outside.
“Not safe,” he murmured, and then glanced back at her. “Probably not too smart, either.”
“How could I stay away? You underestimate the power of your charm, Gregor. Also, you overestimate the intelligence of our friends, there.” She shot a dour look to the door. “They didn’t even look at my face when I came in.”
Gregor dropped his gaze to the low V of the white uniform, perusing the lush landscape of cleavage presented therein. “Can you blame the poor bastards?”
She sighed, but somehow it seemed unrelated to him.
“A nice rack can topple empires, princess. It’s just the way we’re built.”
Her look was one of pained disbelief. She said simply, “Men.”
He held his hand out. She took it. They looked at each other for a moment in silence while the television droned on softly in the background. It hung on the wall opposite his bed, and he used it as white noise to block all the sounds of sick people coughing and crying and calling for the nurses, for more morphine and better food. A hospital seemed to him one of the most depressing places imaginable. He hated it, but prison—he knew as a fact—would be even worse, so he was milking his stay for all it was worth.
“How are you?” Her gaze dropped to his chest, to the bandage visible above the neck of his blue gown which was changed every twelve hours by the lovely Lily.
“Been better,” he said matter-of-factly. “I’d forgotten how much gunshot wounds hurt.”
Her brows rose. “Forgotten? Am I taking that to mean you’ve been shot before?”
He made a dismissive noise and waved his free hand. “In my line of work, it’s par for the course. Your little friends, though—that was a new one. Can’t say I’d like to see them again anytime soon.”
“I’m sorry.” Her mouth twisted. “Had I known it would all turn out like this—”
“No apologies, princess. My life’s been a wild ride, and one I wouldn’t change a minute of. Including knowing you.” He reconsidered a moment. “Although if you want to buy me a new Ferrari, I wouldn’t object.” His voice soured. “Not that I’ll be needing it in prison.”
“Prison?”
At her look of confusion, he said, “Agent Doe. The German. He came to see me.”
Her fingers beneath his tensed. She whispered, “He’s not dead?”
“He is very much undead,” Gregor confirmed.
“And?”
“And you were right. They know about you. About your kind.”
<
br /> Her black eyes burned. “How much?”
He considered that. “Enough to be problematic.”
“What did he say? What did he want?”
“He wanted me to fill in the holes in their information. He offered me a deal: squeal and stay out of jail.”
She dropped his hand and sat up rigidly in the chair, which he took to mean she assumed he had filled in the holes in their information. He glowered at her. “Seriously, princess—that’s insulting.”
She stood and began to pace, chewing her thumbnail, throwing worried looks at the door. She pulled the fabric curtain that hung from a rod on the ceiling around his bed, blocking the view of the door. “Tell me. Tell me everything.”
“Come here,” he ordered, pointing at the bed. “Pacing women make me nervous.”
Surprisingly, she complied without comment. Once perched on the edge of the bed, she took his offered hand and stared down at it.
He said quietly, “He—his organization—wants to round you up, confine you. The word zoos was mentioned.”
Her head snapped up with a gasp. Her eyes were wide and horrified. If they grew any larger, they would devour her face.
“He said his organization was above the police, and I heard him call someone. He asked for the chairman, identified himself as Thirteen, of Section Thirty. Does that mean anything to you?”
Pale and trembling, she shook her head.
He squeezed her hand. “I should have given you more guns. I have a feeling you’ll be needing them.”
It took her a long time to answer him. When she finally did speak, her voice was uneven and low. She spoke to their joined hands without looking at him. “Tell them to look in the catacombs. Tell them that’s where I said we lived—in the catacombs and the old abbey near the Sacré-Coeur in Montmartre—the DuMarne. We’re gone now, so it won’t matter, but there will be evidence we were there. It should be enough to keep you out of jail, make them think you’re cooperating. And I think…” She lifted her gaze to his, and it was utterly without hope. “I think this will be the last time we’ll see each other.”
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