Damon’s hand tangled in my hair.
“I should have…”
Lifting my head, I pressed my fingers to his mouth. “We can’t undo it. It’s already done. I’m learning to live with it—or trying to. If we have any chance at all of making it, Damon, you’ll have to do the same. And that means we can’t constantly play the maybe game, the should-have game. It’s done.”
He caught my wrist, kissed my fingers, his gaze intent on mine.
Silence fell between us.
“I love you.” He reached up and laid his hand on my cheek. The emotion churning in his eyes was enough to break me open. “I have to tell you—you didn’t want to hear it before and I won’t say it again after this, but I’m sorry for what I did. I hate myself for not being there.”
Slowly, I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding.
“Okay.” I nodded. “Okay. Now…we just…can we just move on from here?”
His arms came around me, tight, so tight I could barely breathe. But I didn’t complain.
“This is what I missed,” I whispered. “Being like this. With you.”
It shouldn’t have been a surprise, the nightmares coming on the way they did, not then. Even though some part of me was vaguely aware that I was still in my bed, even vaguely aware that Damon held me, I could feel it pulling at me.
They’d been getting worse lately. Not that I had them more often, but Jude’s voice was getting stronger in my head. It seemed like the easier it was for me to push his touch away in the day, the harder it was to break free in my dreams.
I could hear him.
Sometimes I thought I could even smell him, feel him.
He’s not coming for you.
Jude might be in a box for the next fifty years, but in my head, he was still free. No. He stood right there, beside my bed and as I tried to roll away, he reached out and tangled a hand in my hair.
I froze, the memory of all the pain rising back up. Teeth sharper than blades shredding my skin. Blood pumping out of me. His body ripping into mine. Bones breaking.
Broken already?
“You’re not here! ”
I shouted it at him. Or tried.
He smoothed my hair back, his voice oddly gentle. Oh, Kit, he murmured, his voice kind. I’ll always be here. Don’t you know that?
And then he drove his fists into me, my face, my belly, my ribs. Bones broke under the blows and I tasted my own blood yet again.
Nobody will save you.
I broke free, because even in dreams, I always do. I could see the blinding white as I hurtled toward the chasm. Snow stung my skin, my hair blinded me.
Even that will not free you, little warrior. Little weakling.
The cliff lay ahead, the dark abyss a promise.
The only way to escape is to die—
To be free, all I had to do was jump. The gorge was right there. I could see it, all but taste the oblivion I’d find once I jumped.
That’s it, darling Kit. Just jump…just jump, Jude crooned in my ear.
“Kit!”
Hands closed around my arms.
I swung out. I had to—
A roar shattered the cold air and then—
“Wake up.” Warm, hard lips pressed to mine. A familiar scent flooded my head. “Wake up, baby girl.”
“You’re not here,” I whispered. “Not here…he said you wouldn’t come.”
Hot hands caught my face. “Open your eyes, Kit. I did come. We all came.”
Damon’s mouth pressed to mine, the taste of him shocking me out of that weird twilight sleep. Jerking back, I stared at him, breath sawing in and out of my lungs.
A dream.
Just a dream.
“Damon.” I started to shiver.
He pulled me in close, but even the heat of him wasn’t enough to warm me. “You’re okay,” he whispered. “You’re safe.”
I clung to him, waiting for the echoes of the dream to fade. Waiting for the feel of him to fade. In the back of my mind, Jude lingered, almost like he lived inside my head.
Son of a bitch, that had been a bad one.
That nauseating reality of what that might mean left me wanting to puke and I turned my face into his chest. I shivered and Damon stroked his hand up my back. “It’s over,” he whispered.
Was it?
How could something that felt that real be over? I could still feel the bruises, the ache of broken bones, the lingering pain between my legs. I could still taste the blood and feel the biting cold from when I’d torn out into the snow.
“Come back to me,” Damon murmured, his lips brushing over my brow.
I huddled against him. Under my cheek, Damon’s chest was hard and warm, rising and falling with every breath he took. I spread my hand wide against his skin, the inky black of his tattoo so dark under my hand.
“Sorry,” I muttered. I hated this, how vulnerable—how raw I still felt. “Shit. I hate this. I hate it—”
“Don’t.” His hand tangled in my hair as he spoke the word against my temple. His voice was low, raw, like he had to force it out. His chest shuddered on a ragged breath and then he spoke again, “We all have nightmares. Don’t apologize for yours.”
“It’s…” I squeezed my eyes closed, focused on the beat of his heart. “It’s not just the nightmares. It just…Damon, these feel…” I stopped, shook my head. I wasn’t explaining this in front of him. I needed to talk to somebody, yes. But not Damon. Not now. “I can’t explain it.”
His hand smoothed down my back, gripped my hip. “Try.”
Of course he wouldn’t just let it go. But there was all sorts of wrong I could detail without lying. Blowing out a sigh, I forced myself to open my eyes, staring out into the dim room. “They won’t stop. If the nightmares don’t stop, maybe I’ll never feel like me. If they’d just stop…”
I let that one fear out. It was a true fear, one that choked me, haunted me. Even as it left me, I wanted to pull it back. Would he even understand?
“You’re going to beat this,” he said when my voice trailed off. “You’re too strong not to.”
Closing my eyes, I turned my face back into his chest. It seems like he almost always understood. A sigh shuddered out of me.
“What scares you?”
It came out of me without me realizing I even wanted to know.
His odd silence had me looking up but his gaze fell away from mine.
I stroked my index finger over his lower lip and waited.
A sigh rumbled out of him and he looked back at me, caught my wrist. “A lot of things. I’ve got my own nightmares, Kit. Losing you—I can’t tell you how many times I’ve woken up remembering the nights you were missing, how it felt to see you on that cliff. I relive it over and over. And there’s…”
He stopped, looked away.
“There’s what?”
Now he did look at me. “I can’t even remember a lot of it. There are nightmares, but they started when I was a kid. Back when I was too young to remember.”
Something clicked. It’s the story of me…what put me on the road that made me what I am—
The tattoos…
“Does this have anything to do with your family?”
A shudder fell across his eyes. “You see too much sometimes.” Then he pressed his brow to mine. “I don’t know.”
Before I could even ask, he pressed his thumb to my mouth. “There aren’t any answers. Chang found me—I was maybe four or five. He’d been out hunting with his kin, smelled…decay. Me. I was close to dead. I was too young, too weak to tell him anything. I have no idea. I’d been alone so long—he figured the food had run out a few weeks before. The water supply had dried up a few days earlier. If I would have left, I might have been okay, could have been found sooner. But I wouldn’t…”
The words trailed off.
“You wouldn’t leave.”
He looked back at me. There was a haunted look in his eyes, one I’d never seen before. “I couldn’t.
Chang told me he had to drag me out of there, even as weak as I was. As sick as I was. I kept—”
He stopped, eyes closing. When he looked back at me, long moments had passed and suddenly, I didn’t want to know. “He thinks it must have been my father. The body was too decayed for him to tell—Chang said he must have been dead for months. There wasn’t anybody else there.”
“You were alone there for months.”
His gaze slid away. “We lived in the mountains. Sometimes I remember that. Mountains, with the sun rising up over them. I can remember the mists rising up as the sun rose. There were caves, and trees, and paths we’d walk.”
His lashes fell down, hiding his eyes. “We were in a cave. That’s where he found me. The body was in the main cavern—they were man-made. Like somebody had cut them out of the rock. There was a little room…Chang said he’d found the remains of supplies, food up there. That’s where I was. With my father.”
There was nothing to say to that.
I wrapped my arms around him. He tucked his head against my breasts and just held me.
“I understand nightmares, Kit. I’ve had almost forty years to come to grips with mine. Yours are still raw and you remember them all. They don’t make you weak…they’re just part of who you are.” His lips skimmed across my skin as he spoke.
A sigh shuddered out of me and I lay against him.
Moments passed, one hand sliding up and down my back while the other flexed on my hip, kneading the skin there.
As the tension slowly drained out of him, I curled one arm around his neck. Desperate to chase away the dark memories—both his and mind—I stroked my fingers up and down his skin as I said, “Forty years, huh? You’re an old man, Damon.”
A grunt escaped him and then he rolled.
“That a fact?” he asked as he tucked me beneath him.
It was still dark. Morning hadn’t even kissed the horizon, but I didn’t need light to see him. Something that might have been the first edge of humor lit his eyes as he threaded his fingers through my hair.
“Probably too old for me.” I pretended to mull it over. “Geez, you’re like…eighteen or nineteen years older, practically.”
“Give or take, hard to say since nobody knows exactly how old I was when Chang found me.” He caught my thigh in his hand. I gasped as he settled against me. His mouth found mine. “Do I feel too old now?”
I couldn’t say anything as he drove inside me.
Instead I just wrapped my arms around him.
It wasn’t a bad way to chase away the nightmares—mine or his.
Dawn came sooner than I liked.
I drifted back into a twilight sleep, although I don’t think Damon did.
I didn’t rest much longer. As those faint rays of dawn crept up along the horizon, my body came to completely wakefulness. Get up, Kit. No more sleep for you.
I was warm lying there, Damon’s arm around my waist, his scent surrounding me, the heavy weight of his thigh pinning mine to the bed. Turning my face into his neck, I breathed him in, tried to remember the last time I’d felt this…whole.
It had been months. Too many months.
In a few more weeks, it would be a year. My throat tightened. Pushing that thought away, I squeezed my eyes closed and lay there another moment.
But that peaceful, easy feeling was gone.
My belly twisted into a tight, hot knot and my mind was…buzzing. I was buzzing, I realized. I went to twist away and Damon’s arm shifted, freeing me. I slid him a look from the corner of my eye, saw him studying me from under his lashes.
There was an intense look on his face.
He reached out and trailed a finger down my arm as he watched me.
I bent over him, pressed my mouth to his—hard and quick before I rolled out of bed. I would have liked to linger, but…
There was something nagging me, something in the back of my brain that wouldn’t let me.
Damon must have recognized the look because he rolled out of bed with feline, easy grace, a resigned expression on his face.
Unable to resist, I said, “You move pretty well for a man of your advanced years.”
“Keep it up, smart-ass, and whatever has you so twitchy just might have to wait.” There was a gleam in his eyes.
It made my belly burn and I almost went to him.
It felt…good. I felt good. I almost felt like me.
But I turned away, crossing the bedroom to my dresser. It was the old fashioned kind—a lot of people had gone to the built-in organizational units that took up less room, but I liked stuff. Came from too many years of not having stuff. The old dresser had been warped and needed a lot of love and work. Sanding, painting, refinishing—things I’d had to research and teach myself, but I liked the way it looked.
I wasn’t even able to drag clothes out of my dresser before the phone rang.
For a split second, the sound of the Imperial March froze my blood.
Justin.
It wasn’t just my blood that froze, either.
It was everything. Damon didn’t breathe, I didn’t breathe and that odd buzzing in my head went silent.
Then life lurched back into rhythm and I had my phone in hand before I even recalled moving.
“Colbana.”
He didn’t even bother with a greeting. “You going to be ready to roll?”
I looked over at Damon. He sat on the edge of the bed, staring at me with grim intensity.
“Yeah. You figure out where we’re needing to go?”
“Bet your ass.” He paused a moment and then, voice going sly, he asked, “So how did last night go?”
“Tell him I said hi.” Damon’s voice was a low growl.
Justin’s laugh was quick and bright. Rubbing the back of my neck, I tried to decide just what had happened—what I’d done—in my life to have these two at odds like this. There weren’t two men that meant more to me than them and they practically looked for reasons to rip each other apart.
“Hi back, pussy-cat,” Justin said.
Damon’s hand curled into a fist.
I turned my back. “Justin, do we have a job going down or not?”
He sobered fast.
“Oh, yeah. There’s a job.”
“What’s going on?”
I gave Damon a blank stare in the mirror. I had ten minutes to shower and dress, twenty minutes to pack my gear. No minutes to argue with my boyfriend. “What do you mean?”
“Something’s up.” Damon stroked a thumb down his stumbled chin, his gray eyes gone to flint. “You’re worrying on something. So’s the asshole, although he’s hiding it. I heard it in his voice. Has it got anything to do with whatever you were talking to Chang about?”
I tensed. It was only for a split second, but that was about two split seconds too long, because Damon knew me far too well for that to go by unnoticed. In a casual voice, I said, “I just needed a few questions answered.”
Damon sighed, the sound heavy and drawn. “You’re dodging me.”
“No. I’m not.” Yes, I am.
He threw his legs off the edge of the bed and strode out of the bedroom.
I caught up with him just as he dug his palm unit from the tangle of his jeans.
“What are you doing?” I asked warily.
“Calling Chang.” Unlike me, he sounded completely fine. “If you won’t talk, he will.” He gave me a sidelong look. “He might not like it, but if it’s an order…”
“Fine.” Teeth gritted, I spun on my heel. He’d hear it sooner or later anyway. If I told him, then I controlled what he learned. And maybe I could figure out more about Shanelle. “But you’ll have to listen while I shower and dress. I don’t have much time.”
Damon’s silence as I showered didn’t do a damn thing to calm the butterflies in my gut.
I stepped out and he met me, holding out a fat, fluffy towel. Slowly, I lifted my arms. As he wrapped it around me, I said, “And that’s about all I know.”
“Wh
y didn’t you ask me instead of Chang?”
Scowling, I said, “Because I’m working a job. You worry too much about me anyway.” I jerked my shoulder in a shrug. “Besides…half the time he’s hearing stuff before you do.”
He stepped back and turned away. “I could have told you just as much about the cats who’ve gone missing. I want them found.”
“Would you have told me about Shanelle?”
The muscles in his shoulders went tight, rigid as a length of steel. “What’s there to tell?”
“How long were you lovers?”
He tensed. Just as quickly as the muscles in his shoulders tightened, they relaxed and if I hadn’t been looking for some sort of reaction, I would have missed it. But I saw it.
I’d been right.
“Well?” I asked when he didn’t respond.
“Lovers?” He shrugged, almost lazily and glanced back at me. “I don’t think you could say we were lovers, Kit. We had sex. We worked together. It was not a romantic relationship.”
He strode to the door.
I remembered what he’d told me once—I was the only one who’d ever had his heart.
But had he ever had anybody else’s?
Softly, I asked, “Did she feel the same?”
“What does that matter?”
“Because she’s planning on taking her former position back…whatever that means.” I moved up behind him and slid my arms around his waist. “She’s not getting you, Damon.”
His hands covered mine. “No. She’s not. There was nothing but sex there, Kit.”
“On your part.”
“I…” He stopped and sighed. I pressed my cheek to his back as he lifted his head to the sky. “Yeah. On my part. I can’t tell you what she thought or wanted, Kit. But you don’t need to worry.”
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