Small tremors echoed down through his body, like the aftermath of an earthquake, as he walked slowly back into the kitchen. He could not keep doing this. He could not. There had to be a way to make it stop.
He was grateful he had been able to help Ciera, but the cost was too great. The Queen had been right. If he couldn’t find a way to draw on the universal energy for the healing he did, pulling it from himself would eventually kill him, just as surely as a knife to the ribs.
CHAPTER 11
CIERA woke from a dream of violence and panic to find herself safe in her own bed. For a moment she simply lay there, staring up at the reassuringly boring stained ceiling tiles, tracing the familiar patterns that looked like a mouse with two tails and a small brownish tiger. But a feeling of unease kept tugging at her senses until she threw off the covers to discover a thin new scar where she had dreamt of a gaping wound. The shirt she had put on last night was still around her—barely—cut almost to the collar and stiff with dried blood she could only assume was hers.
And yet she felt fine. A little weak, maybe, but nothing a cup of coffee and some breakfast wouldn’t fix. A shudder ran down her spine. What the hell had happened?
She ran the previous evening through her mind as if it were a video. Working at the soup kitchen; she remembered that clearly. Ducking out the back door to go on a mission—vaguer, but still certain. A frightened girl, a bunch of thuggish men, a fight. That was blurred, like an out-of-focus photo, but Ciera was almost sure those memories were real too. But after that, things got fuzzy fast.
Sun. Ciera sat up in bed so fast her head spun for a moment. Gregori had been there. How or why, she wasn’t sure, but somewhere in that blur, his handsome face with its broad cheekbones and distinctive black eyes had made a cameo appearance.
She swung her legs over the side of the bed and tore off the remains of her ripped tee shirt. The jeans she wore were also encrusted with dried blood, sticking to her as she peeled them off of her body with shaking hands. A quick wash with a wet cloth got rid of the worst of the red stains covering her torso, but she couldn’t find any wounds that would explain the amount of brownish red that had soaked into her clothes, just a couple of superficial slashes on one arm. Maybe it had come from someone else? But there was that scar . . .
Wrapping her robe around herself, Ciera headed toward the kitchen for a much-needed cup of coffee to ease the parched dryness of her throat, only to screech to a halt two steps into the living room when she spotted Gregori asleep on her couch.
He was sprawled across the not-quite-long-enough surface, legs dangling off the edge, one arm over his face. An untouched mug sat on the table near him, a thin layer of scum floating on the surface. He was fully dressed, down to his boots, and smudges of dried blood adorned his shirt and pants, although as far as she could tell from where she stood, none of it was his.
Hers, then?
Her vague memories of the night gelled into more solid form. The ambush in the alley. A battle she had been losing badly until an unexpected ally appeared out of nowhere. Gregori. He had been there, then. But how?
Had he been following her? He must have been—there was no way that his arrival in that particular place at that exact moment could have been a coincidence. But why would he have been? If Victor had sent him, then why save her? And, for that matter, if he had been stalking her, why on earth was he still here, asleep on her couch?
She shook her head, torn between confusion and freaking out. A man had been in her apartment while she was unconscious and completely vulnerable. Yet clearly, she was unharmed, and he . . . he didn’t look so good.
Ciera took a few steps closer, gazing down on her unexpected rescuer. Sun’s face was pale, and there were shadowy circles under his eyes that hadn’t been there when she’d seen him at the soup kitchen the night before. He looked exhausted, and not at all threatening.
She wondered if he was going to get into trouble for not going back to the monastery. She wondered what the hell he was doing in her apartment. But a glance at the clock on the wall also made her wonder how the hell she was going to get to work on time. I got into a fight in an alley and was rescued by a gorgeous mysterious semistranger probably wasn’t going to cut it with her boss. Ah, well. She could always blame the weather.
Her trip across the room to the kitchen to start the coffeemaker didn’t cause her unexpected guest to stir, so she tiptoed back into the bedroom to grab an armful of clothes and the knife from under her pillow, and then locked herself into the bathroom for a quick shower.
When she came back out, dressed once more in the proper professional clothes she wore like armor, and with her clean hair pulled into an aggressively neat bun, Gregori was sitting at the tiny kitchen table with a fresh mug, looking as comfortable as if that was how he started every morning.
“I would have poured your coffee,” he said, gazing at her serenely. “But I wasn’t sure how you took it.”
Ciera gaped at him, finally forcing her mouth closed as she marched over to stand in front of him. “Would you like to explain what you’re doing here?” she asked. She resisted the temptation to pull the switchblade she’d tucked into her jacket pocket, only partially because she was fairly certain he could take it away from her before she could get it open.
“Drinking tea,” he said in a calm voice.
She also resisted the temptation to bang her head against the counter, although it was a close thing. “I can see that,” she said through clenched teeth. “Why are you doing it here instead of in your nice, quiet monastery, where you belong?”
He stared at her from under dark brows. “How much do you remember about last night?”
She shuddered involuntarily. “I’m not sure. There was a fight. You showed up.” She walked over to the counter to pour her coffee, never quite turning her back on him. A dollop of half-and-half and a spoonful of sugar went into her cup before he said anything else.
“I followed you from the shelter,” he admitted. “I had been hoping to talk to you, but you left before I got a chance.”
Clink, clink, clink. Ciera’s spoon rattled against the side of her cup in time with the beat of her heart. It was a simple enough explanation. She just didn’t know whether to believe it or not. She popped a couple of pieces of bread into the toaster before answering.
“If you were following me, why didn’t you just stop me and say something?”
He shrugged. “It was snowing, and I could not be sure it was actually you. I thought I would wait until I was sure. But then you went into that alley . . .”
He was waiting for her to explain, she realized. He’d seen her come out with the girl, seen the mask and the fight. Her mind raced around in circles, trying to come up with any explanation other than the one that was true, and failing miserably. Shit.
“There was a lot of blood on my clothes,” she said, putting off the moment when she’d be forced to confess. “And quite a bit on yours too.”
He nodded, sipping his tea, his dark eyes still focused on her.
“But I couldn’t find any wounds deep enough to have caused that much blood loss. Did you get hurt?” One hand strayed to touch the new scar she couldn’t explain.
Gregori shook his head. “I was unharmed. The blood must have come from your assailants, as well as the few shallow cuts on your arms.”
Ciera didn’t really believe him, but she also couldn’t come up with any other explanation that made sense. Maybe her shirt had been ripped in the fight? There was something seriously off here, but damned if she could figure out what it was.
“I suppose you want to know what I was doing in that alley,” she said, putting the bread and some butter on the table and sitting down opposite him. “What with the fighting and all.”
He spread butter thinly on his toast and took a bite, chewing and swallowing thoughtfully before saying in a polite tone, “Only if you wi
sh to tell me. You owe me no explanations.”
Except that I am pretty sure you saved my life. That buys you something more than a mug of tea and a piece of whole-wheat toast.
Ciera looked across the space between them—so little and yet so far. What would he think of her if she told him who and what she really was? Would he despise her? Pity her? That would be worse, maybe. She doubted he could possibly understand. And yet a part of her wanted, surprisingly strongly wanted, to share her tale with one other human being. To no longer be alone with the harsh reality of her life.
“It’s a long story,” she said. “And not a pretty one.”
“Tell me,” he said.
And so she did.
“I used to have a different name,” she said. “And a very different life.”
She took a bite of her own breakfast, more to give him time to react than from any interest in food. He simply nodded and waited for her to continue, as if she were telling him a fairy tale in front of a blazing fire instead of spilling her guts at the kitchen table to a man she barely knew.
“I grew up a long way from here, in a small town in an area of the country where mixed-race couples were still a rarity. My parents, well, I think they loved each other in the beginning. Maybe they didn’t realize how hard it would be. My father was a carpenter—a jack-of-all-trades, really, since he wasn’t all that good at any one thing, but he couldn’t find many people who would hire him. Or he’d get a job and then get laid off with some flimsy excuse when they found out his wife was part black and part Native American. Later on he started drinking, and that didn’t help him keep work either. By the time I left home, he was mostly just an angry, bitter man who looked at both of us like we had ruined his life.”
Gregori winced. “What about your mother?”
Ciera gave up on the toast and took a sip of coffee instead, the liquid marginally less bitter than her memories.
“She tried,” Ciera said. “Tried to make things easier on my dad, and I guess herself, by doing what she could to fit in. She dressed like the other ladies in town, acted like them as much as she could—she was originally from New York City, where she met my dad when he was there on a job; I don’t think anything about her earlier life had prepared her for the kind of prejudice she came up against in a small Southern town. When I was a kid, I would watch her layer on makeup five shades lighter than her skin, straighten and bleach her hair, do what she could to minimize the width of her nose and the broadness of her lips.”
“That must have been hard. For her and for you,” Gregori said.
Ciera smiled sadly. “Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if it had worked. If she hadn’t had to spend her whole life pretending to be someone she wasn’t. If it had actually made my father happy, which it didn’t.” She sighed. “It didn’t help that my skin was so much darker than hers. It happens that way sometimes. I guess her black father’s genetics came out more strongly in me. No amount of hair straightener was going to make me look white.”
Gregori gazed at her. “You are beautiful, Ciera. The color of your skin, the texture of your hair, the shape of your lips—they are the perfect blend of all the races that went into creating you. You are like the beach at dawn when the fog comes in; each of those things is lovely on its own, but together, they can be magical.”
Ciera felt tears prickling at the backs of her eyes. No one had ever described her in such a glowing, poetic fashion. Men had said flattering things, usually because they wanted something from her. But she could tell that Sun meant every word he said. She doubted she would ever see herself that way, but it touched her more than she would have expected to know that he did.
“Um, thanks,” she said, brushing the back of one hand quickly across her face. “I wish that was what I saw when I look in the mirror every morning.”
“What do you see?” Gregori asked in a soft voice.
She opened her mouth to say something light and sarcastic, but for some reason, the truth came out instead. “I see someone who was a constant reminder to her parents that they had made the wrong choice. I see the face that made their lives more difficult, helped people see through the illusions my mother tried so hard to build, and caused a thousand whispered arguments.”
“Your parents’ failings do not make you any less beautiful or any less valuable as a person,” he said, reaching out to take her hand. “Surely you must know that.”
Ciera shrugged. “I suppose I know it now, most days. But when I was a teenager, it felt like I was the problem. Like their lives would be better if I wasn’t there. Hell, maybe it was true. As far as I can tell, they never looked for me. Either way, I ran away from home when I was fifteen, and I haven’t been back since. I eventually made my way across the country to Minneapolis. Some stoners who picked me up while I was hitchhiking were headed here, and it seemed like as good a destination as any.”
They sat in silence for a moment, Gregori obviously waiting for her to continue with her story, and Ciera trying to figure out a way to make it more palatable. Make herself sound like less of a fool or a loser, or worse yet, a cliché. In the end, she just went on, waiting for the moment when he would recoil in disgust and pull his hand away from hers.
“When I got here, I floated around on the streets for a while. Slept in the basement of an abandoned building some kids I hooked up with had found a way into, worked odd jobs here and there for whatever money I could get. I was underage and had no ID, so it wasn’t like I could get a real job. I was surviving. Barely. I went hungry a lot.”
“Like the teens at the shelter,” Gregori said with growing understanding.
She nodded. “Then I met Victor.”
“Ah,” Gregori said. “Enter the hero, stage left.”
Ciera grimaced. “More like enter the villain, but of course, he didn’t look like one at the time.”
“What did he look like?”
Ciera thought back to the first night she’d met Victor. “Polished. Powerful. Handsome.” Ironically, she thought all those words could be used to describe Gregori, but the two men couldn’t have been more different.
“He was involved with the gangs that run most of the drugs in the city. Mexican cartels channel the drugs in, and Victor was, as far as I could tell, in charge of a chunk of territory. I don’t know the specifics. He said he didn’t like to bring business home. But I overheard conversations now and then that made it clear he had a certain standing in the organization.” She bit her lip. “Underneath that polish was a very dangerous man. But it took me a while to figure that out.” She shook her head at her own stupidity.
“You were young,” Gregori said, as if he could read her thoughts. “You said he didn’t like to bring business home. So you lived together?”
Ciera took another sip of coffee to wet her throat. Telling this story was like chewing on glass. “For a couple of years. Victor took me off the streets, set me up in a nice apartment, bought me pretty clothes. He liked good food, so we ate out a lot, but he also paid for me to take cooking lessons so I could make meals to the standard he expected.” She made a face. “Victor had very high standards. And a low tolerance for people and things that didn’t meet those standards.”
“Ah,” Gregori said. “He sounds very controlling.”
“You have no idea,” she said, her fingers tightening involuntarily around the handle of her mug. “It was like a compulsion with him. I had to be dressed exactly the right way for the right occasion. Once I wore the emerald earrings he gave me with a blue dress instead of a green one. He flushed them down the toilet, then beat me until I couldn’t sit down for two days without wincing.”
Sun’s expression never changed, but she saw a flash of something in his eyes; something dark and furious. Then it was gone, and she thought perhaps she’d imagined it.
“It must have been difficult, living like that,” he said. “Why did you stay? Was i
t fear of going hungry again?”
Ciera could feel her cheeks flush, and she looked down at the table. This was the part she hated. The part that made her feel weak and ashamed. But she’d gotten this far without faltering. Too late to turn back now.
“No, not that. There were plenty of times I would have gladly gone back to sleeping on a bug-infested mattress just to get out of that apartment.” Defiantly, she gazed into Gregori’s eyes and refused to look away. “It was the drugs.”
Did she see disappointment? She couldn’t be sure. When he didn’t say anything, she went on.
“It turned out that Victor had a pattern. He would find a girl on the streets who caught his eye. Someone who appealed to his idea of beauty, but didn’t have the experience or self-esteem to resist being molded into who he wanted her to be. A girl who would be grateful for the luxuries he brought her, and for a warm, safe place to live.” She took a ragged breath. “And then he’d get her hooked on drugs, to make sure that she would be easy to control. After all, he had plenty of access to the product. Once the girl was hooked, between that and fear of his temper, they all fell into line and became exactly what he wanted them to be.”
Gregori’s hand tightened on hers, but his face was as placid as always. “He sounds charming. Shall I kill him for you?”
Ciera blinked. She didn’t know what kind of a response she’d been expecting, but certainly not that one. She wasn’t even completely sure he was kidding.
“Thank you, but that won’t be necessary,” she said.
He nodded. “If you are quite certain.” He removed his hand, but only to pick up his mug again. “You are obviously a very strong and courageous woman.”
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