by Stacy Gail
“Have your houseboat on satellite. No one within three miles of you. She awake yet?”
Kyle stared at Macbeth’s comment box and gave serious thought to not answering. “No. No change.”
“The mind and body are intrinsically linked, Kyle.” A rare drop-in to their chat room, Sara’s brand-new husband, Dr. Gideon Mandeville, surprised him by appearing next. “From what you’ve reported, your friend suffered a serious attack today. Sleep is the great healer now. She’ll wake when she’s ready.”
That did nothing to quiet the panic gutting him now. “If she was attacked in a mental way, I don’t know how to treat her. It’s not like I can put a sling on her brain.”
“Don’t go borrowing trouble. Wait and see if she presents any symptoms when she’s awake. Nevertheless, for her own safety, it might be best to restrain her for the time being.”
His sigh hurt. His chest felt too tight to take in air. “Way ahead of you, Doc. I’ll sing out if anything changes. Offline now.”
He turned off the phone before anyone else could offer up another platitude. The fact of the matter was, no one knew how to make a Dantalion-touched mind better, if that was what this was. And then there was that ultimate eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room: the question of whether or not “getting better” was even a possibility once an insanity-inducing demon treated a brain like a hockey puck.
“I’m okay with the idea of you, me and handcuffs, cabrón. I just don’t remember if I enjoyed it.”
“Nikita.” Kyle was on the bed and holding her with no memory of having moved. Not that it mattered. As of now, he officially didn’t give a shit about anything that wasn’t specifically Nikita-related. “You’re not allowed to ever let me think, even for a second, you’re going to leave me. Do you understand? That’s fucking unacceptable.”
“Leave you?” She shifted, the links in the steel cuffs clinking in the stillness. “No chance of that, with my hands like this. Do you usually have to restrain your lovers to make sure they don’t make a break for it the moment your back is turned?”
“No.” For once, witty repartee was beyond him. Everything was beyond him. All that mattered was that she was talking and making sense and not trying to kill him. Things were looking up. “I never thought I’d be so happy to hear you call me cabrón.”
“When you cuff me in my sleep, I’m not going to call you anything else.”
“You weren’t asleep.”
“What?”
“You were unconscious. I had to Tase you.” With homemade electricity rather than an actual Taser gun, but she didn’t need to know that.
“What?” She stiffened, and he pulled back far enough to see her eyes widen with shock. “Why the hell did you do that?”
“You were trying to kill me, Nikita.” And she probably would have succeeded if he hadn’t had the gift of angelic speed on his side. If it had been anyone else, she would have driven bone straight up into gray matter and she’d be wearing handcuffs for an entirely different reason.
She was staring at him as if she’d never seen him before. “What are you talking about? I would never—”
“You really don’t remember?” He had no clue if that was good or bad.
“No.”
“Do you remember meeting someone by your car? Making someone bleed? Running like hell along the beach? Your feet are a mess because of that, by the way.”
“No. No, I...” But something was happening, he could see it in the fleeting expressions chasing each other across the canvas of her face. Confusion melted into a painful cringe before her eyes squeezed shut. She arched away from him and tried to bury her head in the pillows. “No. Go away.”
He had no idea if she was talking to him or whatever the hell was going on inside her. Not that it mattered. Leaving her side was not an option. “I need to know what happened, Nikita.”
“No.”
“I can help you if—”
“No one can help me. I killed her.”
Fear flash-froze his heart, and his thoughts immediately centered on the blood he’d found. “Who, Nikita?”
She twisted her head deeper into the pillow, but she couldn’t escape whatever was inside her. “My mother. I killed my mother.”
As if by magic, the icy grip on his chest loosened. “Nikita...sweetheart, you had nothing to do with that. Yolanda told me your mother drowned. Don’t you remember?”
“I. Remember. Everything.” She turned back to him with eyes that burned with defiance, as though she was determined to make him see the ugly truth inside her. “I’ve always known deep in my heart that I killed her. I killed her so I could live.”
The mere thought of Nikita carrying that weight around all these years hurt him in ways he didn’t even know he could hurt. “Stop that. You were a baby. You had no choice in even being on that boat, much less had any bearing on what happened. You didn’t know what—”
“I knew exactly what I was doing.” Her black anguish was a terrible thing to see. It was filled with a self-loathing that went past mere torment. She looked beaten by it, as if deep down it had been punishing her all this time, and she’d now lost any hope of ever escaping it. “It wasn’t really a boat that my mother got us passage on. It was more like half-boat, half-raft, and it seemed to be held together by nothing more than the duct tape that covered the floor. I’m amazed that rickety thing made it off the coastline.”
Though he knew it was wrong to think ill of the dead, Kyle cursed Nikita’s mother for putting her child in such outrageous danger. “You don’t have to relive that time if you don’t want to. Try and focus on what happened this morning. Tell me about that.”
“What happened this morning is tied to what happened back then.”
“What do you mean?”
“It started when the craft began to fall apart about halfway through our journey,” she went on without answering. “A piece of fiberglass here, a plank of wood there...at first it didn’t seem that alarming, but it was death by inches. As time passed, the living space on that vessel shrank until all the people were herded into one small area. Eventually that sank under everyone’s weight and broke apart.”
“Nikita.” His heart twisted at what she must have endured, and he smoothed a hand over her hair in the instinctive need to wipe away the old pain. “What a godawful nightmare.”
“It got worse. Before everything went to hell, my mother discreetly cleared out a cooler and put me on top of it with the instruction to never get off of it, no matter what happened. When the last fragment of the boat sank, I was the only one who didn’t go right into the water.”
“Exactly. She did what a good mother should do after inadvertently placing her child in a dangerous situation. She did her best to make sure you survived it.”
“She kept people away from the cooler as it bobbed along,” she went on, almost as though she hadn’t heard him. She stared blankly ahead, and he knew she was no longer seeing his bedroom, but rather a desperate scene that had scarred her in ways he was only beginning to understand. “She kept telling me everything would be all right, that we’d left such a long debris field that surely we would be found. I think at the time she still believed it. I know I believed her. Then people began to scream. And the water...it turned red.”
A shudder went through her, while Kyle’s stomach tightened at the new level of horror. “Sharks.”
“Yes. Sharks.” It came out as an almost inaudible whimper, and it devastated him to hear it. Nikita Tesoro, the strongest woman he knew, should not know a cruelty so deep it made her whimper. “My mother screamed when she realized what was happening. I still dream of that scream. It wakes me up and I swear I can still hear it echoing around the room. Isn’t that strange?”
“No, babe.” He dropped his mouth to her hair, her temple, her ear. But there was no kiss gen
tle enough that could erase her agony. “I think that’s perfectly understandable.”
“She was so scared, Kyle.” She brought her knees up, a tight fetal position marred by the hands that were cuffed behind her back. She looked like a person intent on disappearing in on herself and never coming out again. “My poor mama. She was frantic to get out of the water when she tried to climb up on the cooler with me. It swamped under our combined weight.”
Just when he thought her living nightmare couldn’t get any worse. “What she did, trying to get out of the water...that was pure instinct, Nikita. Anyone would have done that.”
“What about when I shoved her away, Kyle? Was that instinct too? Because that’s what I did. I shoved her off the cooler and when it bobbed back to the surface with me on it, I begged her to keep me safe. I should have saved her. Instead, I...oh God, I hate myself, I hate myself, I hate myself...”
“Stop that. You’ve got it all backward, don’t you see that? I may not ever want to actually be a parent, but I do know one thing about them—parents protect their babies. Not the other way around.”
“No.” To his horror, tears slid from the corner of her eyes, and they were made that much worse in their hopeless silence. “Children like me... They feed their mothers to sharks.”
“Damn it, will you cut that out? You know better than that.”
“What I know is that I gave my mother a horrible choice—death by drowning, or death by a feeding frenzy she couldn’t even see coming for her. I’ve wondered ever since which one I would choose. Or, since I’m so rotten inside, if I’d have knocked me into the water and taken the top of the cooler for myself.”
“I told you to stop it.” He knew it wasn’t right, that he was probably handling it all wrong, but he couldn’t keep himself from giving her a little shake. “I’m not going to allow you to tear yourself apart like that, because you don’t deserve it. No one deserves what you’ve been through, and none of it was an actual choice you made. You were eight, for God’s sake. What the hell were you supposed to do?”
“I’ll never know.” She closed her eyes, pushing more tears out to streak silent paths of pain into the pillow. “I’ll never know what kind of person I am as an adult, because deep down I fear I’m still that selfish, awful person I was as a child.”
“You weren’t awful. If your mother hadn’t dragged you out into the middle of the fucking ocean—”
“I don’t blame her, so you shouldn’t either.”
That was just more proof of what a good soul she was, but he had no clue how to make her see it. “Sorry.”
“I’m the one who’ll always be sorry. When my mother resurfaced by the cooler, she was the one who apologized, can you imagine? Then she said she loved me, and that she always would. Siempre.”
The light went on. “Your tattoo.”
“She told me to never forget how much she loved me,” she went on, nodding. “Then she told me to count to a hundred with my eyes closed, and not to open them even if I heard her coughing. I started to do as my mother instructed, but I peeked when I heard her make a strange noise. She’d chosen to drown herself rather than wait for death to come for her.”
He closed his eyes at the final, soul-crushing blow. How she’d found the inner strength to go on with life after that was a goddamn miracle, as far as he was concerned. “She did everything she could to save you, including finding a way to stop herself from inadvertently harming you by putting you in the water again. I’ll bet she recognized she’d try to get back up on the cooler in her panic, so she willingly gave up her life so that the one she loved most—her daughter—could survive that hell.”
“I screamed for her to come back to me.” She shook her head against the pillow, a lost gesture of misery. “I kept telling her that I was sorry, that we could share the cooler somehow.”
God, she was breaking his heart. “What a good daughter you are.”
“She never came back, Kyle. I screamed until I had no voice left...” A jolt went through her, as if she’d been pricked with something sharp. “I told her that. I remember I told her that.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No.” She turned her face into the pillow once more. “No, I can’t tell you about...that. It’s crazy. I’m crazy, I’ve gone completely insane.”
Just the mention of that word made him think of Dantalion. Insanity was his thing, after all. “I need to know exactly what happened.”
“I told you, I’ve lost my mind. Now let me out of these handcuffs before I show you just how crazy I can get.”
“Nikita, I don’t—”
“No more talking. I just want to be left alone.” Her knees pulled all the way up to her forehead and shut him out completely. He backed away, trying to find the magic combination of words that would make everything okay, when a fluid movement from her made him do a quick double-take. A second later he cursed himself for giving her enough room to slip her shackled hands over the swell of her butt. An oldie-but-goodie maneuver, and a veteran bounty hunter like him should have seen it coming. Too bad he’d been blinded by her anguish and his indecision on whether or not he should tell her about a telepathic demon to see she was scheming to get free.
“Damn it, Nikita!”
She ignored him by rolling to the opposite side of the bed and launched away from him. A second later she was down on the floor, a muffled grunt of pain escaping her clenched teeth.
“Shit. What the hell...?”
“Hate to say it, but I told you so.” Stretching facedown across the mattress, he leaned over the side of the bed and curled his fingers around her ankles. “You tore the crap out of your feet, running away from...what, exactly?”
She gave a half-hearted shot at kicking him in the jaw. “A mad delusion.”
“A mad delusion doesn’t bleed, Sparkle. I found signs of a struggle at the side of your car. That tells me someone was really there.” When she remained stubbornly silent, he glanced at the feet he held. Deep, boiling rage that she should have known such terror burned in him when he saw the ugly purple and black bruising around the bandages he’d put on her cuts. “Tell me, Nikita.”
“I’ve told you enough already. More than I’ve ever told anyone. No more.”
“I think that’s part of the problem—you’re much too used to bottling up all the bad things and letting them eat away at you. You’ve never learned it’s okay to share.” He brushed a careful thumb over a nasty bruise and made a sound of sympathy when she flinched. Damn, it was time for the big guns—like lying. “If our roles were reversed, I’d tell you what happened.”
“Would you really? You trust me that much?”
“Absolutely.” Except for the part about keeping his Nephilim status from her, the very same status that tied his hands when it came to letting her in on Dantalion’s existence. And it wasn’t that he didn’t trust her with that secret. He just didn’t trust her to not walk away after hearing it.
Not that there was any need to tell her about it. Not yet. Not until he had proof she had actually suffered an attack from Dantalion. Maybe something else entirely had made her go off like an unguided missile.
Yeah, right.
The look she was giving him clearly wished him to the farthest reaches of space. “You’re not going to let this go, are you?”
“Not a chance. You can tell me anything, you know.” Knowing full well he was risking a foot to the head fit to knock it off, he brushed his lips in a slow, long line along the delicate arch. “Anything.”
Far from looking violent, her expression became distracted as her gaze fastened onto his mouth. “You’re not exactly forthcoming yourself. I know that your father had some sort of drug problem, but that’s it.”
“You want it to be even? If it takes a game of ‘you show me yours, I’ll show you mine’, that’s fine. But m
y story’s not nearly as impressive as yours.”
“Cabrón...”
“There’s a certain dopamine imbalance issue in my family that can cause schizophrenia or aid in addiction, but it can be managed if you’re responsible about it. The one thing I can thank my father for is showing me how not to be weak and give in to temptation. He wasn’t so bad when I was younger, but by my teen years I don’t remember a single day where he wasn’t so high or drunk he didn’t know who I was. My mom was my rock, and not wanting to let her down has made me who I am today.”
“I like the man you are today.” There was a wealth of compassion in the eyes that watched him so carefully. “You said you don’t want to be a parent. Is this hereditary problem the reason?”
He nodded. “In a nutshell.”
“Maybe you have nothing to worry about. You have a crazy brain and I’ll always think of you as Hurricane Kyle, but I’d never call you schizophrenic.”
“Good, because I’m not.” And he’d make sure he never sucked in so much energy from a storm that it would send his brain into permanent tilt. He’d rather die. “What’s more, I’m careful about my intake of alcohol, and I’ve never even smoked a cigarette because of that addictive nature I’m sure I inherited.”
“Maybe you didn’t.”
“Oh, I did.”
Worry darkened her eyes. “So...are you saying you have an addiction? What are you addicted to?”
“You.” He breathed in the faint scent of the soap and astringent he’d used on her poor feet, nuzzling his cheek against the fragile skin covering her interior ankle before kissing her instep, then turning his attention to the other foot he held. “You’re the one thing in my life I don’t know how to live without. If that isn’t addiction, I don’t know what is.”
A disturbed breath escaped her. “Damn it, you scared me. I thought you were serious about being addicted to something.”