“Me?” He wrapped his hand around the back of her head, sinking his fingers into her tresses as he brushed his lips over her silky soft hair. He was raging with the need to kiss her, to fill her with his passion, chasing away all the memories of the hell she’d faced, so all she would ever think of again was how it would feel to be with a man who treasured everything about her very soul. “How is it possible that I make you feel safe? You know what I am. You’re insane, aren’t you?” he murmured. “That has to be it.”
She lifted her face to look at him, and he saw true fear in her eyes. Not fear of him. Fear she was sharing with him. “I’ve spent my life researching you. Researching Calydons.” Lily didn’t pull away or even hint at retreating. “I understand you, Gideon. By killing Cade and my grandmother, you saved my mother’s life. Trig’s, too.”
Gideon frowned, listening to her repeat the words he lived by. That all the lives he took were justified for the greater good. People outside the Order never understood that, certainly not when he was taking the lives of people they loved. How was it possible that a woman who’d suffered so much violence understood him?
“No matter how it happens,” Lily said, her voice clear and true, “you’re true to your mission to protect innocents. There is honor in that.” Her fingers dug into his hips, keeping him close. “My brother was a Calydon. He was a good person. I loved him with all my heart. I knew he was strong, he was good, and he was honorable, even though he was also burdened by being Calydon. Like you are. I wanted to hate you. I did. I tried.” Lily met his gaze. “But you’re like my brother. You do horrible, horrible things without remorse, but you have honor.”
Gideon tangled his fingers in her hair, knowing he should stop her and tell her about the mark, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. For this one moment, he wanted her to look at him like he wasn’t a demon, because she made him almost feel human when she looked at him like that, and that was a gift.
Because he was a monster. Yeah, sure, he’d tried to atone for it over the last five hundred years, but he knew he was. The instant Lily realized she was bound to him, she’d know it, too. She’d never again look at him the way she was right now: with trust, with tenderness and with desire so pure and so intense that it brought everything inside him to a roaring crescendo.
Gideon felt something flicker inside him at the honesty on her face, at her belief in him, calling upon the one thing he didn’t have, would never have, and had spent his life trying to make up for. “Lily, I don’t have honor—”
“You do—”
“No.” Gideon ground his jaw, unable to accept her accolades when he knew what a bastard he was. He couldn’t lie. He couldn’t deceive her. Not anymore.
It was time to show her the truth about what he was.
Silently, Gideon took her hand and pressed his lips to her palm, keeping his gaze fastened on her eyes. Then he took her sleeve and gently pushed it up her arm, knowing that everything would change between them the minute she saw the mark. Lily could forgive him for killing a grandmother she’d never met, because of her love for her brother. She could forgive Gideon for almost draining her dry, because she took responsibility. But she’d never forgive being bonded to him. Not with her history. It would be too personal to her.
Which was fine.
He wasn’t going to forgive himself either. He should have known. Somehow, someway, he should have known and prevented it. That was his duty, to protect her, and the only way to keep her safe would have been to keep the bond from beginning. He’d failed once, and he’d failed a second time with her.
The sleeve was up, baring Lily’s arm, and Gideon laid his hand over the mark, her skin pulsing with the warmth of his brand.
Question flickered in Lily’s eyes, and she glanced down at her arm, but he was covering it.
He felt her body tense, and she sucked in her breath. Her hand shaking, she peeled his fingers off, and he allowed her to move his hand.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Lily’s stomach plummeted as she stared at the marks on her arm. “That can’t be—”
Gideon shoved up his sleeve and laid his arm next to hers.
They matched. His brand was on her arm.
Lily shoved away from him, stumbling off the edge of the bed, still gaping at her arm. “That’s not right. It can’t be right.” She jerked her gaze to him. “You already met your sheva. It can’t happen twice.”
His jaw was rigid, his blue eyes blazing with regret, but also with a possessive heat that made her body leap with desire. “Apparently, it can.”
“No!” Lily whirled around and ran into the bathroom, turned on the faucets and shoved her arm underneath, scraping at it with her fingernails. Clawing at her arm. Visions of her grandma trying to kill her own daughter crowded her mind, Trig convulsing in his bed as his Calydon destiny claimed him, and she started shaking violently. “It’s wrong. I can’t—”
“Lily!” Gideon walked up behind her, his body crowding hers as he reached around her and grabbed her hands, prying her fingernails out of her skin.
“No! I have to get it off!” She tried to rip free of his tight grasp, her heart pounding so hard, her ears ringing, her stomach churning.
Gideon’s muscles bunched as he wrapped his arms around her, immobilizing her against his chest. “Lily.” His voice was calm. So calm it made no sense. “You can’t get it off. It’s there forever.”
She stared at him in the bathroom mirror, at his broad shoulders dwarfing her, at his intense blue eyes, at his muscled arms pinning her to his chest. Her gaze drifted down to his forearms, and she saw the black brands on his skin, burned into the flesh.
Her stomach lurched and she jerked free of his arms and fell to her knees. She lurched over to the toilet, grabbing the seat as she vomited. Tears streamed down her cheeks and she couldn’t stop.
Gideon knelt beside her, holding her hair off her face, rubbing her back as her body heaved again and again until there was nothing left. But still her body kept trying until she was shaking so violently she was afraid she’d shatter.
Gideon kept stroking her, his head bent next to hers. He was murmuring words, but she couldn’t hear them, couldn’t think about anything other than her grandma, her brother, and the fate she was locked into… I can’t do this. I can’t—
Yes, you can.
She moaned and held her forehead with her hands. You can hear my thoughts now.
We were both resisting so hard before that we were blocking our connection. It’s open now. Gideon’s arms went around her and he pulled her onto his lap.
Lily tried to shove off him. “Let me go!”
He tightened his grip and kept her locked against him. “No.”
“Gideon—”
“I don’t even know the name of my first sheva.” His voice was quiet, so quiet that she had to stop struggling to hear his words. “I was walking down the street with Dante and two other Order members. We were going to get food.” He snorted in disgust. “Food. So mundane. So innocuous.”
“Let go of me,” Lily whispered, her fingers sliding around his wrists to try to pry his arms off her. “I know the story.” She didn’t want to hear it again. She didn’t want to hear how he stood back and let that innocent girl be killed. She didn’t want to hear how he was going to do it again, this time to her.
“Listen to me, Lily. I need you to hear this.” Gideon’s voice was raw, and bitter, and she shivered at the harsh edge to it. “I need you to hear the story from my point of view. You’re locked into me now, and you need to know the type of male you’re burdened with.”
She hesitated, realizing she wasn’t going anywhere until he released her. And a part of her wanted to know. From him. She sighed and stopped fighting, but she couldn’t relax, not with his powerful arms wrapped around her with such unyielding strength. “What happened?”
“I saw her across the street,” Gideon said, gazing at the wall as if he were reliving the moment in his head. “She was walking with
two friends. I think she was maybe eighteen, if that. I was nineteen, and I’d come into my powers only a few weeks before. I was reeling with my new powers, and Dante was having difficulty controlling me. My muscles were twice the size they’d been before my change, and I was getting stronger every day.”
Lily said nothing. She knew all about the transition. About the dream the young Calydons had where they were fighting for their lives in a battle on another plane. If they survived the dream, they woke up with their brands. If they didn’t, they died in their sleep. Trig had died. Despite her spending her whole life searching for ways to ensure he survived his dream, he’d died.
“I saw her,” Gideon continued, “and I knew instantly that she was my sheva. I wanted her so badly, but it wasn’t just sex. I needed to protect her, to hold her, to bring her into my world and make her mine.”
Lily’s jaw tightened as jealousy slammed into her. “I don’t want to know—”
“I could have kept walking,” Gideon continued relentlessly. “No one else saw her. I could have walked past her that day and let her disappear. I knew the implications, but I thought she was so beautiful and I wanted her to see me. See my muscles. Feel my power. I wanted to see her face light up in awe for who I was. So I crossed the street and introduced myself.” His arms tightened around Lily, and he pressed his face into her hair before continuing.
Lily felt a small ache in her chest, and her grip on his wrist softened. “Gideon? Are you okay?”
He lifted his head from her hair. “Dante followed me over there, and the minute she smiled at me, I went down on my knees. Literally. She knocked me over with her voice.” His voice grew harder. “Dante grabbed her in one hand and me in the other and carted us both around the corner into an alley. He threw me down on my ass and told me I was a total fuckup and I’d better turn out all right or he’d be making the wrong choice. Then he called out his spear and he killed her.”
Her forearms searing hot in response to his confession and torment, Lily twisted out of his grip to face him. His eyes were haunted, his face tight. Where was the cold, stoic warrior who’d been unaffected by his sheva’s death? It had been a lie. All this time, he’d been living a lie, and she’d bought it.
He glanced at her, then averted his eyes and leaned back against the bathroom wall, his arms draped over his knees. “She looked at me the split second before Dante’s blade sank into her and she said ‘Why?’. That was her last word. Why.” He met Lily’s gaze, and she saw the coldness in his eyes that he was so well-known for, the detachment that she now knew was simply a shield. “The answer to her question was because I was too fucking arrogant to keep walking when I should have.”
“Gideon—”
“Dante handed her body to me, and he told me I’d better make myself worthy, because an innocent had died to keep me alive. Then he left.” A muscle ticked in Gideon’s cheek. “I held her for the next ten hours. I just stood there in that alley, with this dead girl in my arms, and I couldn’t move.”
Tears began to sting at the back of Lily’s eyes for his pain, even though his eyes were hard, and his body was rigid. He believed he felt no pain, he’d erected a shield around himself for five hundred years, but she knew all too well that that kind of anguish never left. It was always inside, fermenting and poisoning.
“Quinn and Elijah, who were rookies with me at the time, came back and found me. I was covered in her blood. Together, we buried her. We sat on her grave for six days. All three of us. They knew I would have killed myself if they’d left. So they didn’t. They stayed with me, until they finally helped me realize that the only appropriate response was to make her death worthwhile.” Gideon’s fingers traced the inside of his wrist.
Lily saw he was rubbing a small scar on his skin, and she knew that Calydons scarred only from other Calydon weapons.
“I cut myself and bled onto her grave. I swore on her death that I would never waiver in my Oath to protect innocents against rogue Calydons. I promised her that I would be worthy of her death, that thousands of lives would be saved because she sacrificed her life.” His gaze flicked to Lily. “And then we got up, and we never talked about it again.” His eyes grew bitter. “And the legend of Gideon was born.”
She moved between his knees, and he let her, his hands finding her hips, palming her waist.
His gaze went to her. “And now, I have another sheva. Another responsibility to carry. Another choice to make.”
Lily didn’t need to ask what he was going to do. She already knew. His need for her was burning in those blue eyes, in the fierceness of voice. He hadn’t walked away from his sheva before, and he wasn’t going to now. He was going to keep her, devil be damned.
Gideon’s grip tightened on her hips. “I can’t stand back and let you die. There’s no fucking way.” His chest expanded with a deep breath. “But if I end up going rogue or dying because of the bond, or even just fuck up the one thing I truly care about, which is to keep innocents safe from rogue Calydons, then I’ve violated my promise to a dead girl whose name I don’t even know. How do I make that choice?” He lifted his hand to her hair and fisted the strands. “Hell, Lily. I’m not prepared for this. I’m not prepared for you.”
Lily braced her hands against the rough cotton of his shirt, feeling the thud of his heart against her palms. It was a steady, strong beat, but it was uneven. Irregular. Damaged. “I’m not prepared for you, either.”
Gideon pulled her closer. His mouth was inches from hers, heat rising furiously between them. “I don’t know what to do.”
His confession was so raw and desperate, she knew only tremendous pain would have prompted him to admit something like that, and suddenly she felt so ashamed for all the horrible things she’d written about him in her articles. For her accusations of how cold and brutal he was. She lifted her face to his. “I’m sorry for judging you.”
He managed a small smile and brushed her hair out of her face, his fingers snagging in the tangles. “I worked hard for that reputation. You helped me spread the word. Don’t be sorry.”
Lily leaned against him, reveling in the hardness of his body. He was her enemy in so many ways, but he was also her only ally. Now that she was his sheva, she knew his commitment to her safety would never fade, never die…until he went rogue, of course. But right now, she was in the arms of a man who would destroy the world to protect her, and that was a pretty incredible feeling for a woman who’d been hiding from shadows for too long. “I spent my life trying to learn as much about the Calydons as I could, so when Trig had his dream, I could save him.”
Gideon kept playing with her hair. “He was lucky to have you care about him so much.”
“Yes, well, it didn’t seem to make a difference.” She tangled her fingers through Gideon’s, watching his hand dwarf hers. “I thought I could save him. I thought I knew how. I danced for him when he was dreaming, trying to feed him my power. I stayed in his bedroom all night, dancing and singing until my feet bled, watching his body convulse on the mattress as he fought for his life. And he died.” Lily lifted her chin, refusing to revisit that horrible moment, the aching loss of realizing she’d lost her brother. “Until I figure out how to ensure a Calydon survives his dream, I can’t have a son.”
Gideon’s hand paused in the slow caress he was doing on her back. “If you mated with a human, you wouldn’t have a Calydon for a son.”
“I’ve done my research, Gideon. Being a sheva runs in the family, and I’ve known since I was little that the odds I’d be one were high. So, that was part of the other reason for doing my research. To figure out how to control the situation. To prepare myself if it ever happened. To stop it from happening. I’ve been careful not to get too serious with a human male, because I didn’t want to abandon my family if I got sucked in by a Calydon.” She groaned. “The best laid plans—”
He stiffened. “You have a man?” His voice came out a low growl that vibrated in his chest.
Lily lifted her head to lo
ok at him. His eyes had gone to a blue the shade of midnight, and his face was heavily lined with anger. She laid her hand on his face. “It’s difficult to believe I ever thought you were ice.”
His scowl didn’t lessen. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“No, I don’t have a man. And if I did, I’m sure he’d be long gone. I’ve been missing for two years, remember?”
His arms tightened around her and the scowl slowly faded, replaced by regret. “Shit, Lily, I don’t know why I just reacted that way.”
“I do. It’s the bond. We’re not even close to being fully bonded, and you’re already turning into the man Cade became. A man who was ready to murder his own son in a jealous rage.”
His face darkened. “I would never murder my child.”
His voice was so resolute with conviction, she knew he believed his words, and she did too…for now. “Did you know Cade?”
“Of course, I did. He was younger than I was, but I’d known him for three hundred years.”
“Would you ever have believed he’d try to murder his own son? A thirteen month old toddler?”
Gideon’s jaw worked hard and finally he shook his head. “No.”
“And my grandmother tried to kill her own daughter.” Lily needed to get off his lap. Retreat from their intimacy. Start to build the walls, like she’d been planning since she’d first realized she could be someone’s sheva.
But Lily couldn’t bring herself to pull away from Gideon. His body was warm, his muscles hard, and his hand was reassuring as he caressed the small of her back. They weren’t doing anything that could increase the bond, but being this close to him was giving her strength. Grounding her. He was giving her security, and she needed that right now.
She gave up resisting her need for him and snuggled up under his jaw, as if he could keep all the monsters at bay. All but the monster he himself brought to the table.
Darkness Seduced (Primal Heat Trilogy #2) (Order of the Blade) Page 16