“But,” Jillian went on, “I’m not going to let that chemistry completely take over my brain. Not when so much is at stake. I know the djinn thing is my hang-up, because clearly there are plenty of human women who are very happy with their djinn partners. But I expect honesty of the man I’m with, whether he’s djinn or human. So tell me what you’ve been hiding all this time, and then….”
“And then?” he prompted.
“Well, I guess we’ll just have to see.”
Chapter Fifteen
Could he do it? Could he bare his soul to her, knowing that once she learned the truth about why he had chosen Katelyn Fonseca, why he had been with the djinn in Taos at all, Jillian would most certainly reject him. Her soul was too good and pure to accept a man such as he, even when her kisses scorched like those of a fire elemental.
On the other hand, if he refused to tell her the truth, then she would walk away. And he could do nothing to stop her this time, because she had offered him a way for them to move forward, and he had been too much of a coward to do as she asked.
He pushed out a breath, and knotted his fists at his side. Throughout his life, he had always done as he wished, and had not allowed the needs and desires of others to impede his path. Now he would have to set all that aside, humble himself before her. And still his sacrifice might not be enough.
Jillian stood there, watching him carefully. Ah, how beautiful she was, with that mouth which just begged to be kissed, and with those wide, smoky gray eyes. Yes, those eyes were still a little reddened from her weeping bout earlier, but he found that did very little to mar her appearance. Had he ever found a djinn woman so lovely? At the moment, he rather thought he hadn’t.
Better to risk all, on the chance he might have her, rather than ignore her request and know that she would walk out of his life forever.
“Very well,” he said at last. “But please — do sit down. I think that is best.”
She nodded, then resumed her seat. Aldair noticed that she still seemed very tense, as though she knew she would not like what she was about to hear, and so had already steeled herself against it.
Wise woman.
He also sat down, and sent one irritated glance toward the water that sat on the table before returning his attention to Jillian. In that moment, he longed for some wine to give him courage, but making the substitution now would be far too obvious. He would have to force himself through this unaided.
Then he might as well get to it.
“I told you of my brother,” he said.
“Yes. How your father favored him, and how you wanted to take your revenge.” Her head tilted slightly. “But you didn’t say how.”
“Through Katelyn, to start.”
“Katelyn?” Jillian repeated, looking confused. “What did she have to do with it?”
“Very little, save as a means to an end.” He stopped there, steeling himself. The expression of puzzlement on Jillian’s face had already started to shift toward worry, and he had only just begun to tell the tale. “You see, when we knew the time to unleash the Heat was nearly upon us, those djinn who wished to save their humans made their selections for their Chosen. I had not fully decided what I was going to do — ”
“You mean you didn’t care whether you saved someone or not?” she asked, worry now turning to something rather like horror. “But you said — ”
“Let me continue.” He did not like to cut her off in such a way, but he knew he had to keep going, that if he stopped he might not have the nerve to continue. It was bad enough already, for Jillian now looked at him like some creeping insect she had just discovered in her bedchamber. His blood went cold, but he made himself say, “As I told you, I was not sure what I planned to do. But then I heard that my brother Jasreel — ”
“Jasreel?” she interrupted. “You mean Jace? The djinn who’s with Jessica Monroe?”
“Yes,” Aldair replied. He realized then that this was the first time he had uttered his brother’s name in Jillian’s presence. “You know him?
“Not exactly. I’ve met Jessica, though, and — ” Jillian stopped herself there. “That doesn’t really matter. I guess it just startled me. I suppose if I’d really thought it through, I would have connected you by your last name. But I think I’ve only heard it once, and that time in passing. Anyway, please go on.”
Well, at least she didn’t know his hated half-brother very well. That was something. Aldair nodded, and continued, “As I was saying, I had heard that Jasreel had selected a woman for himself, and I thought that would be a very good way of taking my revenge upon him — to claim the same woman he wanted as my own.”
“You didn’t love her, though.”
“No. She is a very beautiful woman, however, and I thought I would do well enough with her. But because Jasreel and I had claimed the same Chosen, the elders decreed that we must battle one another for the right to have her.”
Jillian appeared to absorb all this while wearing a faint frown. “So…I assume he won, since you were with Katelyn instead.”
Oh, the ignominy of having to admit to such a thing, especially to Jillian. Aldair’s fists clenched, but he managed to keep his tone level enough as he replied, “I am still not sure he did not cheat in some way. But yes, the elders believed that he came out ahead in that conflict, and so he claimed Jessica Monroe as his own.”
“Well,” Jillian said, “she is very beautiful.”
“Nowhere near as beautiful as you.”
That comment elicited a raised eyebrow and a disbelieving look, but Jillian made no other reply. Perhaps she simply did not want to waste time on foolish arguments when the meat of the story still lay ahead. “So you moved on to Katelyn Fonseca.”
“I did select her as my second choice. But my true goal was merely to be accepted as a member of the Taos community, so I might be close to Jasreel and Jessica, and therefore wait until another opportunity presented itself. Which it did soon enough, for Jasreel was captured by your people in Los Alamos. I thought then that perhaps this could all be resolved with no further conflict, for Katelyn had disappeared as well not long before that, when she went out with a scouting party to learn more of the people in Los Alamos.”
“But she was never in Los Alamos,” Jillian protested. “That is, I never heard anything about it.”
“You did not hear anything because it was not Captain Margolis and his men who captured her. She was taken by Khalim and his followers, and given to one of Khalim’s cousins as a prize.”
“That’s…horrible.” Jillian’s face had gone white, and she crossed her arms, hugging herself, as if she had suddenly taken a chill.
This was where Aldair wished very much he could leave off, for he would have to admit that he had felt very little concern as to Katelyn’s fate. He had never loved her, only used her. At the time, he had been so consumed by his own desire for revenge on Jasreel that the thoughts and feelings of one human woman mattered very little to him. Now, though, he could only reflect on what he had done to her and realize how shameful, how cowardly, his own behavior had been.
“Yes,” he said briefly. “Although when she went missing, I truly had no idea what might have become of her. I only thought that with both her and Jasreel gone, then I could take Jessica as mine. Indeed, I went to Zahrias, the leader of our community, and asked him to intercede on my behalf. He would not go so far as to simply hand her over to me, although he did try to convince her that there was no way to save Jasreel, and that if she became my Chosen, she could still remain in the community. Of course, she would have none of it, and went on to rescue him.” Despite his own efforts to keep his face as expressionless as possible, he could feel his mouth twisting as he thought of Jessica’s devotion to the hated Jasreel, of how she absolutely refused to take him, Aldair, as her replacement lover.
“But you couldn’t let it go, could you?”
“No,” he replied. How well Jillian already knew him. Of course he could not abandon his revenge. He me
rely had taken it in another direction. “I left the Taos community and went to join Khalim and his followers.”
“But….” The confused look was back, although somewhere behind it Aldair could detect some of that same worry and horror, as if she knew the answer to the question and yet could not prevent herself from asking it anyway. “Wasn’t this Khalim person behind the attacks on Taos? Didn’t he hurt one of your Chosen and kill another?”
Aldair let out a heavy breath. “And more than that, for he also attacked Katelyn’s scouting party, and killed the men in the group and took the women hostage. He cared nothing for the compact all djinn had agreed to, that the Chosen must be sacrosanct, and no harm brought to them.”
“How on earth could you ever join up with someone like that?” Now Jillian had shrunk back against the cushions of the love seat, as if she needed to put even that meager distance between them. “He was a monster.”
From the tone of her voice, Aldair guessed she must think that he was a monster, too. Well, she wouldn’t be the first person to believe such a thing of him. “I was angry, and not thinking clearly. I — ”
“And did you even try to get Katelyn away from those djinn?”
“No.”
Dead silence. Jillian’s mouth worked, and she looked away from him, staring off into the opening that led to the dining room. The sunflowers he had brought her still sat on the table, incongruously bright notes in the storm-darkened house.
At last she said, “I’m not sure I want to hear any more of this.”
Exactly what he had feared. Well, what had he expected — that she would nod in understanding and forgive all his heinous deeds? For now, seeing them through her horrified eyes, he realized how dreadful his actions had been. He had not attempted to save Katelyn from Ali, Khalim’s cousin, for he had not cared about her. Indeed, he had not cared about Jessica, either. He had only wanted her because to possess her would hurt Jasreel so terribly.
“That is your choice, of course.”
Jillian rested an unsteady hand on the love seat’s cushion, then used it to push herself upward. However, she did not leave the room, as he had both expected and feared. Instead, she moved to the window and stared out into the storm. Rain lashed the window, blurring the landscape outside. “I don’t understand,” she said then, her voice faint, shaky. She cleared her throat and went on, the words a little stronger this time. “I mean, I guess I’m trying to reconcile the person I’ve spent time with this week with the man you’ve just described to me. How can you — how could you — ?” Her voice broke there, and she clenched her fingers on the windowsill, apparently using it to hold herself up, to prevent her knees from giving way.
He rose from the couch and went to her. However, he took care to remain a safe distance away, even though in that moment he only wished he could take her in his arms and hold her, tell her that he had changed, that he was not the same man who had left Katelyn to the wolves and had tried to steal the woman his brother loved more than life itself.
But he was the same man. Or rather, the anger and the resentment that had driven him to such actions were as much a part of him as the affection he now knew he felt for this woman, this mortal. Whether she could learn to accept all of him — well, he could not know the answer to that.
“It is difficult,” he said. “I can make no excuses, for that will not change what I did. Nothing can change any of it. But all I did was succeed in making Jasreel and Jessica’s love stronger than ever, and it seems Katelyn has found her own happiness as well, with this man Shawn Gutierrez who leads your community. And I — I told you that I was banished for breaking an oath. The oath I broke was the one I had sworn to keep all the world’s Chosen safe, for by casting my lot with Khalim, I was a party to his crimes as well. That was why you found me there in the outer circles. The elders and the people of Taos — and now Santa Fe — thought I had been given a just punishment. This is why I have done my best to avoid them. For if they learn of where I am, then they will most certainly send me back. And that is what I cannot bear. Yes, I can endure the outer circles again if I must. What I cannot bear is the thought of being there for all of eternity, and never seeing your face again.”
Tears glistened in Jillian’s eyes. But she didn’t move, stayed where she was, gripping the windowsill as if it was the only thing that held her up. When she spoke, the words came out in a cracked whisper. “Aldair…you are making this so hard for me. I can’t — I — ” She stopped there, pulled in a gasp of a breath. “I want to hate you. I should. But….”
“But?” he repeated. He didn’t want to hold hope in his heart. Hope hurt. And yet, she still stood there. She hadn’t run away. Surely if she despised him, wanted nothing more to do with him, she would have fled the room.
“But….” Another of those pauses. He could almost see the thoughts darting through her mind as she attempted to decide what she should say. “But I also know that holding on to hate is not the way to move forward. I’m not sure I can ever truly forgive the djinn for what they did. I guess what I’m trying to figure out is whether I can forgive you for what you did.” She stared out at the sodden landscape past the window, where the stalks of the sunflowers were bent almost double by the force of the rain and where new little rivers had formed in the bare dirt of the front yard. “Do you promise me — do you swear — that you had nothing to do with the Heat, with letting it loose on the world?”
At least that was one thing he could do, without reservation. “I do swear it,” he said quietly. “I will admit to you that I did nothing to stop it, either. Not that I could have. The decision had been made, and far more of my people wished for the world to be cleansed than they wished to preserve it as it existed. But although my motives were far from pure, I did keep Katelyn from perishing in the scourge that followed the Dying.”
Jillian’s full mouth twisted into a crooked smile. “So I guess you did the right thing for all the wrong reasons.”
“Yes, I suppose you could look at it that way.”
She nodded, but didn’t reply. Again he got that sense of her mind rushing at full speed, trying to process everything he had told her. Weighing what he had done.
And if she found him lacking, if she found the small kindnesses he had shown her could not possibly make up for all the dreadful things he had done before they met…what then?
Well, you will set her free, he told himself. Bad enough that you tried to force Jessica, when she came to you to save the people of the Taos community from Khalim. You will certainly not do such a thing to Jillian.
Whether he would have actually taken Jessica to his bed, Aldair couldn’t say. For all his other crimes, he had never forced a woman. His partners had always come to him willingly. But he had been so driven by his desire for vengeance, he could not truly say whether he would have stopped himself at the last moment. Luckily, he had not been compelled to make that decision for himself, since the elders had interceded and taken Jessica away before anything could happen.
It still bothered him, that he did not know for sure what he would have done.
Jillian let go of the windowsill and faced him. Without speaking, she reached out and took both his hands in hers. Her fingers felt very small and cold and fragile, and he wished he could draw her closer so he might fold her in his arms and warm her properly. However, he knew he did not dare to make such a gesture. She would have to approach him, if that was what she truly wanted.
To his surprise, she let out a rusty little chuckle. “I’ve been fighting with myself the past few days, you know. I didn’t want to acknowledge what I’d begun to feel for you. And now, hearing what you had to tell me….” She shook her head so her loose hair fell over her shoulders, rich and brown against her lightly tanned skin. “Part of me was almost relieved, because you’d given me the best excuse in the world to walk away. After all, how could I possibly be with someone capable of such things?”
“I see,” he said, as calmly as he could, even though her word
s sent another chill through him. He began to pull his hands from hers, but her fingers tightened immediately, preventing him from stepping away.
“No, you don’t, Aldair.” Lifting her chin, she gazed up into his face. “But then I thought of how it would feel to never see you again, to have you gone completely from my life. And — and I realized something. Jack died almost two years ago, and ever since then, I’ve been dead, too. Dead inside, because I was too frightened to let myself live again. I fought those feelings for you because I knew that meant I wasn’t dead. You made me feel alive. Even when I wanted to strangle you,” she added with a rueful smile.
Her words brought him more hope than he could have hoped for. At the same time, though, he willed himself to be cautious. She had not yet said that she wished to stay. She had not said the words he had always thought of as a trap, but which he longed for now like nothing he had ever longed for before…not even vengeance on his brother.
He waited, because this was her moment, and the last thing he wanted was to speak and ruin it.
Now her fingers weren’t quite as cold, although they still felt cool to his touch. She moistened her lips before saying, “I have to forgive you, Aldair. I have to, because that’s the only way I can admit to being in love with you.”
Such a surge of warmth came over him then, he knew he could do nothing but reply in kind, although he had managed to avoid saying those words his entire life. “I love you, Jillian. God witness these words, for I have never said them to anyone before. How could I, when I had to wait through the centuries for the perfect moment when I could be with you?”
Her eyes filled with tears, and she managed a gasping little breath, right before she said, “Why, that’s quite a line, Aldair. Is it true?”
“Of course it is true,” he replied, somewhat indignantly. Here he had just bared his soul to her, and she was questioning his veracity?
“Prove it,” she said, moving closer. Those stormy eyes were locked on his, filled with a warmth he would have been a fool not to recognize.
Forbidden (The Djinn Wars Book 6) Page 18