by Bec McMaster
Light began to penetrate her closed eyelids. A gentle hand stirred through her hair. Gemma blinked awake, the familiar shape of a man's lips bare inches from her own. Ashen brown hair fanned around his face like a halo.
"Dima?" she whispered.
Fingertips traced her cheek. "I'm here. I wanted to be here when you woke up."
Woke up?
God. She felt like every inch of her had been pummeled, and her throat burned. Gemma tried to lift her hand, but it was trapped against her body. What on earth—?
"Here. Take it easy." Obsidian helped her to sit.
Gemma swayed, looking at the heavy stone walls and the barred door. Her left arm was strapped across her chest in a leather sling somewhat akin to a straitjacket, and every inch of her body ached. Pain pounded behind her temples, like an ice pick straight through her right eye.
"Where am I?" she slurred.
What had happened? Was that blood on her split skirts?
"We're in Thorne Tower."
Thorne Tower?
Home to traitors, violent murderers, and dangerous political dissidents. And this time she was on the other side of the bars. Gemma's head jerked up, and suddenly it all came rushing back to her in a jumbled mess. There was blood splashed through her memories. Byrnes screaming at her. A flash of Ingrid's face. The bang-bang-bang of the gun in her hand, and an odd image of Malloryn crawling away from her, leaving a smear of blood behind him as she stalked toward him, bringing the pistol up—
"Where is Malloryn?" she whispered hoarsely, because her memories ended there, watching him crawl for the forlorn pistol on the ground as she lifted her pistol and pointed it at the back of his head.
"I don't know. They weren't going to lock me up, but I insisted. I didn't want you to be alone. The last I heard he was missing."
The hot flush of not-tears swept through the back of her sinuses. A sound broke from her chest; a squeaky wheeze that sounded like something dying.
Damn it. She knew herself.
She didn't miss when she meant to kill.
Obsidian held his arms out.
"You shouldn't touch me." Not when there was blood on her hands. Not when there was so much darkness staining her soul—
"I'm not afraid of your darkness, Gemma," he told her, and she realized she must have breathed the words out loud. "There's nothing inside you that could ever make me turn away. Your darkness is but a mirror to mine."
He knew.
She looked up helplessly, but he merely held his arms open as if she belonged there.
And then she was in them, and they wrapped around her, bringing with them all the absolution she'd been hoping to find.
"It's not your fault," he murmured, stroking her hair.
"They put that cursed neural implant in my head, didn't they?" All her memories were scrambled. She could barely piece together the last few days, let alone... today? Had it happened today?
"Yes. I had to shock you with one of the guards’ stunners to bring you down." Obsidian began to explain, telling her everything he knew.
Oh, my goodness. Isabella was dead. Malloryn... missing. It was all too much for her.
"I'm here." He picked her up in his arms, dragging her onto his lap as he slid onto the trundle bed.
It was all starting to come back, little fragments starting to piece themselves into the pattern.
Isabella looking at her. Saying those words.
London Bridge is falling down....
Light draining out of the world until it felt like she was staring down a narrow tunnel. At the end of the tunnel she could hear Malloryn's voice. Byrnes. Ingrid. Obsidian. But it was like looking through the wrong end of a telescope.
All that remained was a high-pitched whine in her ears and a voice.
"Your mission is to kill the queen."
What happens if someone gets in my way?
"You must kill the queen."
But what if—?
"Kill. The. Queen."
A hollow silence.
"Or die trying."
Suddenly she could see it all running swiftly through her head, as if someone had sped up the action. Byrnes stepping between her and the throne room, a determined look on his face and his hands held defensively.
Men in the Coldrush uniforms sprinting toward her and then falling, one by one by one. A bullet hole slammed through a man's forehead, and Gemma squeezed her eyes shut, trying to forget the look of shock on his face as he fell.
Blood on her hands....
Splashed across her memories....
"And the... others?" she whispered, half afraid of the answer.
"Alive." A warm hand rubbed her back. "Ingrid wanted you to know she was sorry for dislocating your shoulder. And Byrnes said to tell you he's still picking bullet fragments out of his ass, but he appreciates the fact you shot him there and not in the head. He also said something about how you were wrong; you're top of the list. I don't know what he meant by that."
Gemma broke into a laugh-sob, because that sounded so like Byrnes, and yet at the same time she knew exactly what the bastard was trying to tell her. What Ingrid was trying to tell her.
This time the real sobs began, racking through her chest.
Obsidian's arms squeezed her tighter, and Gemma wrapped herself around him desperately. Her fingers curled in the slick leather of his coat, and her face nuzzled into the crook of his throat as she let it all out.
She needed this so badly.
Strong arms to protect her from the rest of the world. From herself. Kisses that scattered over her cheek and forehead, cool against the heated flush of her skin.
Someone who could understand her, who would never flinch from the darkness within her, because he had his own share of ghosts.
"The memories fade," he said softly, rubbing her back.
And she had the sudden horrible realization he spoke from experience.
Who had been there for Obsidian when he woke with blood on his hands?
What had it felt like to know it had been her blood?
Had he searched for her?
It was one thing to hear him speak of it, quite another to know deep in her gut exactly how it felt to have the blood of someone you loved on your hands.
"How do you deal with it?" she choked out. "How do you ever let yourself forget?"
"I'm not the one you should ask for advice. I wanted to forget. I wanted to carve the pain from my heart, and so I asked Ghost to put me through a year's worth of conditioning under Dr. Richter's special treatment—the kind he used for X. I got what I asked for. I lost all my memories of you. They tortured them out of me until the mere thought of you brought pain.
"It wasn't until we arrived here last year to enact Balfour's revenge scheme that I began to remember. The first time I saw you it was like a knife to the chest. I hadn't realized Ghost asked Richter to reprogram me at the same time. Every time I saw you I hated you, but I couldn't hurt you. It drove me crazy to crave your presence so much and not understand why. Touching your skin reawakened some part of me they'd locked deep within. Kissing you reignited all I'd ever felt for you. When I kidnapped you, the conditioning started to fail, and you began to bloom in my heart, until those memories started to resurface."
He looked at her intently. "Don't do what I did, lyubov moya. It hurts to know you were used to make others suffer. It should hurt. Gaining back everything I lost is worth all the pain in the world, just to know you again."
She swallowed.
Hard.
"And I will be there for you," he whispered, lacing their fingers together as he lowered his mouth to hers for a glancing kiss. "Every step of the way. For you are mine. You've always been mine. I will take your pain for you if you cannot bear it. I will guard your back when your heart is heavy. But you are stronger than me, and neither of us knows what is going on out there. It might not be... too bad. Don't think the worst. Not until we know the facts."
We. It made all the difference. "What now?
"
He hesitated, and she felt it.
"The Council is considering what to do with you. Without Malloryn around to speak on your behalf, there was talk of execution. I believe Charlie had a word with his mentor, Blade, and both he and the Duke of Bleight pushed for the Council to hold their vote until they had all the facts, but it concerns me. The queen is frightened. She doesn't understand what happened. All she sees is how close you came to taking her life. I didn't wish to wait to discover what her verdict is, so I came with you just in case I needed to get you out."
Execution.
Her blood ran cold. All she could see were the faces of those Coldrush Guards. "Perhaps I deserve it."
"If you're going to say such foolish things, then I swear I shall leave you here to face your fate. Da, your body pulled the trigger," Obsidian snapped, "but you were controlled with the neural implant. The question is, my love, are you going to let those who controlled you get away with it?"
He might as well have slapped her.
"Are you going to let them win, Gemma? Because that doesn't sound very much like the woman I know."
Fury flared. She'd been so focused on what she'd done that she hadn't considered the alternatives.
Someone planted that damned thing in her head.
Someone sent her to kill the queen.
Of all the torments she'd suffered in her life, the sheer indignity of having her own will stolen from her was the worst. "You have a point."
"Good. There's one more thing you need to know.... It's Balfour, Gemma."
For a second she didn't think she'd heard him correctly. What did Lord Balfour have to do—
And then every inch of her went cold, as she realized he was watching her carefully, the muscle in his shoulders tensing as if prepared for her reaction.
"Lord Balfour is still alive," he said softly. "He's the true enemy. The one setting all the pieces into play...."
"What?"
She saw again the school. Her training masters. A fellow student, lying on the ground before her, the only thing standing between her and survival.
"Pull the trigger, cadet."
And she'd hesitated, until that student scrambled for his forsaken knife.
It was the first time she'd ever killed.
She'd never forget that bloodied mist.
The sound her fellow student's body made when it hit the ground.
"Good." A hand coming to rest upon her shoulder. "Lord Balfour will be pleased with your progress, cadet. You have passed your year end exams."
The sickening lurch in Gemma's chest almost brought up her gorge. She could never scrub that image from her mind. She could never forget the name of the man who'd shaped her.
The one who'd sent her to kill Malloryn, because she looked like the woman he'd once loved.
"How?" He died.
Obsidian brushed a strand of hair from her cheek, watching her expression as if to gauge her response. "Balfour was taking the elixir vitae before Malloryn cut his throat the night of the revolution. In the advanced stages of the Fade, death creates a vampire, but it only exacerbates the elixir's effects upon the craving virus. When Balfour resurrected he woke in a coffin. You have to physically remove a dhampir's heart or decapitate him in order to truly kill him.
"He's the one who gathered us together after Falkirk burned. He's the one we pledged our fealty to. I've been working for him for over a decade, though never in the open." A flicker of consternation crossed his face, and he pressed his hand to his head. "I can't remember why I agreed to it. All he's ever done is destroy our brotherhood, and turn Ghost into the man he is now. But Balfour's behind everything. I should have told you earlier. I-I never realized how much you hated him—how much he'd hurt you—until that night when you told me of your past. Gemma, I would never.... I would never have worked for him if I'd known what he did to you."
She couldn't seem to breathe.
Balfour.
Alive.
It all made so much sense.
She pressed her unsteady fingers to her mouth. The day's events were pure Balfour. He and Malloryn had hated each other with a passion that could burn London to the ground. Of course, he'd have wanted Malloryn to suffer.
And how better to do it than to wield her as the weapon that would cut the duke down?
This was twice now that Lord Balfour sent her to kill Malloryn.
And rage bloomed within her like a flame given oxygen.
"He's currently in Russia," Obsidian murmured. "Please say something, Gemma. I'm sorry. I should have told you."
"Yes, you should have damned well told me!" Unable to control her fury, she smashed her fist against his chest. "I hate him. I hate him so much. He stole over half my life from me. He made me what I never wanted to be."
Obsidian took the blow, and the second.
Gemma's rage snarled in her chest as she saw the look upon his face. The quiet acceptance as if he'd expected to be punished for this secret. Her third blow paused, her fist hovering in the air between them.
He too, had been forged by Balfour.
His memories stripped from him. His choices stolen. What did he know of trust? Even now, she could sense him holding a part of himself back, as if to protect himself.
He was trying.
And surely he would fail at times, for every instinct trained into him taught him to guard himself first. He'd never learned how to reveal the secret depths of his heart.
But he'd thrown his lot in with Malloryn's for her.
He'd betrayed everything he'd ever known for her.
Gemma's sudden fury drained out of her, and she opened her closed fist, splaying it wide across his chest, gasping a little at the sudden fierce ache of pain. Of understanding.
For all she'd lost, this man had lost more.
He'd lost himself.
"I didn't want you to hate me. I didn't know what to do—how to tell you. It was a shock to discover he'd had a hand in forging both of us, and then there was no time," Obsidian admitted. "I have been so lost, Gemma. Everything I ever believed.... It means nothing. Everywhere I look, I see an enemy trying to manipulate me, even Malloryn. You have been my one constant. The only guiding star I could see in any of this, but even then I wasn't sure how much I could trust you."
She swallowed the hard lump in her throat. "Balfour used me to hurt Malloryn. He knew it would be the one thing that could twist the knife in Malloryn's chest."
"I know." Gentle fingers brushed a strand of hair behind her ear. "He was the one who demanded we have you assassinated and delivered to Malloryn's doorstep to find. It was the first moment of my awakening. I have never felt such rage before, and I couldn't understand why. But it led me back to you. As much as I hate him for what he's done to you, I will never regret finding you again."
His head dipped, lips brushing against her ear. "I trust you, as much as I can. I trust your judgment. But to give so much of myself goes against my very nature. I will try to do better, I promise. If you could ever forgive me?"
Gemma turned her mouth to his, her hand clasped over his cheek. The roughened trace of his stubble—something she'd never felt upon his jaw before—reminded her this man was real. Flawed. And hers.
"There is nothing to forgive," she breathed, pressing her forehead to his. "And perhaps, once all is said and done, we will have a chance to learn together. For you are not the only one who knows nothing of trust."
Gemma could barely breathe as she waited for his response.
He grabbed her by the back of the neck, his mouth crashing down upon hers. Claiming her in a kiss both furious and demanding. She could sense the need in him, the question he asked. Be mine. Please. Gemma grabbed a fistful of his hair, her tongue thrusting into his mouth, answering as best she could.
Always.
She'd never understood what lay between them. Why him? Why, of all the men who'd sought her heart, had he been the one who stole it?
The second they'd met, she'd been drawn to him.
She'd always had the sense he could see right through her carefully constructed words and flirtations. A single glance from those dangerous gray eyes stripped her to the bone, as if only he saw the real Gemma. The little girl who'd learned to lock her true self away, even as she so desperately wanted someone else to see it.
Perhaps it had been her innate conscience realizing she had met the other half of her soul. Like finding like. On the surface, they couldn't be more different if they tried. Obsidian held himself apart, watching the world with cold, wary eyes. But she'd walked the same path as he. Buried her pain and rage beneath a smile and a laugh. Thrown herself into living her life as completely as she could, determined to beat the odds others had given her, even as nothing ever felt completely real. Different lives, yes, but still the same, at heart. She understood this man, in a way she'd never understood another living person.
They broke apart with a pant, though Gemma was loathe to destroy the moment. She wanted more. She wanted to allow passion to steal away all her hurt, all her pain, but that would only be using him in this moment.
When they came together again, she wanted their moment to be about them. Nothing else. No hurt. No pain. No rage. Only a consummation of love, where she could show him the secrets that lurked deep in her heart.
"We need to go," she breathed.
Obsidian nodded, drawing back from her, and looking right through her as if he saw the words imprinted on her soul. He shifted out from underneath her, slinking toward the bars. "Just in case the queen makes a hasty decision she can't take back."
"What are you doing?" Gemma whispered, as he set his hands around the bars of the cell. "Obsidian? I thought you had a lock pick."
"I like your 'magic'," he told her, granting her the faintest of smiles. "But this works for me."
Gemma staggered to her feet, her face puffy and her lips swollen. "You won't break the bars! They're reinforced and were designed specifically with blue bloods in mind.... Oh."
The bars were warping as he flexed his arms. Muscle rippled beneath the tight-fitting black coat he wore. "Why do you think I insisted upon staying with you?" His teeth were clenched together. He wrenched the bars almost half a foot apart. Another inch. Just wide enough to ease through.