This couldn’t be happening. She hadn’t denied herself the brief time she might have had with him, hadn’t compacted her emotions into an infinitesimal speck to ensure his survival just to watch him die in front of her. It wasn’t that she thought he was helpless—she knew he wasn’t—but his Aspect wasn’t normal, either. He couldn’t wield it in his defense like an ordinary Aspecter could. He could only let it act in his defense. And she wasn’t going to take the risk that this time, it wouldn’t make the right decision for him.
She slammed every ounce of her will against the chains Danvers held and shoved herself to her feet. Every tendon in her body felt as if it ripped from the bone as she flung herself in front of Random. Danvers’s blast of Aspect hit her square in the chest. The impact knocked her off her feet, shoved her back into Random like a wrecking ball.
He didn’t go down—he had better balance than she’d given him credit for. His arms came around her, steadied her as they skidded back together on the loose gravel. She blinked in rapid succession as her vision turned white. If she’d had an ordinary upbringing, she’d already be unconscious from taking a concentrated hit of Aspect with no shields in place. But she had practice with taking these kinds of hits. She’d done it every Friday of her sixteenth year.
She would pass out soon, but for now, she fought through it.
Random’s body kept her upright when Danvers gripped her chains in a fist of Aspect and pulled. Random’s arms around her waist held her to him when Danvers commanded her to moved forward. And then Random’s Aspect did what it always did—it acted of its own volition in the manner it thought would serve its wielder best.
Random’s power curved down her arms like a caress, slid carefully, gently, around her chains, and pried Danvers’s grip from her. Then it sunk deeper, searching, testing. It felt along the inscribed lines of her bondage and then did the impossible.
Casually, as if it took no more effort than blinking, Random’s Aspect sank into her chains and shattered them.
It was a profound, life altering moment and she didn’t have the chance to appreciate it. A fresh wave of Danvers’s Aspect surged toward her. She blinked through the white lights in her vision and snapped a shield into place.
It wasn’t an ordinary shield. It also wasn’t anything she had ever tried to use in actual combat, either. It was an idea, one she had played with over the years but never used in practice. Because if it had worked, she hadn’t wanted her father to know.
Danvers’s Aspect barreled into that shield. Rather than blunt his power, as a traditional shield did, hers embraced it, curving ever-so-slightly. It bent just enough beneath the blow to catch the attack, to hold it for a brief moment, and then rebound it upon its wielder.
Danvers didn’t block—he didn’t have time to, couldn’t have prepared for something he’d never have expected—and his own attack hit him full-on.
He vanished.
Valkyrie lunged for the place where he’d been but her body refused to move, her sight whittled down to a narrow pinprick. She fought to tell Random that Danvers wasn’t gone, that it was just illusion, but her throat was so tight she could barely suck air through it, much less speak. The sparkles in her vision went blindingly white and, much to her mortification, she passed out in Random’s arms.
4
The only thing that kept Random from driving straight to a Council medical facility was the inescapable pull of his Aspect demanding that he take Valkyrie home instead. Considering the inconvenience his power became any time Valkyrie so much as needed a snack, he trusted it knew things he didn’t, and she would be fine. Besides which, she’d probably kill him if she woke up in a hospital.
He’d pulled her Jeep into his driveway before he realized he’d brought her to his home instead of hers. She would likely be as pissed about waking up in his house as she would have been about waking up in a hospital, but he wasn’t changing course now. Besides, she had told him to stay out of her house. He always respected a woman’s wishes.
The lack of doors on the vehicle was a convenient aid to his getting her out of it and carrying her inside. He wished he could say he swept her into his arms, but it was slightly less graceful than that. He considered himself to be in excellent shape but Valkyrie had an inch on him in height and she was a freight train of solid muscle.
As he climbed the five steps up to his front porch, he was forced to admit there was absolutely nothing graceful about his hauling her up them, and he was glad she was unconscious for the ungainly event. Especially the part where he had to half set her down to open the front door.
She woke up when he was five feet from the couch, because of course she did. She couldn’t even stay passed out for a length of time that befitted the amount of damage she’d taken. No, she was Valkyrie Winters, and she had to do everything slightly faster and better than everyone else.
He didn’t even try to hold her. He dropped her at the first sign of movement. She landed on all fours like a cat, immediately sliding into a sweep that would have taken his legs out from under him if he hadn’t backed well away from her the second he’d let her go.
“Not the enemy here, love.” The endearment rolled off his tongue before he could stop it.
She zeroed in on him and stilled. He watched her take him in, then take in the room, then settle back on him before the tense lines of her shoulders eased.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“My place.”
She frowned. “You live in a condo.”
“I did. Now I live here.”
She stalked for the door. He stepped in front of it.
“Get out of my way,” she ordered. It was a good tone for ordering people about, appropriately terse and with all the right undercurrents promising terrible things would happen to him if he didn’t comply.
Too bad for her, not complying was what he did best. “You just got knocked unconscious. Where do you think you’re going?”
“After him.”
“He’s gone.”
“He didn’t vanish,” she said in a patient tone—so patient it was condescending, “he’s an Illusion Aspecter.”
“Since I didn’t think ceasing to exist had suddenly become a new branch of Aspect, I did gather it was something like that. He did, however, get into a vehicle and drive away.”
“You let him go?” she growled.
“Couldn’t see him to stop him, love.”
“Why are you calling me that?”
Because I’m an idiot who can’t help himself. “Because it irritates you,” he lied. “I am irritated by tonight’s turn of events, so I thought I would share the joy.”
“So sorry if I interrupted your date, but I never asked you to come after me.”
“I wasn’t on a date, and you’re physically incapable of asking for help when you need it.”
“Lauren Hale seemed to think it was a date, and I didn’t need help. If you hadn’t come rampaging after me I wouldn’t have had to throw myself in the literal line of fire, and I might actually have what I need right now.” Her eyes flashed with the anger that limned her entire body, as if she were a vessel storing righteous indignation, and once she hit critical mass she’d go off. If he wasn’t still recovering from the fear that he’d almost lost her earlier, he would poke her just to see if she exploded.
And why did she keep bringing up the date he hadn’t even been on?
“Lauren did think it was a date. I corrected the misunderstanding. And forgive me, but you did need help. I watched you sit still and get punched in the face by a man who had literal Aspect chains around you. So what the fuck is going on?”
“It’s work.”
“Your work for the Council took you to a bar to meet a dangerous man without backup?”
“Yes.”
“I already heard DuPont canned you. Lie better, Kyrie.”
“It’s none of your business.” She lifted her chin defiantly. Did she have to be so goddess-damned beautiful when her eyes were tel
ling him to fuck off? He was a masochist if ever there was one.
“Fine. You want to play it that way? Illegal use of Aspect occurred in Council territory, to which I was a witness.” He pulled out his phone. “I feel the need to do my civic duty and report it.”
“Don’t.”
His thumb hovered over his contacts list. “Give me a reason not to. Talk to me.”
Her mouth stayed resolutely shut.
“Since words are so difficult for you, why don’t I start with what I know? There are no Illusion Aspecters in Seclusion powerful enough to do what this one did tonight. I can think of precisely one in the entire country who is, and he nearly killed us all six months ago. He’s also conveniently the only person I know who does weird experimental shit with Aspect like carve chains into people.
“There. I talked. Now it’s your turn.”
Valkyrie looked down at her wrists. She still couldn’t believe the chains were gone.
“How did you destroy them?”
He shrugged, as if wiping away sixteen years of bondage in the space of a breath was nothing. “I didn’t like them.” He sank a world of meaning into the statement. “How did he get them on you in the first place?”
Her breath left her in a rush. Random didn’t know. Whatever his Aspect had shown him when it severed her bonds, it hadn’t shown him how old they were. She’d been so sure he would know, had prepared herself for the questions he would have about that.
Part of her had been relieved, had been selfishly glad the truth would finally come out. But it hadn’t, it wouldn’t, and that was good. That was better. Safer. For him.
“I don’t know. I don’t understand how the chains worked.” That much, at least, was true. If she had understood them, she would have removed them herself. “Thank you.”
He jerked back. “What?”
“Thank you,” she repeated. “For removing them.” He didn’t understand the depth of what he’d done, but she did.
He walked up and pressed his palm flat against her forehead. She went completely still. His body was barely a foot from hers, close enough to reach out and touch, to bury her head in the curve of his shoulder and breathe in his scent.
She batted his hand away. “What are you doing?”
“Checking for a fever,” he murmured.
“Why?”
“You just thanked me.”
“Isn’t that what normal people do when someone helps them?”
“Yes. It just isn’t typically what you do.” He gave her a half smile, more a slight curving of lips than anything else. “Especially not when it comes to me.”
There was something a little wistful in his voice. Combined with the intensity in his eyes as he looked at her, she could almost believe that the things he’d spent the last year telling her were true. That she wasn’t just another phase for him. That he actually wanted her.
She realized she’d stopped breathing, stopped doing anything other than staring into his eyes.
“Kyrie?” His voice was thick and heavy.
Those two syllables cut through her walls like nothing else could. He was the only person who had ever called her that. She’d clung to it over the years, as if it were a separate identity she could lose herself in. When being Valkyrie or Ms. Winters was too difficult, when she hated both of those people, she could pretend she was Kyrie. Imagine the kind of person Kyrie could be.
But she couldn’t be Kyrie right now, because Kyrie wanted to close the space between them and take his mouth with hers, wanted to lose her body in his, and the way he’d spoken her name told her Random’s thoughts weren’t far from her own.
“He has my father,” she blurted out. The words had the intended effect of chilling the warmth in Random’s eyes, of making him take a careful step back from her.
“Does everything in your life come back to Elijah fucking Winters?”
Valkyrie’s face shut down. Random took a deep breath and ran his hand through his hair. “I’m sorry. That was uncalled for.”
Blood dripped off her hand to plink on the hardwood floor. He shook his head, retrieved a first aid kit from the bathroom and used the time to consider the situation logically, unemotionally. When he returned, he set the kit on the table and gestured her over.
“Give me your hand.” Amazingly, she did. He set to work with the kit’s tweezers, picking out bits of glass. She never so much as flinched, even when he had to dig in for a particularly stubborn sliver. “What was all the glass-breaking about anyway?”
She shrugged. “Something pissed me off. Nothing to do with you.”
The very fact she felt the need to qualify that made him pretty certain it had had something to do with him. Wasn’t that interesting?
He finished picking out all the glass, moved on to antiseptic, and segued back into the real conversation. “We don’t know that Danvers has Elijah. Siren didn’t actually see your dad when Danvers had her in captivity. She just saw an illusion of him.
“He has him.”
“Valkyrie—”
“He knew things about me only my father knows. He has him.”
He let out a frustrated breath and tore open a package of gaze, pressing it to her palm. “Okay. Say he does. Who is he? And how did you find him?”
“He told me to stick with calling him Danvers.”
“Figures.”
“And I didn’t find him. He found me.”
He grimaced. “The envelope you brought to my office?”
He’d known something was off when she’d stormed in, but he’d ignored it. Ignored it because she’d pissed him off, because he’d needed distance from her after what she’d said to him at Jace’s wedding. That wasn’t the first time she’d cut him to the core, but he had intended for it to be the last. Now here she was in his kitchen and he’d lost all of his senses a minute ago and almost asked if he could kiss her. Would have asked, if she hadn’t spoken.
“Yes.” He wished she was saying that to the question he hadn’t asked, rather than the one he had. “Whoever delivered it got through the estate’s wards without damaging them. The only person I know who can do that is you. Or the person who made the wards.”
He finished taping the gauze down and reluctantly let go of her hand. “You built new wards when Siren was living at the estate.” Valkyrie’s now sister-in-law had tumbled into their lives with a mountain of problems on her heels, and she’d been attacked twice on the Winters’ estate before Valkyrie had laid her own set of wards inside the ones her father had built.
“I took them down after she left.”
“Why would you do that when you knew there was an issue with the wards your dad left on the estate?” He cursed in two languages as the answer dawned on him. “Bait? Please tell me you were not playing bait.”
She said nothing. Loudly.
“Did you think your father was somehow involved in the ward breaches all along? Because Siren’s life was on the line and you didn’t say anything.”
“I didn’t think it then. Not with the first attack on her. That one broke the wards. It was the second instance that made me think it was a possibility Elijah was involved and I did do what was necessary to protect her after that. But she isn’t living on the estate anymore. And she’s strong enough now she doesn’t need anyone’s protection.”
Random squeezed his eyes shut and didn’t bother to point out that Kyrie still lived on the estate. Telling her to protect herself was a losing argument.
“Why would your father tell Danvers anything? He’s been hunting the man for years. Danvers kidnapped your mother. He experimented on her Aspect, he—”
Raped her. Shit.
“Yes,” Valkyrie said softly. “Odds are good that you met my real father tonight.”
“Does he know?”
Valkyrie shrugged. “My mother wasn’t very far along when Elijah rescued her. Danvers may not have realized she was pregnant.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
> “Kyrie—”
“I’m fine, Random.”
He held at bay every instinct that told him she wasn’t fine. Denied the urge to take her in his arms. She didn’t want his support. She didn’t want his concern. She never had.
“Why would your father give him anything?” Random repeated. “Elijah Winters doesn’t strike me as the kind of man who breaks under duress.”
“I don’t know.”
She was lying to him. He’d have bet everything he owned on the fact because he knew her. Had known her since they were kids, before she’d closed herself off completely. Back when he could still talk her into playing cards with him and Jace. She’d trounced her little brother every game, but Random, Random had only lost when he wanted to. He knew her tell, and it was nothing as simple as a physical movement, a tick.
It was in her voice, in the slight shift in timbre when she had something to hide. If he’d wanted to win a game, he’d simply told her he was going to win it. She would inevitably tell him he wouldn’t and he would know, by the way she said it, whether she had a decent hand or not.
She didn’t have a decent hand right now. But if he called her out on it, if he tried to push her, he wouldn’t win the game. She would simply walk away from it.
Before Jace had left for his honeymoon, he’d told Random that he thought Kyrie was keeping something about their father from him. And Random had long thought there was something off about Elijah Winters. To put it simply, the man had always given him the creeps. His great aunt, Ella, had never liked Elijah either, which told Random pretty much everything he needed to know.
After Elijah had gone missing, it had been the first time in years that Random had seen any glimmer of the Kyrie he remembered. That day she’d come home with him, when they’d—he shut the thought down and gave himself a good, hard mental shake.
This wasn’t about him and her. She didn’t want him. She didn’t love him. He could accept that. But he couldn’t change how he felt about her. He’d been fine with the idea of running away from those feelings until this mess landed in his lap.
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