“Only one woman has captured my heart,” Kristoff said, raising the sword again.
I looked at him in surprise, hope bursting into unreasonable but undeniable being deep inside my heart, growing with a desperate prayer. I thought you just said you didn’t love Angelica above all others.
Kristoff shot me a look. I’m a little busy. Now is not the time to discuss relationships.
I think it’s just a perfectly fine time. Who have you given your heart to? I was suddenly giddy, almost light- headed as I waited for him to answer.
“And she took me by surprise,” Alec said with a rueful little laugh. “I wanted to destroy her as I’ve destroyed all the others, hoping each time that it would do the job, drive you beyond bearing.”
Dio! You pick now to have this conversation? Right now? This second? This instant?
Yes! Now! Stop stalling! Tell me!
“But you weren’t driven beyond bearing. You never were. So I changed tactics. I figured if I couldn’t rip your heart out the way you ripped out mine, I’d destroy the other parts of your life.”
“He didn’t rip out your heart. His wife did. He had nothing to do with it,” I pointed out.
Alec cracked open one eye and glared at me. “Pia, you do not interrupt a man when he is explaining his master plan after having been soundly defeated. Don’t you watch any James Bond movies?”
“Sorry,” I said contritely, with a pointed look at Kristoff. “Go on. Both of you.”
Alec opened his mouth to speak, checked himself, then glanced at Kristoff. “I’m missing something, aren’t I?”
“She’s making me admit I love her,” Kristoff said, his voice and face equally pained.
“You said it!” I shrieked, clutching his chest and kissing the pained expression right off his face. “You can’t take it back! You said it out loud in front of a witness! Wait-are you sure? You’re not just saying that because you have mild feelings of affection for me, and don’t want to break my heart? You’re not just being nice?”
“Alec?” Kristoff asked, his hands on my butt.
“Are you daft, woman? You can’t tell he’s arse over heels in love with you?” Alec shook his head, winced at the movement, and slowly pulled himself onto the bench until he could slump down with a grunt. “You must be losing your touch, Kris. None of the others doubted you were anything but a devoted slave to their merest of whims.”
“This is different,” Kristoff said, hoisting me up so my mouth was level with his. “This is my Beloved.”
Say it again, I demanded as I bit his lower lip, welcoming the lovely taste of him as he gave me what I wanted.
I love you, Pia. I don’t know why you ever thought I didn’t. I believed I was making myself quite obvious.
That’s because you’re a man, and it doesn’t occur to you that other people might think you were so much in love with your dead girlfriend that you could never love anyone else.
Never is a long time.
So you really did love her?
Yes.
I thought about that for a moment. That’s OK. I’ve been in love before, too. You’re right. What we have is totally different from that. Say it again.
I love-You’ve loved other men? What other men?
I giggled at his outraged tone, releasing his lip. “You knew I had been with men before you.”
“Been with,” he said, an irritated flare to his nostrils. “‘Been with’ is completely different from ‘in love with.’ I will require the names and addresses of these men you were in love with.”
“So then I decided, What the hell, I’ll let her live. And they’ll live happily ever after, while I continue to suffer untold, endless agonies because I had a Beloved once, and his first wife killed her before I could so much as bed her. This is the thanks I get for my generosity.”
“Shut up, Alec,” Kristoff said, scooping me up in his arms and starting toward the door that led back into the building.
“You’re going to leave me here?” he called after us. I stopped licking Kristoff’s ear and looked back at Alec. “I’m wounded! I let you win! I didn’t kill Pia and watch you die slowly, in agony, while laughing and telling you about each exquisite moment of hell that my life has been since your first Zorya wife killed my love.”
“Set me down,” I told Kristoff. He did so. I took his hand and marched back to where Alec was hunched over on the bench. “I think it’s time we got this over with once and for all. Kristoff, your wife was a Zorya.”
“Yes.”
“Did you know she was going to kill Alec’s Beloved?”
“She said her oxen ran wild and trampled the woman. I did not even know she was Moravian.”
I turned to Alec. “You said your Beloved was melted. Did you see Kristoff’s wife do it?”
His face twisted. “Not the actual cleansing, but I didn’t need to. She was decapitated, and her body was horribly mangled, with parts of her burned away. Only the damned reaper light could do that.”
“That’s what she meant,” Kristoff said slowly, his gaze inward.
“Your wife?” I asked.
“Ruth said she’d tried to clean away the stain of the death, but couldn’t. I thought she was speaking metaphorically, but she was speaking literally instead. . . .”
“She was telling the truth about the trampling, then.” More puzzle pieces were coming together. “But then she probably panicked when she saw a dead vampire, and used the light to try to get rid of the body. Poor woman. She must have been scared to death to try to hide the whole thing. And then when Alec found out and went nuts . . .”
Alec froze for a moment before slumping back against the bench, one hand over his eyes. “An accident. It was an accident after all. All this torment, each second since that moment a unique hell of its own, and her death was due to an accident. I should have killed the oxen.”
“You did. They were my best team,” Kristoff said, then cleared his throat when I nudged him. “Why did you never tell me this?”
Alec sighed and looked up at him. “You were my most hated enemy. You killed the one woman who could save me. Or so I thought. I turned you, pretended I was your friend so I could shadow your every footstep, and make sure that you suffered just as I did. I drove away your women, tried to take your Beloved, and plotted with infinite detail both of your demises. Why do you think I didn’t tell you?”
“But you’re not Kristoff’s enemy, are you?” I said gently, leaning against Kristoff, so happy I thought I might break into song at any moment.
“No,” he said dolefully. “Sometime over the last hundred years the enjoyment has gone out of watching you suffer.”
“You didn’t tell the reapers where to find Kristoff’s girlfriend, did you?” I asked, suddenly wary.
Alec shook his head. “I told her about him. I never thought she’d run straight out into the pack of them. I did my best to save her.” He looked up at Kristoff. “I was truly sorry about that.”
“I know.”
“Before this breaks down into a true Hallmark moment and we all start buying each other Precious Moments figurines, why don’t we get you off the roof?” I said, holding out my hand for Alec. “The sun is moving and it’s going to hit you soon. And although the blistering is gone off your face, you don’t look like you could stand too much more.”
Alec let us help him to his feet, supporting him between us as we got him back to the door. “If I said I was sorry about everything, Kris . . .” He let the sentence trail off, but looked expectantly at Kristoff.
Kristoff nodded and socked Alec on the shoulder in a guy gesture of forgiveness, but Alec was still recovering from that ball of light, and tottered into the wall. Kristoff righted him with a word of apology, dusted him off, then held open the door for him.
“Why did you tell Frederic we were coming to kill him?” I asked.
“I knew by that time that I couldn’t kill you. I figured I’d have them do it for me,” Alec admitted.
“But you couldn’t even do that, could you, you big galoot?” I said, taking Kristoff’s hand. Mattias bounded up the stairs to greet me, refusing to stop kissing my free hand until Kristoff pushed him down half the flight of stairs.
“Kristoff!” he said in a wounded little voice as he picked himself up. Magda and Ray were next to him, looking
