There was no hesitation. “Yes.”
“Even if things couldn’t be…normal…between us? Sexually speaking.”
“Yes.”
He frowned. “This is going to come out wrong…”
“Which is fine, because I’ve already put my foot in it with you back at the clinic. We’ll just be even.”
Rehv had to smile, but the expression didn’t stick. “I have to know…why. Why would you come back.”
Ehlena lay back down against the pillows and, in a slow sweep, moved her hand up over the satin sheet that covered her stomach. “I have only one answer to that, but I don’t think it’s going to be what you want to hear.”
The cold numbness, which was returning as the remnants of those orgasms he’d had dissipated, sped up its reclamation of his body.
Please let it not be pity, he thought. “Tell me.”
She was quiet for a long while, her stare shifting out toward the blinking, glowing view of Caldwell’s two halves.
“You ask me why I would come back?” she said softly. “And the only answer I have is…how could I not.” Her eyes flipped to his. “It doesn’t make sense to me on some level, but then, feelings don’t make sense, do they? And they don’t have to. Tonight…you gave me things I not only haven’t had for a long time, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt.” She shook her head. “I wrapped up a body yesterday…a body of someone my own age, a body of someone who likely as not had headed out of his house the evening he was killed with no clue that it was his last night. I don’t know where this”-she gestured back and forth between them-“thing with us is going. Maybe it’s just a night or two. Maybe it’s a month. Maybe it’s longer than can be measured by a decade. All I know is, life is too short not to come back here and be with you like this again. Life is just too short, and I like being with you too much for me to give a crap about anything other than having another moment like this.”
Rehvenge’s chest swelled as he stared at her. “Ehlena?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t take this the wrong way.”
She drew in a deep breath and he saw her bare shoulders tighten. “Okay. I’ll try not to.”
“You keep showing up here? Being who you are?” There was a pause. “I’m going to fall in love with you.”
John found Xhex’s place easily enough because it was only ten blocks from ZeroSum. Even still, the neighborhood might as well have been in a different zip code entirely. The brownstones on the street were elegant and old-world, with the curlicue shit around all the bay windows making him think they were Victorian-although how he knew that with such surety he hadn’t a clue.
Hers wasn’t a whole building, but a basement apartment in one particularly attractive walk-up. Underneath the stone stairs that led up from the sidewalk there was an alcove, and he slipped in and used the key on a strange copper-colored lock. A light came on as he stepped through, and he saw nothing exciting: Red-washed floor made of stone slabs. Whitewashed walls made of concrete blocks. At the far end there was another door with another odd lock.
He’d expected Xhex to live someplace exotic and filled with weapons.
And plenty of French stockings and stillies.
But that was fantasy for you.
Down at the far end of the hallway, he opened the other door and more lights flared. The room beyond was windowless and empty except for a bed, and the nondecor was no surprise, considering what the basement hall was like. There was a bathroom across the way, but no kitchen, no phone, no TV. The only color in the room came from the floor of old-fashioned pine boards that were finished to a fresh honey glow. Walls were whitewashed, like the corridor, but made of brick.
The air was surprisingly fresh, but then he saw the vents. Three of them.
John took off his leather jacket and laid it out on the floor. Then he removed his boots, keeping his thick black socks on.
In the bathroom, he used the toilet and splashed his face with water.
No towels. He used the tail ends of his heavy black shirt.
Stretching out on the bed, he kept his weapons on, although not because he was afraid of Xhex.
God, maybe that made him stupid. The first thing he had been taught in the Brotherhood’s training program was that you never trusted symphaths, and here he was, risking his life by staying in the home of one-likely through the day, without having told anyone where he was.
Yet it was exactly what he needed.
When night fell again, he was going to decide what to do. He didn’t want out of the war-he liked fighting too much. It felt…right, and on more than just a defend-the-species kind of level. It felt like it was what he was supposed to be doing, what he had been born and bred to do.
But he wasn’t sure he could go back to the mansion and live there.
After a while, the lights went off when he didn’t move, and he just stared into the darkness. As he lay on the bed with his head on one of the two rather stiff pillows, he realized it was the first time he had been truly alone since he’d been picked up from his shitty apartment by Tohr in that big-ass black Range Rover.
With total clarity, he remembered what it had been like to live in that hellhole of a studio in not the wrong part of town, but the downright dangerous section of Caldie. He’d been terrified every night because he’d been scrawny and weak and defenseless, drinking only Ensure because of his bad gut, weighing less than a vacuum cleaner. The door that had separated him from the drug users and the prostitutes and the rats that were the size of donkeys had seemed thin as paper.
He had wanted to do good in the world. Still did.
He had wanted to fall in love and be with a woman. Still did.
He had wanted to find a family, have a mother and a father, be a part of a clan.
Didn’t anymore.
John was beginning to understand that emotions in the heart were like tendons in the body. You could pull them and pull them and pull them and feel the pain of the distortion and the stretching…and up to a point, the joint would still function and the limb would bend and support weight and remain useful after the stress was off. But it wasn’t an infinite kind of thing.
He’d snapped. And he was damn sure there was no emotional equivalent of arthroscopic surgery.
To help ease his mind into rest so he didn’t drive himself nuts, he concentrated on what was going on around him. The room was quiet, except for the heat blower, but that didn’t make much noise. And the building was empty above him, with no sounds of anyone moving around.
Closing his eyes, he felt safer than he probably should have.
Then again, he was used to being on his own. The time he’d spent with Tohr and Wellsie and then with the Brotherhood was an anomaly. He’d been born in that bus stop alone, and he’d been alone in the orphanage even as he’d been surrounded by an ever-shuffling deck of kids. And then he’d been out in the world by himself.
He’d been brutalized and gotten over it without help. Been sick and healed himself. Made his way as best he could and done an okay job of it.
Time to get back to basics.
And the core of himself.
That time with Wellsie and Tohr…and the Brothers…was like a failed experiment-something that had seemed to have potential, but that, ultimately, was a failure.
THIRTY-TWO
Night or day, it didn’t bother Lash.
As he and Mr. D pulled into the parking lot of an abandoned mill and the Mercedes’ headlights swung around in a fat arc, it didn’t matter to him whether he met the king of the symphaths at noon or midnight, as he somehow wasn’t intimidated by the motherfucker anymore.
