through his skull.
She was shaking her head again. “He was mixed with the blood of two different types of shifters. There was no way he could have survived.”
“You don’t know that,” X heard himself saying. This was really Ary’s area of expertise. She and Papplin were doing some research on the shifters and their unique DNA, so they would know the probability of a mixed-breed shifter’s mortality. What X did know was that this was a new scenario for the shifters to deal with. As of now it had only been known that shifters mated with like shifters. Occasionally there was a human shifter mating, but those were usually in the Gungi where the humans were more likely to believe and to keep quiet about the existence of the shadows.
“He may have had other problems and that’s why he didn’t live. Without an autopsy you can’t be sure why he died.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said with a sigh. “None of it matters anymore. I don’t know how Rolando found out about the baby. He must have thought I’d killed him, for whatever reason. I guess he never really knew me at all, either.”
He was tired of holding back, tired of restraining himself where she was concerned. Up until this point he’d never had to treat her with kid gloves and he was sick of doing it now. This wasn’t the Carprise he knew. Gone was the fight in her, the flash of anger in her eyes. Now she was standing there feeling sorry for herself because of circumstances that were beyond her control. And X had had enough of it.
He moved to her then, grabbed her by the shoulders, and pulled her closer to him.
“Stop it! Shit happens all the time, Caprise. It happens to the best of us. You do what you have to do to get through the situation, to survive. And that’s what you did.”
“I should never have run. If I’d stayed with him—”
X cut her off. “If you’d stayed with him you don’t know if he would have killed you or not. You said yourself you had no idea what a tiger would be doing in the Gungi. He was too far away from home for it to be for any good reason.”
“I was far away from home,” she said sullenly.
“No. The Gungi is a part of you, Caprise. It’s time you start to accept that.”
“Every time I turn around somebody’s telling me to accept something. This is my life—why can’t I live it the way I want?”
“Because the way you want isn’t the right path. I used to think the same way, Caprise. I used to feel like the whole world was against me. That if there were something bad in the grand plan, it was scheduled to happen to me.”
X remembered those thoughts with a certain irritation of his own. While his running away had been in the form of moving from Atlanta to DC with his parents, it had still been running. He’d wanted to stay, to stand up to any more of the Jeremiahs of the world, but his parents were too afraid of the repercussions.
“What did happen to you?” she asked when his eyes had taken on a distant look.
He was still holding her close, but she could move enough to press her palms against his chest. “What happened to make you the hard-ass you are?”
Because really, a lot of this advice X was tossing at her could be hurled right back in his direction.
As she’d expected, X took a step back from her. “This isn’t about me. What happened tonight was about you and that tiger. He shouldn’t have been in the Gungi when you were and he shouldn’t have been here in the city. But that’s all over now. We can finally move on.”
“And how will we do that?” Caprise asked. She wiped her eyes, feeling a lot stronger than she had just a few minutes ago.
What X had said to her was right. A part of her had known all along what happened with little Henrique wasn’t her fault. She had been half delirious with pain, so whatever that shaman and midwife told her, she would have believed. Then it seemed as if she’d traded one type of pain for another as realization dawned on her—she’d had a son and now he was dead. Her parents were dead also. Everyone she loved left her in some form or another. Everyone except Nick; he’d always stood strong.
“How will we move on, Xavier? You’ve killed Rolando, that’s all well and good. I’ve told you what you so desperately wanted to know about me. Now what?”
“Now we continue to work to get rid of these Rogues. I have to clear my name since I’m now suspected of murder, and you have to find yourself a real dancing job because I really will become a cold-blooded murderer if I have to sit back and watch men gawking at your half-naked ass one more night.”
He’d said a lot, Caprise thought with a nod of her head. But he hadn’t answered her question.
“And what about us? What do we do, Xavier?”
He took another retreating step. Caprise thought about following him, about crowding him the way he always seemed to do with her, but she suspected X needed to be handled differently.
“We do whatever we want,” he told her. “Isn’t that what you said, that you want to live your life the way you please?”
She nodded. “I did say that.” She’d said a lot of things and, if she remembered correctly, so had Nick just before she’d left Havenway to go find X. He’d said that once things were set in motion there was no turning back. Caprise remembered how it felt when X had looked at her in that alley, like no one else existed but them. And when she’d gotten closer to him, even amid the scent of anger, rage, and humans, she’d picked up something else. It had been subtle, surrounded by the other scents, but right at this moment it was burning her nostrils, sending licks of desire through her body.
“So that’s what we’ll do. I’ve got some other things to talk to Nick and Rome about,” X said, moving toward the door. “You, ah, get some rest, or something.”
Caprise nodded. There was more she could have said; she could have pushed a little harder. But she didn’t. That wasn’t how these cards were going to play out. So she stood there looking at X as if she were listening to his every word, obeying his commands. When truth be told, Caprise was planning, getting her strategy in order. And as he closed the door behind him she shook her head. “Xavier Santos-Markland, you have no clue.”
Chapter 21
Darel closed the door to his apartment and walked straight to the bar. He picked up a glass, poured himself a healthy helping of vodka, and emptied it within seconds. He hadn’t bothered to turn on any lights because he knew his way around his own apartment. In a couple of hours it would be full daylight. Police would no doubt be combing the alley behind Athena’s once more. He’d seen those two cops there the night before, the night Rolando had killed that Shadow.
Darel had seen that coming a mile away. That shadow had been with Caprise each time she’d come to the club; he’d stuck to her like glue. Once Darel mentioned that to Rolando and pointed the shadow out to the shifter when he’d come into the club that night, he’d known how it would end. Rolando was a loose cannon, just as Darel had tried to tell Sabar. And he wasn’t to be trusted. That was something else he’d found out. He was still trying to decide how he was going to deal with that little fact.
“Busy night?”
The female voice startled him, but Darel didn’t show it. He’d thought he was alone and even now when he inhaled deeply he did not pick up a scent. A second later the lights came on and what Darel saw standing in the middle of his living room made him pour another glass of vodka and take another deep gulp.
“I thought it was time we talked,” she said.
Like hell. When someone wanted to talk they were usually fully dressed, not standing there wearing what was the equivalent of underwear.
Bianca Adani was in his apartment. She was Sabar’s girl. She was also the ex-girlfriend of Boden Estevez, the crazy-ass
