“My brother was there,” I said thinly. “And the Black Mage.” Shutting my eyes didn’t help. I kept seeing the field, those shadows slinking along the edge of the woods. “Those wolves—were they part of your pack?”
“Some of them.” Trowbridge turned, yanked an appliqued coverlet from the quilt rack, and gave it the sniff test before he tossed it on the bed.
I shook my head. “How did you escape from that?”
He threw a pillow on the bed then bent for another. “Your brother set up an explosion that destroyed a section of the outer fence. My wolves saw freedom and went right for it, just like he intended them to. It was a bloodbath. Half of them never made it through the gap in the wall.”
“You could have been killed,” I said in horror.
“The Shadow used the diversion to lead us to another exit. When I saw what was happening, I tried to go back to lead my brothers to safety, but he pointed his hand at me, like you did downstairs at Anu, and I felt this thing, like a band of something invisible…” A look of disgust. “It felt alive. And when I tried to claw it off me, I could feel the burn of magic. It wrapped itself around my chest, binding my arms.”
“I couldn’t pull myself out of it. It was like being caught in the jaws of the wolf trap all over again.” He swallowed. “One of my pack got hit in the flank, he was dragging himself toward me … and I couldn’t go to him. I wanted to. I tried. But I couldn’t. I followed your brother out of the field like a whipped puppy on the end of a leash.” Mouth sealed, he ran his tongue over his top teeth, then gave a shrug that strove for indifference, but failed. “When the magic wore off, I almost killed him. But he kept saying, ‘You can make it up to them. I know the location of the Safe Passage. I’ll take you to it, once we get back home.’”
“I thought I was sending you to paradise. I just wanted you to live. To heal.” My voice cracked. “Not to spend nine years—”
“I did heal. I did live.” Comet trails spun around his pupils.
What was it? The faint eau de Mannus? The knowledge that I’d done to Dawn Danvers exactly what Lexi had done to him? Whatever the impetus, all I knew was that I needed to be out of that room as fast as possible. To find a place to hide, to think, to rock myself as I mourned for all those stupid happily-ever-afters that had kept me afloat for the last six months.
I spun for the door—
“Don’t.” That’s all he said. “Don’t.” Spoken so softly—not an order, but a request, maybe even a plea. And it stopped me—that faint underlying thread of “please”—right in my tracks.
The door’s glass knob cut into my palm. “I wasn’t running.”
“You sure?”
Forehead against the door, I nodded miserably. “I just need some space for a bit.”
“I’m done with that,” he growled. “No more space between us.”
The air stirred between us. “If you touch me,” I quavered. “I’m going to break down.”
A man-sigh. Then, softly, “I hate it when you cry.”
“I’m not crying,” I said through my teeth. Not yet, anyhow. Even if it meant locking my knees and blinking like a caution light that never was going to turn green.
Because sooner or later, I knew I had to do that.
And I would. In a minute or two.
“Forget that,” grumbled his scent. Just when dry land was virtually in sight, an invisible stream of Trowbridge yum stretched out and touched me. With delicacy, at first—a deft brush over my white knuckles, followed by a sweet “steady, girl” caress along the back of my hand. Then, ever possessive, it wound itself around my wrist, pausing to give a soothing and apologetic stroke to the bruise beginning to form on my skin. Onward it spread over my skin—fondling and touching the things it considered its possessions. “This is mine,” it said, licking the inside of my elbow. “And these are two of my most favorite things,” it crowed, as it made a quick and impertinent detour to graze my breasts.
It slid up my neck. “Remember me?” it asked.
My chin crumpled when his scent touched my cheek—tender-sweet.
“I’m walking now,” Trowbridge told me. “You don’t have to move. I’ll come to you.” And he did, crossing the distance between us faster than I could think. “All the honeyed words in the dictionary aren’t going to get us out of this mess.”
Because that’s what “this” was. A huge hodgepodge of daydreams and nightmares; sun-spun myths and gritty facts; bleeding wounds and toughened scars.
And now—thanks to the consequences of my desperate decision revealed to me in a Goddess-cursed dream—it felt like our fate was written four ways, the answers hidden within the folds of a paper fortune-teller. There were no easy choices written on those wings of paper, instead there were symbols—a Fae, a wolf, a black walnut tree, and a twin.
I still wanted him. I couldn’t be in the same room with him without my body reacting to his. But how could he get past this? How could I?
Guilt.
It swarmed over me, biting like fire ants.
His heat warmed my back. I knew all I had to do was lean back a little, and I’d fall into his arms. But unspoken words were the Hoover Dam between us.
My One True Thing leaned into my ear and whispered, “Listen, I got over hating you.”
And with that—bang! The Hedi floodgates flew open.
“Aw shit!” He cursed as a sob broke through my control. “Don’t cry, sweetheart.”
There went my chin; there went my knees.
Trowbridge said, “Aw shit,” again, then suddenly, I was being swept into his arms and carried—a rigid, half-curled ball of sobbing woe—five paces across the floor. He paused, possibly to consider—chair or bed?—and went for the safest choice.
I cried into my hands as he sank into the easy chair and tucked me into his lap. I shuddered as he coaxed my head toward the convenient hollow below his collarbone. I sobbed into his neck when he wrapped a comforting arm around me.
The man, not the Alpha, rubbed my back. “You cry it out, okay?”
And I did, long and hard.
“I like your hair when it’s loose,” he observed, after the storm had passed. A tug from him, a wince from me, and then my hair was free of the elastic’s hold. He threaded his fingers through the uncombed mess and fanned it down on my shoulder. “I like it just like this.”
“You going to listen to me now?” When I gave a silent nod, he pressed his chin on the top of my head. “That first month in Merenwyn was so fucking hard, it would have been easier to die. I thought if I ever got my hands on you…” He stretched to reach for his mother’s crocheted pillow, then passed it to me. “Here, wipe your nose with this.”
“I can’t,” I quavered. “It’s too nice.”
“Okay, hang on.” He did a thigh press, reached under himself, and pulled off his towel. Back down we went. “Here take this.” A vague wave toward my nose. “Blow, and then I’ll tell you the rest.”
I did.
“I was thinking about you one night before I fell asleep.” His fingers combed my hair away from my ear. “And then … There you were. Real as life. If I could have waded out of that damn water, I would have wrung your little neck.”
I dabbed at my leaking nose.
“Then this … thing happened.” His tone turned bewildered. “I remember thinking, ‘I’m going to kill her,’ and then … I don’t know how to describe it. You just … flowed into me. Like I’d opened a book, and I could read you. All of a sudden, I heard your thoughts like they were mine. Not only that, I could see some of your memories. I know it sounds whacked, but it was like I stood inside you, and if I turned around, I’d see every part of you.”
