Rapture's Edge

“When did that happen? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“We haven’t exactly been doing much talking,” she said sarcastically, but he cut her off.

“You can’t seriously think I’m letting you leave this house while they’re still out there. We haven’t figured out what we’re going to do yet—”

She yanked away from him. Anger blazed to life inside her, and the confusion she’d felt only moments before turned to hot, crackling indignation.

“We? There is no we, Demetrius. Just because we—” she waved her hand in the air, skipping the obvious, “doesn’t mean I have to ask your permission to do anything.”

His face hardened. A low, sinister growl rumbled through his chest. And just like that, they were back to where they’d been for years: enemies.

She scowled at him. “Don’t think you’re going to growl me into submission, either. I don’t belong to you —”

“Yes, you do!”

Suddenly, he was in her face. His arms wrapped around her, pinning hers behind her back. His hands encircled her wrists, hard. He stared down at her, enormous and frightening, his eyes burning with a dark, savage fury. “You do belong to me. You are mine and I am yours, and there is nothing on this Earth that can ever change that! Stop fighting it!”

“Let me go!” She trembled with fury and tried to break away, but there was no release from the iron bands of his arms.

“We’re bonded, baby girl, whether you like it or not, so you better get used to the idea.”

Her breath huffed out like she’d been punched in the stomach. “Bonded! You’re taking a hell of a lot for granted, Bellator!”

He put his mouth next to her ear and said deliberately, “Don’t make me put you over my knee.”

Because she hated, absolutely hated what the thought of that did to her, what his voice and strength and heat did to her, how weak he made her feel, she froze. Very, very quietly, she said, “And don’t make me remind you why we are in this situation in the first place.”

He jerked.

Still with that deadly softness, she said, “If you think we’re past the fact that I found you standing over my dead father with a gun, you’re wrong. If you think that just because we had sex I’ve forgotten the past three years and everything my people have been through, you’re wrong. And if you think that I would allow myself to trust someone who won’t even give me the courtesy of an explanation, you are very, very wrong.”

A tremor ran through him. His hands around her wrists loosened, and she broke away and stared at him. He was frozen, staring back at her without expression. All emotion had drained from his face, his eyes. He looked dead. When he spoke his voice was clipped, hard.

“You read your father’s journal. You know what Silas is—”

“Yes, I do. But what are you? Let’s just get it all out now, Demetrius, why don’t we?” Trying to speak over the fierce booming of her heartbeat, she hurried on. “Because I for one am sick of secrets. I’m sick of lies. I’m sick of not knowing the truth. You’ve helped me, you’ve helped Mel, but what about the rest of it? How do I really know what your endgame is, if there is one? If you won’t tell me the truth, how can I ever trust you?”

He stood there staring at her in silence for what felt like forever, his face flat, an icy stillness growing between them that felt like being slowly submerged in a sea of inky black water. Her body and blood were freezing from the feet up.

Finally, in Latin, slowly and deliberately, gazing into her eyes, he said, “Your life before mine. Your needs before mine. Your desires and hopes and dreams before mine. I pledge you my life, and upon my death I pledge the service of my everlasting soul. There shall be no others before you, now, until the end of all time. On my honor, I swear it.”

Her mouth fell open. She stared at him, stunned.

Ritual words. Bonding words. Words she’d only ever heard spoken in a ceremony that involved hands painted with henna and fastened together with silk ties, crowns of rosemary and candles and the exchange of rings.

And his face still so flat, but his voice now was pure agony, reverberating with everything he wouldn’t allow his face to reveal. It was awful, almost too painful to hear.

But he wasn’t finished yet. He said, “You evidently are not bonded to me, but I am bonded to you. That is permanent. That is forever. I have no endgame except to love you, Eliana. And protect you, and keep you safe. It’s up to you if you believe that or not, but the truth of it remains.”

She swallowed, feeling like something very large and heavy had fallen on her head. Her heart didn’t know whether to stop or pound or explode, so it settled on a horrible kind of twisting that felt like an animal in death throes trapped inside her chest.

“Tell me what really happened that night,” she demanded, her voice harsh. “If you love me like you say you do, tell me what happened and let’s be done with it, once and for all.”

Eerie, the look he gave her then. His flat expression contorted into something truly dreadful to behold, something she knew all too well from years of avoiding it on her own face in the mirror: desolation.

She waited, she held her breath, and it felt like the air all around them held its breath, too, everything suspended like motes in the sunlight. Like her heartbeat.

But he didn’t speak. He held his silence and the raw, barren look on his face didn’t change, but no sound came out of his mouth and that was almost too much for her to bear. In that moment, she felt like something inside of her died.

She took a step back. Another.

He said, “I’ve never lied to you. Give me your trust and I can prove it.”

Her laugh was a bitter, ugly thing that she might have been ashamed of if she weren’t so choked with the ashes of her hope. “If you were in my shoes—if the roles were reversed—would you trust you?”

He stared at her, unmoving, miserable. His mouth twisted. He whispered, “No.”

She closed her eyes and briefly wondered how long it would take before her ravaged heart just decided to stop beating, bereft as it was of any reason to keep on.

“Finally.” She opened her eyes and looked at him. “Finally an honest answer.”

Then she Shifted to Vapor and left her clothes in a pile at his feet, leaking air.

35 Overripe Fruit

The problem with Shifting to Vapor and leaving all your clothes in a heap on the floor is what happens when you Shift back.

In other words, if you’re anywhere except a nude beach or alone, people are going to stare.

Eliana crept, as slowly as she could without being noticed, over the smooth plaster ceiling of the hospital corridor. Nurses and doctors passed unawares beneath her as she flowed silently forth, navigating around buzzing light fixtures, trying to be as unobtrusive as a small cloud of mist slinking along a rough ceiling possibly can. She passed the visitors’ area and the information desk and swept into an elevator with a hugely pregnant woman holding the hand of a small boy.

Stretched thin as a breath of air, she hovered against the metal fixture on the roof of the car that held a row of florescent lights. The boy—towheaded, barely a toddler—looked up and smiled. To her horror, he pointed and said to his mother, “Thmoke.”

“There’s no smoke, honey.” The mother didn’t even look up. The elevator doors slid shut, and the car began a smooth climb. But the child would not be dissuaded.

“Thmoke!” he insisted, and stomped a foot. “Thmoke!”