Heart of Atlantis

She shook her head. “Not yet. I need a few minutes.”

After warding the room with his strongest magics, Alaric left Quinn to gather her thoughts. He only went as far as the bathroom, where he sped through a quick shower, but every instinct he had urged him to hurry, hurry, hurry.

After he cleaned and dried his clothes with Atlantean water magic in the space of a few seconds, he returned to sit silently next to her on the bed. When she raised her tearstained face to him, he asked her again.

“Can you bear to tell it?”

She nodded and fisted her hands in the fabric of her sweater. As she told him all of it, from the press conference to the murder, he grew more and more furious, but at her first mention of Anubisa, he glowed nearly incandescent with rage.

Literally.

She had to shield her eyes.

“Hey, you’re going to need to tone it down for the human,” she said gently.

He instantly dimmed the energy so she could bear to look at him again.

“My apologies. I am holding so much power, channeling it to support Christophe and Serai in stabilizing the dome and the Trident, that it takes little to push me over the edge.”

“I understand, but if you want to hear all of it, you’re going to need to calm down a little. I don’t want to cause your brain to explode.”

He nodded, but she could tell from the way the muscles in his jaw clenched that he was gritting his teeth very hard. She told him the rest of it, right up to the point where he’d arrived to rescue her.

“He told you he wanted to impregnate you,” Alaric said.

She could tell from the way he so carefully enunciated that he was on the verge of going berserk.

“He said it, but he didn’t touch me. Not like last time,” she said softly, almost too softly to be heard.

His entire body tensed beneath her, as if steeling for a blow. “Last time?”

She bowed her head and told him something she never, ever talked about anymore. “Six years ago. When that murderous bastard of a vampire kept me as his plaything and—worst of all—I let him. Alaric, I know you think you want me, but you’d be far better off without me.”

Silence. Utter, complete silence. It took a while for her to gather the courage to look up at him, but when she did, the revulsion and rejection she’d expected were nowhere in sight. Instead, a far more powerful emotion blazed forth from those beautiful emerald eyes, and he kissed her so thoroughly that she’d nearly forgotten her own name by the time he lifted his head.

“There is nothing you could ever do that would make me think less of you, mi amara,” he said. “There is no deed, no matter how horrific you may have found it, in your past that could compete with the grace and courage of your soul. Tell me, if you will, or do not tell me, if you would rather never speak of it. Know this, though: I will fight everyone on this planet—even you, if it must be—who attempts to make me give you up.”

Chapter 22

Alaric watched Quinn carefully as a yawning chasm of insanity beckoned at the edges of his consciousness. He fought it back in the toughest battle he’d ever waged. This was absolutely, in no way, about him.

His rage for what some monster had done to her.

His anguish that she had been violated.

None of it—not any of it—was about him. If he didn’t control his emotions and contain his fury, he would lose her trust forever.

He locked down, hard, on all of it and simply rested his cheek on the top of her head and held her. Said nothing, did nothing; just held her for a very long time and focused on the scent of her still-damp hair. She smelled like flowers and some kind of fruit.

She smelled like home.

Finally, she stirred a little and looked up at him, and he could tell she’d been crying.

“Thank you,” she said huskily. “That’s exactly what I needed.”

“I hope I can always do whatever you need, especially when my every instinct is crying out for the opposite,” he confessed.

“You want to protect me. You want to go back and find that vampire, whom I killed myself by the way, and kill him all over again. Piece by piece, so he suffers for hours.”

“Suffers for days. Months, perhaps,” he growled. “But instead, I will ask you if you are willing to tell me what happened.”

“I don’t talk about this,” she said, her eyes dark pools of painful memory. “Not in casual conversation, not ever, really. Riley doesn’t even know, but Jack does. He helped me find Moira.”

Alaric watched as she clenched her hands into fists and then relaxed them, over and over. He wondered if she even realized she was doing it.

“Moira was my therapist. She helped me to be able to talk about it and, after a long while, to be able to heal and move on.” She shrugged. “Pretty stupid, a big, tough rebel leader needing a shrink, right?”

“You’re not that big,” he said lightly. “More like a pocket-sized rebel leader.”

She elbowed him, but she did smile a little, which was what he’d intended.

“No matter how tough you are, nobody survives pain, or torture, or violation without needing some help to get through it, mi amara. Even Conlan would not have survived the aftermath of captivity without support from your sister.” He was amazed that he’d kept his voice so steady. No wound he’d ever suffered in battle had pierced him deeper than the agony of being unable to undo her past.

“And you. Riley told me how you helped Conlan get through that and cope with everything that happened when she and he met. You’re kind of a hero, aren’t you?”

“I prefer rock star,” he said loftily, wondering a little wildly when the gods had given him the ability to banter while the walls he’d built so carefully around his heart over the centuries, stone by stone, shattered into rubble inside him.

It was almost a miracle. She was the miracle.

Quinn stared down at her clasped hands and drew in a shallow, fractured breath. “It was a terrible plan,” she began, her voice so quiet he could hardly hear her.

“A terrible plan. Since then, I’ve come up with a hundred ways—a thousand ways —we could have done better, but we thought it was a great idea. We’d sneak into his lair, stake him as he slept, and save our little corner of the world. He was a ruthless, murdering animal, and somebody needed to take him down.”

“And somebody was you,” he said, hating it. Understanding it.

“Somebody was me,” she agreed. “Except, he didn’t stake so easily. We didn’t know, back then, the full extent of the powers of the old ones. We didn’t realize they could wake up and suck a human into their minds during the daylight hours.”

He clenched his jaw against the questions burning in his throat for release, giving her time to tell him the story in her own way.

“He caught us, and he killed everyone else with me. He . . . he took a liking to me. Thought I was the girlfriend of one of the shifters or something. Didn’t realize I was one of the fighters. So he decided that he’d keep the whore for himself. Spoils of battle,” she said, bitterness dripping like acid from each word.

“I’m glad you killed him,” he said fiercely; the only comment he’d allow himself.

“I didn’t.” She lifted her face to look him in the eyes. “I couldn’t—not for a while. For far too long. I had no opportunity and no weapons. He was way too strong for me. Instead, I came up with horrible plan, part B: I pretended to like him. I thought if I could get him to trust me, I could find out more about his plots and conspiracies, and . . . and . . .”

She broke down and started to take deep, calming breaths. “Breathing exercises. Moira taught me to use them, you know? For a while, they were all I had to fight back the nightmares.”