Lover Mine

Ten minutes later, Blaylock ducked his head out of the door. His eyes were locked on the floor and his emotions were in an upheaval, which made sense. No one liked to see a buddy self-destruct, and having to conversate with the person who’d sent the poor bastard into a free fall wasn’t exactly a happy-happy.

“Listen, John’s gone into the locker room to take a shower. I got him to quit the Running Man impression, but he’s... He needs a little more time, I think.”

“Okay. I’ll keep waiting for him here in the hall.”

Blaylock nodded and then there was this awkward pause. “I’m going to go work out now.”

After the door eased shut, she picked her jacket and her weapons up and wandered down toward the locker room. The office was empty, which meant Tohr had gone along his merry way, no doubt to set up some Tim the Tool Man Taylor time with a doggen.

And the resonant quiet told her there was no one in any of the classrooms, gym, or clinic.

Sliding down the wall, she let her ass bottom out on the floor and hung her arms off her knees. Letting her head fall back, she closed her eyes.

God, she was exhausted...

“John’s still in there?”

Xhex snapped awake, her gun pointed right up at Blaylock’s chest. As the guy leaped back, she immediately flipped on the safety and lowered the muzzle.

“Sorry, old habits die hard.”

“Ah, yeah.” The guy motioned his white towel toward the locker room. “Is John still in there? It’s been over an hour.”

She flipped her wrist up and looked at the watch she’d snagged. “Christ.”

Xhex got to her feet and cracked the door. The sound of the shower running wasn’t much of a relief. “Is there any other way out?”

“Just through the weight room—which opens only into this hall.”

“Okay, I’m going to go talk to him,” she said, praying it was the right thing to do.

“Good. I’ll finish my workout. Call me if you need me.”

She pushed through the door, and inside, the place was standard-issue, all banks of beige metal lockers separated by wooden benches. Following the sound of falling water to the right, she passed by a bay of urinals, stalls, and sinks that seemed lonely without a bunch of sweaty, naked, towel-snapping males putting them to use.

She found John in an open area with dozens of showerheads and tile on every square inch of the floors, walls, and ceiling. He was in his T-shirt and running shorts and was sitting against the wall, his arms hanging off his knees, his head down, the water rushing over his huge shoulders and torso.

Her first thought was that she had been outside in exactly the same position.

Her second was that she was surprised he could stand being so still. His emotional grid was not the only thing lit up; that shadow behind it was likewise afire with anguish. It was as if the two parts of him were both in a kind of mourning no doubt because he’d suffered or been witness to too many cruel losses in this life... and perhaps another. And where all that put him emotionally terrified her. The dense black void created in him was so powerful, it warped the superstructure of his psyche... taking him where she had been in that fucking OR.

Taking him to the pinpoint of madness.

Stepping over the tiled lip in the floor, her skin goose bumped at the chill in the air that came from his feelings... and the reality that she’d done it again. This was Murhder, only worse.

Jesus Christ, she was a fucking black widow when it came to males of worth.

“John?”

He didn’t look up, although she wasn’t sure whether he was even aware she was in front of him. He was back in the past, sucked in and held in the vise of memory...

Frowning, she found her eyes following the path of the water that rivered its way out from under him and traveled across the tilted tile plane... to the drain.

The drain.

Something with that drain. Something to do with... Lash?

Within the embrace of the solitude and against the backdrop of the quiet sound of the water’s spray, she unleashed her bad side for a good purpose: In a great rush, her symphath instincts dove into John, penetrating through his physical territory and going deep into his mind and his recollections.

As he lifted his head and looked up at her in shock, everything went red and two-dimensional, the tile becoming a blush pink, John’s dark, damp hair changing to the color of blood, the water twinkling like rose champagne.

The images she got were drawn with a quill of terror and shame: a dark stairway in an apartment building not unlike the one he’d taken her to; him a small pretrans being forced by a fetid human male...

Oh. God.

No.

Xhex’s knees gave out and she wobbled—then just let herself go to the ground, landing on the slick tile so hard her bones rattled and her teeth clapped together.

No... not John, she thought. Not when he was defenseless and innocent and so very alone. Not when he was lost in the human world, scrounging to survive.

Not him. Not like that.

With her symphath side out and her eyes undoubtedly glowing red, they sat there staring at each other. He knew she’d read him and he hated her knowledge with such a fury she wisely kept any sorrow or commiseration to herself. He didn’t appear to resent that she’d invaded him, though. It was more like he wished like fuck he didn’t have that to share with anybody.

“What does Lash have to do with it,” she said roughly. “Because he’s all over your mind.”

John’s eyes shifted to the drain in the center and she got the impression he was seeing blood pooling around the stainless-steel cap. Lash’s.

Xhex narrowed her eyes, the backstory becoming pretty damned guess-able: Lash had found out about John’s secret. Somehow. And she didn’t need her symphath side to tell her what the fucker would have done with information like that.

A baseball announcer would seek less of an audience.

As John’s stare came back to her, she felt a shattering communion with him. No barriers, no worries about being vulnerable. Even though they were both fully clothed, each was naked before the other.

She knew damn well she was never going to find this with any other male. Or any other person. He knew without words all she had been through and everything that those kind of experiences spawned when they were triggered. And she knew the same for him.

And maybe that shadow on his emotional grid was a kind of bifurcation of his psyche caused by the trauma he’d been through. Maybe his mind and his soul had gotten together and agreed to cut the past out and put it toward the back of his mental and emotional attic. Maybe that was why these two parts of him were so vividly animated.

Made sense. And so did the vengeance he was feeling. After all, Lash had been intimately involved in both sets of wrongs, his and hers.

Information like John’s in the wrong hands? Almost as bad as the horror that had actually happened because you relived that shit every time someone else learned of the story. Which was why she never talked about her time up in the colony with her father, or that shit in the human medical clinic... or... yeah...

John raised his forefinger and tapped beside his eye.

“Mine are red?” she murmured. When he nodded, she rubbed her face. “Sorry. I’m probably going to need to get another pair of cilices.”

As he shut the water off, she dropped her hands. “Who else knows. About you.”

John frowned. Then mouthed, Blay, Qhuinn. Zsadist. Havers. A therapist. When he shook his head, she took that to mean it was the end of the list.

“I’m not going to say anything to anyone.”

Her eyes went over his huge body from those shoulders to his powerful biceps and his tremendous thighs— and she found herself wishing he’d been this size back in that grungy stairwell. At least he wasn’t as he’d been