Her blue eyes went wide with shock, and then a rabid snarl contorted her face and a low growl of warning spilled from her lips.
In that moment, he realized that her compatibility didn’t matter. He couldn’t ask anything of her. He’d been there the night she’d been rescued. He knew what she’d gone through. It wasn’t fair to ask her to do anything more than heal and grow strong.
Nicholas ignored the pointless surge of hope, shoved aside the pain of his wound, and showed no weakness. His tone took on the same disappointed, lecturing quality his father had used on him too many times when he was a child. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? You don’t go around stabbing people like that.”
She tried to pull her hand away, and it wiggled the knife, burning like fire. Her lips pulled back, baring her teeth. “Let me go!”
“Not a chance. You’re staying right here until Andra shows up.”
“She thinks I’m sleeping. I snuck out while she was in bed with Paul.”
“Sorry to break it to you, kiddo, but I texted her. In fact…”
The heavy beat of footsteps came pounding down the hall. Andra raced around the corner, her face pink and her shirt on inside out. Paul was only a couple of steps behind her, and he was shirtless and barefoot.
Tori let out a scream of frustrated outrage.
“Thanks for coming,” said Nicholas. “Now that you’re here to deal with her, I can have this knife removed. I suggest you figure out something to do with her before she hurts someone for real next time.”
He didn’t wait around to see how Andra dealt with her deranged sister. It was none of his business. As much as he wished otherwise, as much as he would have gladly altered his life to help Tori heal, all he could offer her was the added burden of saving his life.
It was just as well. She was too young for him to think of her as anything but a child, and she was too unstable for any kind of relationship, even if he could overlook her age. It didn’t matter how patient or gentle he would be if he didn’t live long enough to help her. Tori was obviously the kind of girl who would stab a man in his sleep. The Synestryn had turned her into that, robbing her of the life she could have had.
He hoped that Andra figured out something soon. Tori was a danger to herself and others, and unless they wanted people to get hurt, they were going to have to lock her up. She’d spent her childhood imprisoned by Synestryn, being tortured and fed their blood. He didn’t think captivity was going to sit well with her.
Just the thought made him sick.
She could be his. In a few years. When she was older and had healed.
He wasn’t sure he had that much time left. His lifemark was dying. The rate at which his leaves were falling had increased recently. There was no way to know how much time he had left, but he was fairly sure it wouldn’t be enough for Tori to truly heal.
Pain throbbed in Nicholas’s bones. It was worse now than it had been only a few minutes ago. He could barely even feel the knife sticking out of him. Putting one foot in front of another took all his concentration. He wanted to run back to her so she could make the pain stop.
What if he couldn’t control himself as his pain grew? What if he forced her to make it stop?
Nicholas had seen what happened to his brothers as they reached the end of their lives. They became darker, angry and desperate. He’d seen good men do bad things. What if he did the same with Tori?
There was only one thing he could think to do—only one way to keep her safe from himself.
As soon as Tynan was done healing his stab wound, he was going to bargain with the Sanguinar—give him anything he asked for—to have his memory of the last few minutes removed. If he didn’t know Tori could save him, she’d be safe. It was the only way he could be sure.
Chapter 5
“Where are we really going?” asked Iain once they were in his truck and driving out through Dabyr’s gates.
The sun was still high in the sky, but Jackie could feel its descent, like sharp fingernails raking over her back. “To see Samson. I want to see him one more time before I cut ties with your world.”
“So you lied. I figured as much. Not that it matters. They’ll know where we go. Tracking devices in all the vehicles.”
Of course there were. “Great. Nothing like an electronic leash to make a girl feel free.”
“I don’t get you. If you’d stayed, you could have had anything you wanted. You would have been safe. After two years of being locked up, I’d think safety would be at the top of your list.”
How was she going to explain anything to him? He didn’t live in her world—or at least not in the one she wanted to inhabit. “I didn’t feel safe there. I felt caged. Stagnant.”
He said nothing, his eyes on the road. His hands were fisted around the steering wheel, and she noticed a faint scar on the back of his right hand. It was jagged and pale with age.
“How’d you get that?” she asked, looking for a way to get the conversation off herself.
He stared at his hand for an extended moment, as if he had to think about it to remember. “Six against one. Little vicious raptor demons. One of them flew in from overhead and I didn’t see it until it was too late.”
“What happened?”
“I killed it before the poison in its talons felled me. By then Liam had made it to my side. Saved my life.”
He said it so calmly, as if he were talking about what he’d had for dinner last night.
“When was this?” she asked.
“A couple hundred years ago. Right after the big attack.”
“The big attack?”
“We’d thought the Synestryn were nearly extinct—that we’d wiped them out. We were all feeling pretty proud of ourselves. Overconfident. We spread out and tried to lead normal lives. We let our guard down, which was what they’d been waiting for. They coordinated a massive attack near every homestead and Sentinel compound they could find. All of us rushed to help and save the nearby towns from massacre. The Synestryn had planned on that, too, and were ready. They launched their real attack, which was designed to kill our women. It worked.”
Jackie stared at him, her mouth hanging open in shock. There was no emotion in his voice, no grief, horror, or regret.
“We lost hundreds of women that night, and dozens of men. On top of the killing, they sterilized every male Theronai with some kind of magic—though it took us a while to figure out what they’d done. Without the ability to have children and refill our ranks, we’ve never recovered from that attack. Couple that with the painful deaths of many more men who can no longer house their growing power, and it was likely a killing blow.”
“You think they’ve won?”
Iain shrugged as if it didn’t matter. “I don’t think. I fight. I get up every day and kill as many of them as I can before they kill me.”
“And you’re happy with that?”
He turned his head, gazing at her. His black eyes held only faint confusion. “It’s not my job to be happy. I do what I need to so others can be.”
“But what about what you want?”
“It’s irrelevant. I realized it’s easiest not to want things, so I just stopped doing it.”
“Stopped? How do you just…stop?” She would desperately like to learn that skill, because right about now, she’d really love to stop wanting what she was afraid she could never have. Her old life was a dream, a distant memory. As hard as she tried to reclaim it, she feared it would always be out of reach.
That didn’t mean she wasn’t going to keep trying to make it happen. She was way too driven to simply give up.
“This topic is clearly distressing you, and it’s my duty to see to your comfort. Let’s talk about something else. Or better yet, just not talk at all.”
That suited her just fine.
The landscape slid by them, the hope of spring hovering over everything. It was as if the world had just pulled in a deep breath and was holding it in anticipation.
Jackie lasted for all of ten minutes before she couldn’t stay quiet any longer. “Do you hurt? Like the others?”
“Hurt?”
“Helen said that holding in all that power hurts you.” That thought had haunted Jackie the most—knowing these men were in pain. Helen had said Jackie could make it stop.
“Helen talks too much.”
She took that as verification of what she’d suspected. Iain was in pain, like the others. She’d only seen a couple of flashes of it—always after he’d touched her, as if she somehow made it worse. “How do you manage it?”
“Just fine, thank you.”
She turned in her seat and stared at him, hoping her silence would force him to speak. His grip had tightened on the wheel, but other than that, his posture was relaxed. She wished she could do the same, but the tension riding between her shoulder blades never seemed to leave, even when she slept. Not that she did much of that these days. Nightmares of her time in captivity made it hard, and after she woke up a few days ago to one of the Theronai standing over her bed, watching her with desperate hope in his eyes, sleep had not come easily.
Why, of all the dozens of Theronai she’d met, was Iain the only one who looked at her differently? Jackie stared at him, trying to figure him out.
His luceria was paler than the other men’s, so pale it was nearly silver. She couldn’t see enough distinction between the colors to tell if there was any movement in the band, as there was in those of the other men like him.
For a moment, she wondered what it would be like to put it on and wield the kind of power her sisters had. Would it hurt? Would it feel good? Would she feel anything at all?
There was only one way to find out, and she wasn’t curious enough to try it.
She stole glances at Iain as he drove, doing her best to hide it. She couldn’t help but stare. He intrigued her with his impassive expression, leaving her to puzzle out what he was thinking.
He had nice features—high cheekbones, a wide jaw and strong chin with a slight cleft. His beard had grown out just a bit, shadowing his jaw. There were a few paler spots where scars dotted his skin, and she wondered if he’d gotten them in the same attack that had scarred his hand, or if there had been others.
Jackie reached out to trace her finger over that scar before she realized what she was doing. She snatched her hand back and shoved it under her thigh to keep it where it belonged. Touching Iain was not an option. It made her feel strange, tingly and warm.
She remembered that warmth from the night he’d rescued her. She’d been so cold for so long. The heat of his skin felt like sunlight spreading through her. Shock and weakness had numbed her, but that heat had penetrated through the haze, giving her something to focus on so she could hold herself together for just a little longer—long enough to see that the children were all brought out safely.
It occurred to her that she didn’t think she’d ever thanked him for that. He’d gone after the kids alone, risking his life to save them. She owed him for that. But was her debt large enough to do what these people wanted and give up her life?