Chapter 10 #3
Jack nodded. “Exactly. Our re-binding’s at the equinox.”
“Oh my god.” Darcy sighed. “Oh my god, you and I are supposed to—No! I mean, I can’t go up there, Jack, and be surrounded by…”
Jack put his hands on her face, making her look at him. “Listen to me. They will never find out about you. Never. I will die first.”
“Could it come to that?”
His face was stricken, and he looked down. She covered his hands with hers.
“Jack,” she said evenly, trying to keep the panic out of her voice. “Could it come to that?”
His nostrils flared as he flexed his jaw. “I don’t know.”
She felt her eyes widen as her breath caught in her throat. Tears sprang into her eyes. “Can we try to explain? Maybe if we write a—”
“No we. No. They can never, ever know about you,” he exclaimed, his hands tightening on her face. “Never, Darcy.”
She saw the panic in his eyes, and it made her blood run cold.
“That’s what Lela was saying. They will find out, and when they do…” Tears slipped out of her eyes as she looked at him. “That’s why she suggested that you…that’s why you were talking about turning…”
Me, she finished.
She couldn’t speak anymore. It was unspeakable.
He pulled her onto his lap, wrapping his arms around her, burying his face in her hair as she cried on his shoulder.
“I won’t do it. It’s not an option.”
“What are the options?” she whispered.
“We spend every minute together. Be happy. Be married. We have a little time.”
“How much?”
“Fifty days,” he murmured.
“Fifty! Fifty days! No, Jack, there’s got to be a way.”
He leaned back to look at her face, then captured her lips with his for a gentle kiss.
“There isn’t. If I don’t show up, they’ll hunt me down.
If they can’t find me, they’ll hurt my family.
My mother, my brother, my sisters, Tombeur.
If I show up without you, they’ll take it out on me.
” He swallowed, and she watched his throat bob up and down.
“But eventually they might let me go if they can’t get it out of me… who you are, where you are…”
“Let’s run away,” she suggested desperately, swiping away the tears.
“No, mon ame. They wouldn’t like that. My family would pay—”
“I’ll go up with you,” she said, gathering her courage. “We’ll show them that our binding is true. We’ll try—”
“They won’t care. They will kill you.”
She winced, feeling her face collapse, and she hid against his shoulder again, grateful for the feeling of his hands stroking her back, but desperate for a solution.
Any solution. She couldn’t lose him. After a lifetime of waiting for him, she couldn’t say goodbye.
She couldn’t watch him get into his car and drive to Quebec for certain doom.
For them to hurt his beautiful body and torture him. Over her. Over his love for her.
She leaned back.
“We have to at least talk about it.”
His eyes clouded over. “No.”
“We have to.”
“I won’t do it.”
She wiped the last tears off her cheeks and leaned back from him, straightening her shoulders, steeling her jaw.
“Surely you’re not the only one who can,” she said.
“You wouldn’t,” he breathed, his face horrified at her veiled threat.
“I don’t know what I wouldn’t do for you,” she said softly, but firmly. “I belong to you, and you belong to me.”
“Please, baby,” he beseeched her.
“So you would scratch and lick me or bite me with your fangs.” She swallowed, fighting to keep any tremors from her voice.
“And I would have a fever. Then seizures. My claws and fangs would drop, and you’d put me in the room under the garage.
I’d be out of my head. And then my body would expand, right?
And I’d grow hair…everywhere. And you’d throw a fresh kill in with me.
And when I emerged…” She blinked her eyes to keep the onslaught of tears at bay. “I’d…I’d be Roug.”
“Darcy, please.”
“Is that the lay of it?”
His face was contorted in pain, in regret and sorrow, his eyes watery and golden. He nodded, looking down, away from her.
“Anything else?” she asked.
He nodded, but didn’t look up.
“What? Tell me everything now.”
“The binding.”
“What about it? We’d both be Roug.”
He swallowed and grimaced. “Turning a human is a rebirth on almost every emotional level. I would still be bound to you. But you—there’s just no guarantee.”
“There’s no guarantee that I’d still be bound to you?”
“No.” He pulled her face down to his, and she felt the trembling of his lips as he pressed them against hers. His thumbs lightly stroked her cheeks as he deepened the kiss. Finally, she drew back.
“Jack, you’d still be bound to me?”
“Yes. Until death. No matter what.”
“But I wouldn’t be dead, and more importantly, neither would you. So I would find you again,” she murmured. “In the whole world, there’s only you for me. Nothing can change that, Jack. Nothing. We’re stronger than a turning. We’re stronger than anything.”
“Darcy, you don’t know. You’ll be like an animal at first. The bloodlust at Pleine Lune will be stronger than anything you’ve ever felt before in your life. You’re a different being. You’re…”
“Roug,” she answered. “Like you.”
“I love you. I don’t want this for you. I don’t want to risk the binding.”
“I would rather die…” she vowed, interrupting him and commanding his attention with the low fury of her voice. “Than live without you. If I am your soul, then you are my heart. You are the strength of my life beating in my chest, and if you die, I die.”
His eyes fluttered closed, glowing under the thin skin of his lids, and she knew that he was trying not to cry. She could feel it. She could feel the depth and breadth and certainty of his love for her. She knew that he would die for her, and now he knew she would do the same for him.
She raised her hands to cradle his cheeks, and her lips tilted up into a smile. A smile. Because, regardless of the other complications in their life together, looking at him, she felt such joy, such completeness. She felt like life was worth living.
She pressed her lips to his, moving them softly back and forth across his.
He raised his hands to her neck, sinking his fingers into her hair, his tongue slipping through her lips.
She met his intrusion with passion, stroking his tongue as he lapped at hers, her fingers curling on his face until she held him in the grip of her fists.
She drew back.
“Open your eyes,” she whispered.
He did. He saw the courage on her face, in the set of her jaw, in the directness of her gaze. She leaned her neck to the side, moving her hair, offering him unobstructed access to her jugular artery.
Do it, Jack. Do it now.
He held her eyes with his, tilting her head back upright gently, and reaching up to take her hand from his face.
He lowered it, turning it over slowly, staring at her the skin on the inside of her arm—her pink, soft, perfect skin into which his fangs would sink and bury.
In his mind, he saw them biting down, leaving jagged bite marks as she screamed in pain.
He felt his fingers clamp down on her arm, keeping it in his mouth as his saliva mixed with her blood, until he felt the heat of his body transferred not onto her skin, but into her body.
He imagined her passing out in his arms, watching her body turn scarlet as he carried her to his bed.
He could almost feel the fever and seizures as his venom had its way with her.
He closed his eyes against the images, against the pain they caused him. He swallowed and looked back up at her.
You can’t want this.
I want you. This is the only way.
He shook his head, gently releasing her arm.
“I won’t do it,” he said gently. “I won’t—”
Her eyes became frantic, wild. “I’m not letting you die for me, over us. I’m not letting you go back there, where they’ll hurt you, and they’ll—”
“Let me finish,” said Jack, brushing his knuckles over her cheek. “Yet. I won’t do it yet.” He paused, staring at her. “We have fifty days. Let’s try to figure out another way first.”
She took a deep breath, her shoulders relaxing, and nodded.
“Okay,” she agreed.
He pulled her against him, and she rested her head on his shoulder as she had yesterday.
He heard the sadness in his voice. “Relieved?”
She shrugged lightly. “A little.”
It made him wince to know she was still offering herself to him, even though she was frightened.
“Better get to work on that cure,” he said. “If you can make a cure that can control the shifting, I’ll, I mean, I’d be more open to…”
She looked up at him, catching his sad eyes.
Turning you.
“I won’t do anything else,” she said, dropping her head back down to his shoulder.
“I’ll start thinking through the different combinations, molecular structures, and fusions.
And Willow. I need to talk to Willow. Perhaps there’s something in the Enchanteresse book.
I’ll take a hiatus from Dartmouth. I won’t do anything else but this. ”
He loved her for her energy, her bright mind, her willingness to work as a team to figure out how to come out on the other side of this safe and together.
“Nothing else?” he asked, pressing his lips against her forehead.
“Well, I have to go to bed at night,” she said, and his body tensed at the low, sexy way she drew out the word bed.
He leaned back to see her lips tilt up in a smile. A smile.
“Let’s go now. Just crawl back under the covers and stay there all day. Sounds like the perfect idea.”
She smiled up at him, shaking her head. But her smile faded as her eyes glinted with a fierce, intelligent energy bathed in determination.
“Fifty days, Jack.”
“Fifty days,” he said, and pulled her back into his embrace, his heart seeking and finding the rhythm of hers, his mate, his fiancée, his soul. And he tried to keep the inevitable at bay, the dreaded words circling over them like vultures in his head.
The equinox is coming.