15. Brooks
The darkness down here felt like it was alive.
And I didn’t know want to know what was living here.
I hadn’t spent much time in the darker corners of the catacombs, even when Lucien and I were coming down here to get away from the rest of the world and have time to ourselves. We’d been hiding from the world, yes, but we hadn’t gone into the shadowed corners and hidden rooms to do it.
The truth was, we’d been too full of ourselves and each other, and too much in love, to do more than scramble through the openings of the tunnels and find a corner that wasn’t flooded before we tore into each other.
Right now, we were both a little more intent on getting out of here alive and without another round of fighting. Which was, I guessed, why we’d come into a room that felt full of spirits, magic, and danger.
I swallowed the thought, trying very hard to put it out of my mind, and followed him into the deepening black, leaving him to run into things and show me where they were. We’d had enough light at the door to be able to see some of it—the soaring ceiling, the rows of benches—but now that we were in the thick of it I couldn’t see much further than my own nose. I had no way of knowing what was ahead of us. If it was like any other church, there would be more benches and eventually an altar, behind which, I hoped, we’d find a door that led to someplace a little less haunted.
I hoped he was thinking the same I was thinking. And that we were both right.
We were moving too slowly for my liking, to start with, but I didn’t know how much we could do about that. I could feel cold stone under my feet and rising up above us, but that didn’t tell us where it might cross our path and we couldn’t risk the glow of a phone or flashlight. Hell, I didn’t even think we could risk walking too loudly. Landry men had rushed by this room once already, paused, and passed it by, but there was no telling when they might come back.
Or if one of them was already in here with us.
Hell, I didn’t want to walk too loudly just in case the spirits in here didn’t like it. My skin was crawling with the feel of them, my stomach churning. I’d never gone for that whole voodoo-black-magic thing when I lived in New Orleans, but I was starting to think that was because I’d never been in a place like this, where the Otherworld felt like it was climbing up out of the floor.
At that moment, someone else ran by the door to the room, shouting, and Lucien turned, leaned up against something, and drew me up against him. And fuck me, he was hard as a rock against my stomach. My body reacted instinctively, pushing against him, and I gasped when his cock twitched. Moments later his mouth came down over mine—presumably to keep me quiet—and I gasped into him.
God, I’d forgotten how good he felt. He was smooth and rich like chocolate, an angel and a devil who had always known exactly how I wanted to be touched, even before I knew what it meant to have a man’s hands on me. His fingertips slid up under my chin, barely glancing along the surface, and then spread to rake through my hair and cup my head, and instead of harsh and biting, the kiss turned soft. Exploring.
Almost needy.
I fought the groan building in my chest and tried very, very hard to stay quiet, but fuck. The taste of him, the feel of him, was everything I remembered. Scorching and intense. Beautiful and deadly. So much more than I’d ever known I needed, and exactly enough to fill the hole I’d always felt inside me.
No one had ever stood up to what Lucien Boudreaux made me feel. And I both loved and hated that. Feared it, more than anything, because I’d always known that he wouldn’t be mine to keep. He had been too deadly. Too perfect. Like an angel fallen to Earth who had taken a liking to me, and who would burn me if I stayed too long.
He had burned me. Or he would have done, if I’d stayed in New Orleans.
I broke away from him, putting a crack down the middle of my heart, and searched the darkness in front of me for his face. “Not exactly the right place for a makeout session, Lucien,” I whispered. “Too many chances for an audience.”
He leaned forward and ran his lips across my own again, then down my chin to my neck, where he bit me softly. “You mean a human audience? Or is it the spirits you’re afraid of?”
“Both,” I said on an exhale, fighting to remember why I’d stopped him. But the fire was rushing through me, now, coming to rest between my legs, and I could barely get my brain to function. God, I wanted him. I remembered him spreading my legs and sliding into me, his eyes on mine and his bottom lip caught between his teeth as he went as slowly as he could, making sure my first time was the most gentle experience he could manage.
And it had worked. I’d come unspun for him within three strikes. And he’d never stopped being able to spin me back up and undo me.
I nearly cried when he pulled away from me again.
“But you’re right. We don’t have time. I do, however, have a question. And I need an answer before we head back into the light.”
Of course he did. Because the questions had never actually stopped between us. The question of who we were to each other and what we were doing. Whether we were going to be able to make it last.
Whether the world would let us alone.
“What’s that?”
He leaned toward me, placing his forehead against mine so that our noses brushed, tip to tip. “Why are you here, Brooks? Tell me why you came back.”
The pieces of my heart broke anew at that, because I knew what he wanted to hear. And I knew what I wanted to tell him. I could say that I’d come back for him because I missed him like I’d left a piece of myself in New Orleans. That I’d been searching for years to find a man who touched me the way he did or protected me as he once had, and that I’d never been able to find anyone like that. I could have said I’d come running back to him because I finally realized that no one would be able to walk in his shoes, though many had tried and though I’d finally figured out how to take care of myself rather than leaning on someone else.
I could have said I’d finally realized that I loved him and didn’t want to live without him.
Except that certainly wasn’t why I’d come back.
Or maybe it was. But I wasn’t going to tell him so.
“Because I need a favor,” I finally said.
He tensed like he already knew I wasn’t going to give him what he wanted, and I could almost see the mask slide neatly over his face again. “A favor of what?”
“An army. My friends in New York are in trouble, and I came home because I need the soldiers to save them.”
There. It was out in the open and I couldn’t take it back.
And now I’d see whether he was going to step in and save me one more time... or if he was going to prove that he was just as useless to me as my father had always been.