Epilogue #3
Those words I did not offer lightly. Not ever. Safety was expensive. If I gave it, I intended to pay for it personally.
I reached for her hand.
Her fingers were small and trembling and colder than they should have been in the desert dusk. Dirt marked the knuckles. Her nails were ragged, one broken to the quick. I closed my hand around hers to help her up.
The world split.
There was no gradual recognition, no tender unfolding, no suspicious pause in which I might have mistaken sensation for sympathy or outrage for possession. It detonated.
The mate bond hit me like a fist driven straight through the center of my chest.
Warmth and pain and absolute belonging crashed through me in the same instant, so violent in its arrival that my breath simply stopped.
Not caught. Stopped. The brick path, the warehouse wall, the neon stain on the horizon, Taras at my side, the guards behind me—all of it went briefly secondary to the incandescent fact of her hand in mine and the impossible, unquestionable certainty of mine.
Mine not as property. Never that. Mine as fate’s insult and gift.
Mine as answer. Mine as the one soul in all this diseased and elegant world, the Goddess had apparently hidden behind a terracotta planter outside my club after I spent an hour telling Taras catastrophe knew better than to trespass west.
The force of it ran through every chamber in me at once.
Chest. Throat. Teeth. Spine. It carried hunger with it, yes, but not merely blood hunger.
Something older. A savage protective instinct so immediate it felt preexisting, as if my body had been waiting all its life to be told precisely whom to kill for.
Behind me, Taras gave a short involuntary exhale.
Then, with great feeling and almost no volume at all, he said, “Fuck me.”
The twin bond had carried enough of it across for him to know.
I did not look at him.
I could not have if ordered.
The woman swayed when I pulled her upward.
She rose only halfway under her own power before her knees threatened treachery again.
I caught her with my free arm and brought her against my chest by necessity, one hand at her back, the other still wrapped around her wrist and palm as if releasing either might alter reality.
It did not.
The bond burned on.
Her head tipped against me for one disoriented instant.
Auburn hair, dry and tangled, brushed my jaw.
Up close, I could smell fear on her, yes, and starvation, old sweat, dust, and the faint iron trace of healing skin around those raw wrists.
Under all of it lay her own scent, nearly buried by damage, but there.
Human warmth worn thin. Something delicate and stubborn.
Life refusing extinction out of sheer refusal to grant others the satisfaction.
Her heart beat hard and fast against the ruinous line of her ribs.
I looked down at her face.
A stranger’s face.
And somehow not.
Not familiar in any rational sense. I had never seen her.
I would have remembered. Yet the bond did not traffic in reason.
It reached deeper than acquaintance, farther than preference.
It had found something in her and something in me and slammed the two together with divine indifference to timing, convenience, or that she appeared half a grave away from collapse.
Her lashes lifted. Her eyes found mine again, dazed now, frightened, searching.
If she felt anything of what had just torn through me, it did not show in any articulate way.
Perhaps exhaustion spared her the full impact.
Perhaps the bond moved differently through a human body.
Perhaps shock had already laid claim to too much territory.
I did not know.
Taras came into the edge of my vision at last, cautious only because he knew me well enough to recognize the danger in touching any part of this moment carelessly.
“Maks,” he said.
I heard the question inside my name. I heard three others behind it.
“Do you feel it clearly?”
“Yes, have the car brought around,” I said.
That was all I gave him. It was enough.
He glanced once at the woman in my arms, taking in the wrists, the starvation, the way I held her, and something altered in his expression. He nodded. Beneath his expression came something rare and solemn. Protective interest. Calculation already reorganizing itself around a new center.
I bent my head toward the woman just enough that my voice reached only her. “You will come home with me.”
Her fingers curled weakly into my coat.
Whether that was agreement or simple physical collapse hardly mattered. I intended to treat it as assent.
I straightened, keeping her against my chest when it became obvious standing unaided was beyond her. She weighed almost nothing. That fact angered me in ways I would examine later, preferably while killing someone.
For all my talk about not tempting fate and keeping catastrophe away from the west, it turned out both were hiding behind a planter outside my club and had auburn hair and terrified eyes.