Chapter XXIII #3
“It’s been a long time,” Xan said, his eyes on his brother, forever frozen at eighteen. “This year makes seventeen that he’s been gone. I’ve lived with his absence for as long as I lived with him.”
Vic watched his face, so carefully composed and contemplative. Even now, Xan was the picture of control.
“Dimitri was about to go to college, and I think he was nervous about leaving me alone with my parents. We fought a lot. I didn’t always behave the way the golden child ought to.
It was big news that summer that there were a handful of disappearances in a nearby town.
It was all anybody could talk about, and I overheard my dad on the phone one day with another Order member.
Orcans, he said. Something in the woods.
But they couldn’t get the Sentinels out for a few weeks—they didn’t have the manpower. ”
A humorless smile tilted his mouth.
“I was seventeen and thought I was invincible, so, of course, I tried to find it. I was a witch, after all, and if the Order wasn’t going to help, then I would do it for them.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to be a hero, that some part of me wasn’t in it for the glory.
” Xan shook his head. “He followed me into the woods. I didn’t notice until it was too late.
The Orcan was a leshy, a forest demon. The first Orcan I ever saw in person. Dimitri never had a chance.”
“Did you kill it?” Vic breathed.
“Not fast enough.”
Her eyes stung. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“I know that,” he said, looking at her. “But I know better now than to think I can control who lives and who dies.”
Xan set the photo on his desk and trained his eyes on Vic’s face. His stare was so intense, and he was so close to her.
“I am not, by nature, a protective man,” he said. “People think I am. They think that I’m here, doing this job, because I want to keep people safe. But it’s rare I get the chance to save anyone. What I do is clean up afterward.”
Vic hated that image. She hated the idea of himself Xan put forward, like he did nothing more than show up late and throw away the trash.
“When you came here, it caught me unexpectedly. I felt protective.” He looked surprised even now, and he shook his head. “That’s why I followed you around, although for a while I told myself I was keeping an eye on you. I wanted to save you from this place. I wanted to get you out of here.”
Vic swallowed, a tight, painful emotion in her chest. “I don’t need saving.”
But he had saved her, at least once. She’d be dead if not for him.
“I knew you would say that,” Xan said, almost smiling. “As it happens, you’re wrong.”
He punctuated his words with a tap on the top of her knee with his index finger. The motion sent a ripple of energy up her thigh.
“Ever since the night you got here, I’ve begged Max to send you home,” Xan said. “I hate this plan he has for you. It’s risky, it’s not going to end well. Even if it works, it’s not going to end well.”
“ ‘When has changing everything ever led to a peaceful outcome?’ ” Vic said, repeating his words from weeks ago. He’d been telling her that since the beginning, hadn’t he?
“Max is so set on this path. Maybe he thinks the risk to you is worth it; maybe he doesn’t even see the risk. But I do, and I refuse to accept it.”
Xan rubbed a hand over his jaw, looking older than he was.
“Yes, I did whatever I could to get you into that apartment. I thought if Max got that, at least, he might give up on keeping you here. And I thought maybe that was what you needed. If you had a glimpse of your mom’s world, it would help you let go.”
He stood, almost vibrating with nervous energy, and faced the black screen. Vic watched the hard set of his shoulders as her head spun.
“I never would have done it if I’d known Mann was behind the bind,” he said, sounding almost choked with anger.
He met her eyes again, with the desperate, wild look she’d seen there earlier.
“And I had no idea there was an Orcan inside. None. I was waiting outside, yes, but just in case something went wrong—I had no idea what.”
Xan looked at his hands, folded in front of his waist, and when he spoke his voice was tight and restrained. “When I heard you scream…all I could think about was being seventeen and losing the one person who really mattered because I thought I could control what no one can control.”
He stood in front of her, and Vic stared up into eyes like storm clouds. His gaze was like a weight pressing against her mind, making it hazy and hard to think.
The one person who really mattered.
Vic shook her head, heart in her throat. “I’m not that person for you,” she whispered. “I’m an outsider, a liability. I don’t belong here. That’s what you said.”
He brushed her hair aside and cupped the side of her face. Vic leaned into the touch. The searching look was back in his eyes, like he wanted something badly.
Wanted her.
“You’re exceptionally strong,” he said. “You’re vibrant, even here, where there has never been any life.”
His other hand went to the opposite side of her face.
“I know this, Vic: You deserve to survive this place.”
“What do you want from me?” Vic whispered.
“I never want to see you again,” he said, and it sounded like a caress.
Sitting on his desk as she was, they were the same height for what might have been the first time, and Vic’s whole world narrowed to the face in front of her.
The palms on her cheeks were hot and rough, the only warmth in a cold room in a cold castle, and when Xan breathed his exhalations danced across her face.
The force of the look in his eyes, the intensity of Xan’s confession and request, overwhelmed her—a tidal wave dragging Vic under.
She couldn’t focus with him looking at her like that, couldn’t think of anything except jumping out of her skin.
She wanted to run from the room like a frightened animal.
She wanted to hide, burrow inside him and stay there forever.
Vic started it.
Before she knew what she was doing, she had a hand behind his head, her fingers weaving into his hair, pulling him toward her. Xan went willingly, as if commanded, closing the distance between them.
There was no moment of timidity, no coaxing before they opened for each other. There was nothing sweet or soft about the two of them. They met in a tangle of tongues and teeth, two starving lovers meeting for a final meal.
Xan slipped a hand behind her waist, encircling her, and Vic pulled him closer until their chests were pressed together.
She wanted to seal herself to him, to suffocate any distance that dared separate them.
Her nipples were hard, and she knew he noticed that when Xan grunted a pleased kind of sound, and his other hand wrapped around her hips to squeeze her ass.
Vic ran her fingers along the hair on the back of his neck, marveling at the silken smoothness of the strands as his head drifted down. His mouth left a chill trail on the side of her face. His lips closed against the side of her neck, and Vic sighed.
With his hair between her fingers, Vic made a fist. She forced his head back and smiled at the open-mouthed surprise on his face. His lips were shining, red, and his eyes clung to hers in a daze. Vic pulled his lips back to hers, and Xan hummed a happy moan against her mouth.
When had his smell become so familiar to her?
Sweat-slicked skin and dirt and something distinctly Xan that she would recognize anywhere.
She thought of fighting as she pressed herself against him, and she wasn’t sitting on his desk anymore.
Xan held her up with one arm behind her back and the other under her, and Vic was vaguely aware that she was moving against him in an instinctive rhythm they both knew.
But she had no space to be embarrassed at her eagerness—not when Xan mirrored it, not when it was all she could think of. All she was at that moment.
“Yes,” she said against his mouth without thinking. “Yes.”
Her mind was overrun with a single-word chant: more, more, more. She needed more. She needed everything.
The force of that feeling overpowered her, turning her inside out.
Only dimly did she realize, in the far back corner of her mind, that this had never happened before.
None of her late-night liaisons had felt like this.
Never before had she come undone so quickly.
Not once, before tonight, had Vic thought that to stop what she was doing would be to die.
The realization hit her with a slap.
“Stop,” she said.
Xan froze. Slowly, he set her on her feet and pulled his hands away from her body.
Vic avoided his eyes as she tugged her clothes back where they ought to be.
She breathed hard, trying to collect herself.
She wanted him with a ferocity so intense, so foreign, it was almost need.
Maybe it was. She couldn’t handle it—she couldn’t hold it inside.
It was like staring at a flame while every cell in her body screamed for her to reach out and grab it.
When she looked up at Xan, gray-blue eyes, half out of focus, watched her with a mixture of hunger and apprehension that she understood all too well. Did he feel the same kind of desperate need that she did? Did it scare him the way it scared her?
“Did you mean it?” Vic said. “Do you want me to leave?”
Very slowly, he nodded. And Vic understood.
For the first time in Vic’s life, someone had put her first. Someone had prioritized her well-being, her safety, at the price of anything else.
Xan would disappoint his friend, would thwart Max’s plans for the Order, would deny himself what he clearly wanted—to keep Vic safe.
And that, before anything else, Vic understood.
She backed away from him, breathing hard. She stopped at the doorway, reaching for the frame to steady herself. Her knees were shaking.
“I will,” Vic said.
Xan looked so alone, standing in his office, his shoulders hunched forward, surrounded by an empty room. But his voice was resolute when he replied. “And don’t look back.”
Vic nodded, and she fled.