A flush washed over her, and she swayed, but when he reached for her, she stepped out of his reach. “It’s just morning sickness,” she said, and then cleared her throat. “If I’m going to stay, we’ll need to talk about this.”
Luc started for the stairs. “We will.” When he could wrap his mind around it.
“Sooner is better than later. Besides the nine-month timer, there’s a plague and Aegis Guardians are after me.” “I know.”
“But?”
Christ, couldn’t a guy get a moment of peace? “But I’m not a talker.”
Suddenly, she was in front of him, eyes glinting with anger. “Well, too bad. There are some things you can’t run away from.”
Run away? He hadn’t run away from anything since he had turned. Before that, though… “I’m no coward,” he growled. “Really? Because I didn’t know that running away from every female in your life was a sign of bravery. Or am I wrong? Has there ever been anyone with whom you didn’t f**k and run to avoid emotional commitment?”
Fury lit him up, set his jaw so hard he thought he heard his molars crack. “You don’t know anything about me,” he gritted out.
“I know your kind. The Aegis is full of them. So tell me, how close am I?”
Too close. Way too close. He’d spent a lifetime avoiding emotional connections. Even as a paramedic, he didn’t have to get involved with his patients. They were his for a few moments, but he got to drop them off and never think of them again.
And even Ula, the female he’d wanted to mate with, had been more of an escape from loneliness than a love match. He’d liked her, found her challenging, but love? Not even close. “Drop it, Kar.”
She laughed. “No wonder you live out here in frozen desolation. The land is just like your heart, isn’t it?”
Ignoring her barb, Luc mounted the steps, needing to get away but knowing that what she’d said was spot on.
There were some things you couldn’t run away from.
Fifteen
They always leave, Con. Always. Sin’s last words before she drifted off to sleep stayed with Con, had him nearly shaking her awake to tell her he wouldn’t leave. But it would be a lie, because he never stuck with anything. So why in hell did he feel like saying that to her?
Because Sin had lived a waking nightmare, that’s why. As he fell asleep, he’d thought about everything she’d told him, had nightmares about it, and now, as he prowled the house in the early-morning gray light, seeking out all of the secret exits, he couldn’t stop thinking. Sin was still sleeping, but he knew she’d awakened several times during the night.
Once, she’d sat up from a dream, panting and holding her hands over her ears as though trying to block something out. Another time, she’d taken her Gargantua-bone dagger off the nightstand and held it against her chest, cradling it like a teddy bear, before falling back to sleep.
Those images haunted him as much as the things she’d told him. She wasn’t an assassin because she wanted to be. She’d been sold into it. She wasn’t master of her den because she wanted to be. She’d done it to spare her brother’s mate. And because she was who she was—tough, intense, determined—she’d made the best of the situations. Self-preservation instincts hadn’t allowed her to feel sorry for herself or to feel anything or, probably, to even think much on what she’d done or had to do.
And he’d gone and torn down the one defense she had to protect herself.
Fucking idiot.
“Hey.” He whirled around, unable to believe she’d caught him by surprise. She stood at the base of the stairs, clothed, wet hair up in the messy knot she favored, a splash of shy color on her cheeks. She didn’t look like a hard-as-brimstone, cold-blooded assassin. Probably because she wasn’t a cold-blooded assassin like he’d once thought. No, she looked like a woman who had been well loved for the first time and wasn’t sure how to deal with it.
Yeah, well, neither did he. He’d been with a lot of females. Too many couplings had been nothing but one-nighters where they didn’t even exchange names. But he’d also made love to sensual, experienced females he’d liked. He’d spent hours in bed with them, hours talking, playing, doing real “date” stuff. But with the one exception so many centuries ago that had ended in disaster, he’d always kept relationships casual.
Suddenly, this thing with Sin did not feel casual.
The things she’d shared had leveled him. She had mad skills when it came to killing and surviving, but she had little practice with emotion or relationships, and she was lost. Yet she’d opened up, trusting him with a piece of her past, and he knew how monumental that had been for her. It was a mistake for him to have coaxed any of it out. She needed her thick walls, and who the hell was he to try to breach them? An arrogant bastard, that’s who.
She’d been a challenge. A puzzle he’d wanted to solve, a code he’d wanted to break. Well done, asshole.
He’d had a human friend once, back during the Civil War. John had nursed an injured coyote back to health, taught it to trust humans despite Con’s warning to scare it off, throw rocks at it… whatever it took to keep it safe. And one day, it approached the wrong human and was killed.
Con hoped he hadn’t created a coyote out of Sin.
“Hello… Con?” Sin waved a hand in front of his face.
“Ah, hey. Sorry.” He gestured to the stove. “I made breakfast.” If powdered eggs and dehydrated hash browns could be considered food. Wordlessly, she slipped past him, and he caught the fresh scent of lavender soap from her shower, and underneath the floral notes was the earthy tang of their lovemaking. His blood stirred and heated, but he kept his baser instincts leashed as Sin scooped up the eggs and potatoes onto a plate and scarfed every bite. When he shoveled more onto her plate, she didn’t argue.
“Have you thought about who’s after you?” She looked up at him, one dark eyebrow cocked. “Um… assassins?” Her fingers slid absently over her breastbone, and he tracked the motion with greedy eyes. “Speaking of which, I lost another one this morning.”
“Should I offer my condolences?”
She snorted. “Hardly.”
He propped one hip on the counter and folded his arms over his chest. “Well, here’s the thing. I get that they want your ring, but that doesn’t explain the horse guy who tried to kill you and then save you. It also doesn’t explain my house.”
“I know,” she muttered. “Someone who wants my job wouldn’t blow up a house with me in it. It would make finding the ring nearly impossible.” So someone wanted her dead, and not for the ring. But why? Unless…
“Valko,” he snarled.
“The pricolici leader?”
He nodded. “With you dead, he might hope that no cure would come for the turneds.” Rage filled him, made all the more potent by the fact that he had no proof of his suspicion, and by the fact that he could do nothing about it at the moment.
Sin was a hell of a lot more level than he was, shrugging as she finished eating, giving him time to cool off. He watched as she washed her dishes, taking an extraordinarily long time. She was stalling.
Finally, after she’d put away her plate and fork, cleaned the sink, and wiped the counter, she swung around. “Thank you.”
He shoved his hands into his jeans pockets. “It was just breakfast.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.” She looked down at her boots. They were scuffed, beat to hell. Con had never worn a pair of shoes long enough for them to look like that. “I’ve been an ass to you, but somehow you’ve put up with it. You’ve helped me when you’d have been well within your rights to kill me for what I’ve done to the wargs. So… um… thank you.”
Coyote. Her admission cracked his heart right open. He should throw rocks at her, should be thinking only of ways to make her raise her defenses again, but instead, he was thinking about wrapping her in his arms and never letting her go.
You’ll let her go. When her coffin is lowered into the ground. Fuck.
Rocks. He had to throw rocks. Maybe pebbles.
“Sin—”
She held up a hand. “Whatever. I’m done talking about it. We should go.” She brushed past him, and the moment they touched, it was like an electric jolt went through him. His brain short-circuited, and without thinking, he tugged her against him and tried to ignore the sound that his vampire senses picked up: the thud whoosh of her heartbeat. They definitely needed to go. They had to contact Eidolon, too, who would probably be going crazy about now. But Con’s body was tweaking out, his fangs were thrusting downward, and if he could get a taste of her first… He leaned in, slowly—
“Yo.” Sin slapped her hands on his chest. “Ah… do you need to feed?”
The vein in her throat pounded, and her pulse became a roar in his ears.
“Con?”
A wash of red colored his vision, the color of merlot. Or blood.
“Con!” She slapped him hard enough to rock his head back and clear it enough to think. “What’s going on? I can sense your hunger, but it’s weird.”
“Damn.” Stepping away from her, he scrubbed his hand over his face and wondered how the hell he was going to explain this.
“Hey. Straight up, what’s going on with you?” She deserved to know the truth. He’d asked too much of her, and it was time to give back, even if he had to spill another of the many dhampire secrets that kept his race shrouded in mystery and, to outsiders, very grounded and stable. Nothing could be further from the truth.
“You know how I said that dhampires don’t mate with each other?” His voice was gravelly, as though every word was being dragged from between his lips. “It’s because males become addicted to blood. If we feed from one host more than a few times, it takes root.”
“So… why would that be a bad thing if the couple was mated?” “Because the male can go out of control and kill the female while feeding.” Shit, this was hard to talk about, and not because he was violating some ancient dhampire rule. He was way too intimate with the consequences of addiction. “That’s why there are very few mated dhampire pairs.”
“How could there be any?” Her eyes widened with curiosity, and for the first time, he could see a little of Eidolon in her as she dug into the mystery. “Do the mated males feed from other males and females to keep from getting addicted to their mates?”
He nearly laughed. “That only works temporarily. Eventually addiction happens because feeding and sex are intertwined. At that point, males inject a venom that bonds the female to him and he to her, and that ends the addiction.”
“Then what’s the problem?” “There’s a catch.” Strange how nothing good came without strings. “We don’t produce the bond fluid until we become addicted. By then, your control is shot and what you crave is the high you’ll get when they die. So instead of injecting the bond fluid, you run the risk of draining the female and killing her instead.”
She hooked her thumbs in her front pockets and propped a hip against the kitchen’s log entryway as though settling in for a long convo. Which wasn’t going to happen. “You sound like you know something about that.”
“It’s how my mother died. My father killed her.” A thousand years ago, before the two dhampire clans had merged, his parents had belonged to separate clans, both from royal blood. It was hoped that by mating his parents, the clans would join peacefully. It went well… Con and his younger brothers, Dubdghall and Eoin, had been conceived without his father succumbing to addiction, mainly because he took his pleasures—sex and blood— from other females except during his mother’s breeding heats. And then, during his mother’s fourth heat, his father lost control, and instead of bonding with her, he drained her.
“Oh, wow,” she said, her dark eyes shifting from the rapidly lightening dawn back to him. “What happened to your father?”
“The death of the female ends the addiction, but he couldn’t live with what he’d done. He destroyed himself.” That was the understatement of the century. Con’s father had burned himself alive. Sin rolled her bottom lip between her teeth, suddenly looking a little pensive and, for the second time in the last few hours, vulnerable. “Have you ever…”
For a long time, he considered his answer. For an even longer time, he considered lying. And then he hurled the answer like the rock he needed to throw. “Yes.”
“Did you bond with her?” “No.” He hadn’t gotten the chance… Hell, he hadn’t wanted to. He’d wanted blood and sex from her, but not a lifetime commitment. And even then… the desire for sex hadn’t even been a fraction as intense as what he wanted from Sin.
“Did she die?”
“Yes.”
“Your fault?”
“Yes.”
He expected her to react with disgust, but she just cocked her head, stared at him, and then gave a definitive nod.
“I’ve killed a few dudes after I slept with them. Mostly it was because they tried to kill me.” She shrugged. “It happens. You shouldn’t punish yourself.” It was his turn to stare. Every time he thought he had her figured out, she did a one-eighty and reacted in the exact opposite way he’d anticipated. He loved that. No one had ever kept him on his toes the way she did. Even if she was utterly annoying about it.
“I knew better, Sin. I knew what would happen if I fed from her too many times, and I did it anyway. I wanted to take feeding to the very edge, to see how far I could go without crossing the line. I played with her life, and she’s the one who lost.”
Luc started for the stairs. “We will.” When he could wrap his mind around it.
“Sooner is better than later. Besides the nine-month timer, there’s a plague and Aegis Guardians are after me.” “I know.”
“But?”
Christ, couldn’t a guy get a moment of peace? “But I’m not a talker.”
Suddenly, she was in front of him, eyes glinting with anger. “Well, too bad. There are some things you can’t run away from.”
Run away? He hadn’t run away from anything since he had turned. Before that, though… “I’m no coward,” he growled. “Really? Because I didn’t know that running away from every female in your life was a sign of bravery. Or am I wrong? Has there ever been anyone with whom you didn’t f**k and run to avoid emotional commitment?”
Fury lit him up, set his jaw so hard he thought he heard his molars crack. “You don’t know anything about me,” he gritted out.
“I know your kind. The Aegis is full of them. So tell me, how close am I?”
Too close. Way too close. He’d spent a lifetime avoiding emotional connections. Even as a paramedic, he didn’t have to get involved with his patients. They were his for a few moments, but he got to drop them off and never think of them again.
And even Ula, the female he’d wanted to mate with, had been more of an escape from loneliness than a love match. He’d liked her, found her challenging, but love? Not even close. “Drop it, Kar.”
She laughed. “No wonder you live out here in frozen desolation. The land is just like your heart, isn’t it?”
Ignoring her barb, Luc mounted the steps, needing to get away but knowing that what she’d said was spot on.
There were some things you couldn’t run away from.
Fifteen
They always leave, Con. Always. Sin’s last words before she drifted off to sleep stayed with Con, had him nearly shaking her awake to tell her he wouldn’t leave. But it would be a lie, because he never stuck with anything. So why in hell did he feel like saying that to her?
Because Sin had lived a waking nightmare, that’s why. As he fell asleep, he’d thought about everything she’d told him, had nightmares about it, and now, as he prowled the house in the early-morning gray light, seeking out all of the secret exits, he couldn’t stop thinking. Sin was still sleeping, but he knew she’d awakened several times during the night.
Once, she’d sat up from a dream, panting and holding her hands over her ears as though trying to block something out. Another time, she’d taken her Gargantua-bone dagger off the nightstand and held it against her chest, cradling it like a teddy bear, before falling back to sleep.
Those images haunted him as much as the things she’d told him. She wasn’t an assassin because she wanted to be. She’d been sold into it. She wasn’t master of her den because she wanted to be. She’d done it to spare her brother’s mate. And because she was who she was—tough, intense, determined—she’d made the best of the situations. Self-preservation instincts hadn’t allowed her to feel sorry for herself or to feel anything or, probably, to even think much on what she’d done or had to do.
And he’d gone and torn down the one defense she had to protect herself.
Fucking idiot.
“Hey.” He whirled around, unable to believe she’d caught him by surprise. She stood at the base of the stairs, clothed, wet hair up in the messy knot she favored, a splash of shy color on her cheeks. She didn’t look like a hard-as-brimstone, cold-blooded assassin. Probably because she wasn’t a cold-blooded assassin like he’d once thought. No, she looked like a woman who had been well loved for the first time and wasn’t sure how to deal with it.
Yeah, well, neither did he. He’d been with a lot of females. Too many couplings had been nothing but one-nighters where they didn’t even exchange names. But he’d also made love to sensual, experienced females he’d liked. He’d spent hours in bed with them, hours talking, playing, doing real “date” stuff. But with the one exception so many centuries ago that had ended in disaster, he’d always kept relationships casual.
Suddenly, this thing with Sin did not feel casual.
The things she’d shared had leveled him. She had mad skills when it came to killing and surviving, but she had little practice with emotion or relationships, and she was lost. Yet she’d opened up, trusting him with a piece of her past, and he knew how monumental that had been for her. It was a mistake for him to have coaxed any of it out. She needed her thick walls, and who the hell was he to try to breach them? An arrogant bastard, that’s who.
She’d been a challenge. A puzzle he’d wanted to solve, a code he’d wanted to break. Well done, asshole.
He’d had a human friend once, back during the Civil War. John had nursed an injured coyote back to health, taught it to trust humans despite Con’s warning to scare it off, throw rocks at it… whatever it took to keep it safe. And one day, it approached the wrong human and was killed.
Con hoped he hadn’t created a coyote out of Sin.
“Hello… Con?” Sin waved a hand in front of his face.
“Ah, hey. Sorry.” He gestured to the stove. “I made breakfast.” If powdered eggs and dehydrated hash browns could be considered food. Wordlessly, she slipped past him, and he caught the fresh scent of lavender soap from her shower, and underneath the floral notes was the earthy tang of their lovemaking. His blood stirred and heated, but he kept his baser instincts leashed as Sin scooped up the eggs and potatoes onto a plate and scarfed every bite. When he shoveled more onto her plate, she didn’t argue.
“Have you thought about who’s after you?” She looked up at him, one dark eyebrow cocked. “Um… assassins?” Her fingers slid absently over her breastbone, and he tracked the motion with greedy eyes. “Speaking of which, I lost another one this morning.”
“Should I offer my condolences?”
She snorted. “Hardly.”
He propped one hip on the counter and folded his arms over his chest. “Well, here’s the thing. I get that they want your ring, but that doesn’t explain the horse guy who tried to kill you and then save you. It also doesn’t explain my house.”
“I know,” she muttered. “Someone who wants my job wouldn’t blow up a house with me in it. It would make finding the ring nearly impossible.” So someone wanted her dead, and not for the ring. But why? Unless…
“Valko,” he snarled.
“The pricolici leader?”
He nodded. “With you dead, he might hope that no cure would come for the turneds.” Rage filled him, made all the more potent by the fact that he had no proof of his suspicion, and by the fact that he could do nothing about it at the moment.
Sin was a hell of a lot more level than he was, shrugging as she finished eating, giving him time to cool off. He watched as she washed her dishes, taking an extraordinarily long time. She was stalling.
Finally, after she’d put away her plate and fork, cleaned the sink, and wiped the counter, she swung around. “Thank you.”
He shoved his hands into his jeans pockets. “It was just breakfast.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.” She looked down at her boots. They were scuffed, beat to hell. Con had never worn a pair of shoes long enough for them to look like that. “I’ve been an ass to you, but somehow you’ve put up with it. You’ve helped me when you’d have been well within your rights to kill me for what I’ve done to the wargs. So… um… thank you.”
Coyote. Her admission cracked his heart right open. He should throw rocks at her, should be thinking only of ways to make her raise her defenses again, but instead, he was thinking about wrapping her in his arms and never letting her go.
You’ll let her go. When her coffin is lowered into the ground. Fuck.
Rocks. He had to throw rocks. Maybe pebbles.
“Sin—”
She held up a hand. “Whatever. I’m done talking about it. We should go.” She brushed past him, and the moment they touched, it was like an electric jolt went through him. His brain short-circuited, and without thinking, he tugged her against him and tried to ignore the sound that his vampire senses picked up: the thud whoosh of her heartbeat. They definitely needed to go. They had to contact Eidolon, too, who would probably be going crazy about now. But Con’s body was tweaking out, his fangs were thrusting downward, and if he could get a taste of her first… He leaned in, slowly—
“Yo.” Sin slapped her hands on his chest. “Ah… do you need to feed?”
The vein in her throat pounded, and her pulse became a roar in his ears.
“Con?”
A wash of red colored his vision, the color of merlot. Or blood.
“Con!” She slapped him hard enough to rock his head back and clear it enough to think. “What’s going on? I can sense your hunger, but it’s weird.”
“Damn.” Stepping away from her, he scrubbed his hand over his face and wondered how the hell he was going to explain this.
“Hey. Straight up, what’s going on with you?” She deserved to know the truth. He’d asked too much of her, and it was time to give back, even if he had to spill another of the many dhampire secrets that kept his race shrouded in mystery and, to outsiders, very grounded and stable. Nothing could be further from the truth.
“You know how I said that dhampires don’t mate with each other?” His voice was gravelly, as though every word was being dragged from between his lips. “It’s because males become addicted to blood. If we feed from one host more than a few times, it takes root.”
“So… why would that be a bad thing if the couple was mated?” “Because the male can go out of control and kill the female while feeding.” Shit, this was hard to talk about, and not because he was violating some ancient dhampire rule. He was way too intimate with the consequences of addiction. “That’s why there are very few mated dhampire pairs.”
“How could there be any?” Her eyes widened with curiosity, and for the first time, he could see a little of Eidolon in her as she dug into the mystery. “Do the mated males feed from other males and females to keep from getting addicted to their mates?”
He nearly laughed. “That only works temporarily. Eventually addiction happens because feeding and sex are intertwined. At that point, males inject a venom that bonds the female to him and he to her, and that ends the addiction.”
“Then what’s the problem?” “There’s a catch.” Strange how nothing good came without strings. “We don’t produce the bond fluid until we become addicted. By then, your control is shot and what you crave is the high you’ll get when they die. So instead of injecting the bond fluid, you run the risk of draining the female and killing her instead.”
She hooked her thumbs in her front pockets and propped a hip against the kitchen’s log entryway as though settling in for a long convo. Which wasn’t going to happen. “You sound like you know something about that.”
“It’s how my mother died. My father killed her.” A thousand years ago, before the two dhampire clans had merged, his parents had belonged to separate clans, both from royal blood. It was hoped that by mating his parents, the clans would join peacefully. It went well… Con and his younger brothers, Dubdghall and Eoin, had been conceived without his father succumbing to addiction, mainly because he took his pleasures—sex and blood— from other females except during his mother’s breeding heats. And then, during his mother’s fourth heat, his father lost control, and instead of bonding with her, he drained her.
“Oh, wow,” she said, her dark eyes shifting from the rapidly lightening dawn back to him. “What happened to your father?”
“The death of the female ends the addiction, but he couldn’t live with what he’d done. He destroyed himself.” That was the understatement of the century. Con’s father had burned himself alive. Sin rolled her bottom lip between her teeth, suddenly looking a little pensive and, for the second time in the last few hours, vulnerable. “Have you ever…”
For a long time, he considered his answer. For an even longer time, he considered lying. And then he hurled the answer like the rock he needed to throw. “Yes.”
“Did you bond with her?” “No.” He hadn’t gotten the chance… Hell, he hadn’t wanted to. He’d wanted blood and sex from her, but not a lifetime commitment. And even then… the desire for sex hadn’t even been a fraction as intense as what he wanted from Sin.
“Did she die?”
“Yes.”
“Your fault?”
“Yes.”
He expected her to react with disgust, but she just cocked her head, stared at him, and then gave a definitive nod.
“I’ve killed a few dudes after I slept with them. Mostly it was because they tried to kill me.” She shrugged. “It happens. You shouldn’t punish yourself.” It was his turn to stare. Every time he thought he had her figured out, she did a one-eighty and reacted in the exact opposite way he’d anticipated. He loved that. No one had ever kept him on his toes the way she did. Even if she was utterly annoying about it.
“I knew better, Sin. I knew what would happen if I fed from her too many times, and I did it anyway. I wanted to take feeding to the very edge, to see how far I could go without crossing the line. I played with her life, and she’s the one who lost.”
