Darkness Bound (27 page)

“Promises, promises,” she said, yawning again.

He laid her gently down and crawled in beside her, not bothering with the covers, drawing her against his chest so she was facing away, their legs entangled.

“Who knew the big, bad, egomaniacal wolf would be such a
cuddler
?” she said, sighing with what he hoped was contentment.

“I think we’ve already established I’m a big, bad, egomaniacal
cat
.”

“Hmmm.” She wriggled her bottom against his pelvis. “Here, kitty kitty.”

Had she not sounded on the verge of sleep, Hawk would have taken her up on that enticing proposition.

Another yawn, this one accompanied by a deep, rising
whoop
, akin to the mating call of a whale. “Why did the Alpha call you ‘Lord Bastard’ at the punishment tree? And why does he hate you so much?”

A pulse of surprise at the question, a rueful twist in his stomach, bittersweet, as he realized he was ashamed to answer. Of course he would tell her only the truth; even if he’d wanted to lie, his tongue wouldn’t allow it. His entire body rebelled against his better judgment when it came to her.

“Do you remember what you called me in the forest,
Salsu Maru
? What Nando had called me?”

“Mmm.”

“In our language it means ‘Least Son.’ That’s what I am. Not the youngest of three, but the least important, because I was illegitimate. My brother has made an art form of rubbing it in my face, hence his amusing nicknames for me.”

She’d fallen still, listening. “Your brother? The Alpha is your
brother
?
”

“Half,” he corrected. “So is Xander, Morgan’s husband. Three different mothers, three different lives. And in answer to the second part of your question, why he hates me so much, well . . .”

How to explain the unexplainable? What words might properly convey the twisted logic that makes one sibling jealous of the attention given to another by a parent, even if that attention came in the form of vicious beatings for the smallest, most innocent offense? Their father had brutalized both him and Xander from the time they could walk, but for some unknown reason, to Alejandro he’d shown only supreme indifference, as if he didn’t exist at all. He never even looked at Alejandro, never acknowledged his presence in a room. Hawk would have given his eyeteeth to avoid his father’s fists, but to Alejandro, it seemed as if only he were invisible. As if he didn’t even merit the energy required to throw a punch.

To the lonely and the longing, even negative attention is better than no attention at all.

Hawk thought it the worst kind of sickness and perversion that his brother hated him for being an outlet for their father’s evil temper, and he’d never been able to find it in his heart to feel sorry for Alejandro, though he’d tried. Years of rancor had dug a chasm between them, a bottomless abyss that could no longer be bridged, and with the kind of cruel twist Fate so enjoys, Alejandro had turned out much like the man who sired him.

Aloud he only said, “I wasn’t a good brother. Or a particularly good son.”

“Are they still alive? Your parents?”

Hawk closed his eyes. “No.”

Hawk’s mother had suffered the same fate as Xander’s; the scope of their father’s murderous brutality wasn’t limited to his two sons. By luck or cunning only Alejandro’s mother had escaped her marriage to the Alpha alive. She’d lived a good life after her husband’s demise—he died, finally, the day Xander decided to fight back—and only a few years ago, she had drowned in a flash flood during the Season of the Inundation, when she was swept away picking mushrooms before she could climb into the trees.

“I’m sorry,” Jacqueline murmured. “I wish there were more people in your life who loved you. You deserve it.”

His face warmed with pleasure.
Like you?
he wanted to ask.
Do you?

She was silent a moment, then said, “Okay, since we’re sharing stories and you’re too chicken to ask—”

“Cat. I am a
cat
. Do I need to demonstrate my essential catness and pounce on you like you’re a ball of twine?” He hissed and lightly bit the back of her neck, eliciting a giggle.

“Excuse me. Since you’re too
catty
to ask . . . I’ll just go ahead and tell you.”

Hawk froze, his hand on her arm. She burrowed down deeper into the pillow, sighing again.

“My mother had three nervous breakdowns by the time I was ten years old.”

Feeling the invisible steel band that had seized his heart slightly loosen, Hawk slowly exhaled.

Not “I love you.”

Idiot.

“The first time I was five. I remember it because it was my birthday. There were all these people in the house: cousins, friends, my father’s military buddies. My dad was between wars then, so he was home with the family. He used to remember our birthdays by which war he was away fighting at the time we were born. Mine was Granada . . .” She faltered, her voice took on an odd, flat tone. “And . . . and Garrett’s was Cambodia.”

Garrett. Her older brother.

He’s the reason I’m so messed up. He’s the one who broke me.

The steel band around Hawk’s heart began to tighten again.

“I was just about to blow out the candles on my birthday cake when we heard the scream.”

Hawk held still, not even daring to breathe. The little hairs on his arms stood on end.

“Everyone turned. There was my mother, standing in the doorway of the kitchen in this beautiful, tailored yellow dress, her makeup flawless, holding a pair of sewing shears in one hand and all her hair in the other. She looked back at all the staring faces and said, ‘Heavy. It’s so heavy.’ Then she opened her hand and her hair floated to the floor, forming this forlorn red drift around her feet. After that, after she’d been taken away to ‘rest,’ I used to lie in my bed at night and wonder what had been so heavy. I just knew she wasn’t talking about her hair. I think I knew even at five years old that what she really meant was
life
. Life was just so goddamn heavy her mind couldn’t hold up under the weight of it, and it just kind of collapsed like an origami bird under an angry fist.”

Hawk slid his hand down Jacqueline’s arm, slipped his fingers between hers, and squeezed.

“She came back after a while, and the family pretended everything was fine. It wasn’t, of course, but we were polite and never talked about anything that mattered, which was the only way we knew how to love one another. Two years later, she cracked again. I can’t remember why. But . . . another few years went by. And this time when she cracked, the final time, I remember the reason.” Jacqueline’s voice grew small. “Though God knows I wish I didn’t.”

Hawk drew her closer. The room had taken on a tension, a sense of anticipation, as if the air itself were waiting to hear what she would say next.

“She wasn’t supposed to be home. It was her bridge night. My father was away on some stupid sortie or something, who knows, but we always knew how to contact him in case of an emergency. I was ten by then, and Garrett was twenty-five, still living at home, still jobless, so he was supposed to be watching me. And he was. He was always, always watching me.”

Something in her tone set off a warning bell in Hawk’s mind. Every nerve in his body stood at high alert, shrieking a song of horror, so that when he finally heard it, he already knew.

“It had been going on for years, of course. The first time was right before that fateful birthday party. He was my brother, and I loved him, and I believed him when he said he loved me, that it was our secret and I couldn’t tell anyone. I didn’t understand . . . why . . . but I still loved him. Even though it hurt. Even though I always cried.”

“No,” Hawk said, choked, into her hair. “No.”

“My mother came home. She found us. She found him, on top of me in my bed. She went and got my father’s gun from the nightstand and told my brother to leave the room and then she pointed the gun at me and called me a little whore, and she pulled the trigger. She shot me three times in the stomach. And then she turned the gun on herself.”

Her voice was totally devoid of emotion. Dead. Hawk’s arms were around her, crushing tight. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t see through the water in his eyes.

“She was in a coma for three months before she died. My brother went to prison; my father made sure of that. And I lived. If you could call it that. I survived. I became best friends with shame, and I grew to understand how fear never lets you go once it’s sunk its hooks in you. Fear becomes a part of you, like a tumor that can never be cut out.”

Hawk felt like he was drowning. He felt as if all the gravity in the universe had centered on a place in the middle of his chest.

“Garrett kept trying to kill himself in prison, so eventually they moved him to a psychiatric facility. He’s still there. Still keeps trying to kill himself. Still calls my father every year on my birthday, asking if I’ve forgiven him yet.”

There was a long, terrible silence. Hawk was trembling with horror, thinking of her face when she’d told him she could only look back on their first night together as another betrayal. He whispered her name.

In a quiet voice, she said, “You’re the only one I’ve ever told that story. My girlfriend Nola knows part of it. And my father knows, of course. But other than that . . . you’re the only one.”

Hawk rolled her over and took her face in his hands. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” His voice shook.

She wiped away the moisture at the corners of his eyes. “I didn’t tell you so you could feel sorry for me. I told you because I want you to know that all the broken things inside me feel less broken when I look at you.”

He squeezed his eyes shut. “Now, you mean. Because of what I gave you. Because of the drugs. When they wear off—”

“If it means I’ll feel differently than I do right now, I hope they never wear off. I’ve never felt this happy. This free. I want to feel like this forever.”

Her smile was lovely and warm, but he saw the haze, the faint fog of the spirit vine dulling the normally crystalline sheen of her eyes.

A mad, mad idea seized him.

She
could
feel like this forever. He couldn’t make the past go away, but he could take away its power to hurt her.

All he had to do was ask
kalum
to show him how to make the spirit vine brew.

He buried his face in her neck, hiding, shaking with the awful realization that he’d never wanted anything so much in his entire life.

And what kind of man did that make him, that he wanted to basically keep her enslaved, her free will devoured by psychoactive drugs that made her happy and malleable and . . . and . . .

Mine.

It came from some primeval place inside him, an ancient beast calling out, roused by the scent of blood. It began to whisper to him, coercive and sly.

There’s nothing for you here, in this colony where you’re only the Misbegotten, the lone wolf who lives like a hermit, misunderstood and unwanted except for the occasional, impersonal, tryst. Why shouldn’t you take what you want? Why shouldn’t you have a taste of happiness, after all these years of living in the dark? Why shouldn’t you both? You can heal her. You can heal yourself.

Take her. Take her and run.

Hawk’s shaking grew worse.

Jacqueline felt it. She wound her arms around his neck. “It’s all right,” she whispered into his ear as he crushed her against him. “Whatever you’re thinking, it’ll be all right. You’ll see. No matter what happens, I promise everything is going to be all right. It has to be. Because I don’t think anything else could ever compare to this.”

She squeezed him when she said the word, “this,” and in that moment, Hawk knew she was right.

And he knew exactly what he was going to do next.

He pressed a kiss to her forehead, smoothed her hair away from her face. She settled against him, warm and perfect, and within seconds fell asleep.

Hawk held her as the sun rose higher in the sky, held her as the minutes turned to hours and his mind spun with plans and possibilities. Then he rose from the bed as quietly as he could so as not to wake her, and slipped out of the room.

Olivia Sutherland was having a nightmare.

She was a strong woman, not prone to fear or flights of fancy, but ever since she and the rest of the final families had left Sommerley and begun the journey to the rainforest, she felt as if a malevolent specter had been lurking silently behind her, following every footstep, its bony hands reaching out for the back of her neck.

The feeling worsened the deeper they’d gone into the jungle. They were led by an eerily silent Leander and the colony guide. Tonight after she’d breastfed her own child and the Queen’s twins and they’d been tucked into their snug pouches, she’d lain in a makeshift bed of bracken and leaves beside her snoring husband, staring up at the black tangle of branches above, feeling her skin crawl as if a cluster of tarantulas were using her body for a mating ground.

Wrong wrong wrong.
Something was wrong—terribly so—but she couldn’t put her finger on what it was.

She tried telling herself it was homesickness. She tried telling herself it was nerves. She tried making a thousand different logical arguments to convince herself she was overreacting, but something deep inside her belly argued back that she was in danger.

She’d fallen asleep with that thought in mind . . . and the feeling of doom had crept into her dream.

She was running. A highway stretched open in front of her, cutting through a landscape of floating ash and desolation. Buildings burned, smoke coated the sky, piles of rubble spat flames. Though she was running as fast as she could, the road began to tilt up, rising swiftly, and she had to scratch and claw at the asphalt to keep herself from sliding back, sliding down into what she knew awaited her:

Death.

The road reared too high, sheer as a cliff face. She screamed and dug her fingers and toes into it, but it wanted to shake her off. It wanted her to fall. She fought as long as she could, but the angle was too steep, and there were no footholds, just unforgiving black pavement, bisected by two mocking yellow lines.

Just before her fingers slipped, Olivia looked over her shoulder to see what awaited her at the bottom.

Two tiny babies looked up at her from far, far below with solemn, identical faces. They sat naked on a blanket the color of blood, surrounded by howling winds and firestorms but untouched and tranquil, as if floating inside the eye of a hurricane. Four small arms reached up, pale and pudgy, tiny hands opened, fingers spread wide. A sound came from everywhere and nowhere, an ancient and terrible intonation that resonated with such power everything quaked, including Olivia’s soul.

Laughter. It was the laughter of children, warped into a babble of such force and shrieking frenzy Olivia opened her mouth and screamed in terror.

Then she let go.

Olivia bolted upright in blackness, the scream still on her lips. Grayson awoke, instantly on high alert, and shot to his feet from his position on the pallet beside her. He whirled around with a snarl, trying to locate the threat in the teeming dark jungle.

But Olivia knew now where the real threat lay. It wasn’t in the darkness. It wasn’t in whatever would greet them at the new colony, or in anything they might have left behind.

With trepidation, she turned her gaze to the small, snug pouches that held the twins, perhaps a dozen yards away, nestled beside Leander as he slept under the branches of another tree. He was awake now also, demanding to know what was wrong, but Olivia couldn’t look at him.

She couldn’t take her eyes away from the twins.

They were awake, too. They were looking directly at her. And though she was still half asleep and her heart was pounding so hard it made it difficult to hear anything above the rushing of blood through her veins, she was quite sure she heard the four-month-old girls speak in unison.

“Olivia.”

Just her name, clear as a bell. Only their lips didn’t move.

And they were infants; they couldn’t speak.

No one else seemed to hear it. Leander and Grayson and the guide were focused on her, not on the twins. But she felt certain her ears weren’t playing tricks on her . . . as certain as she now felt that these two children of the Queen and her Alpha were monsters.

Or miracles.

Or perhaps a bit of both.