Midnight Awakening (31 page)

He reached out and wiped at an apparent smudge on her chin. Then he tilted her face up to his. He stared at her for a long moment before he kissed her.

It was brief and tender, filled with a sweetness that robbed Elise of her breath.

“Everything else can wait for now,” he said quietly, a dark ferocity in his voice. “Come with me, Elise. I want to take care of you now.”

He led her by the hand, out of the foyer and up the main staircase to her guest room on the second floor. She walked inside with him, paused as he turned to close the door behind them. He glanced down to where her packed bag sat on the floor. When he looked back at her, there was a question in his eyes.

“I had been planning to leave Berlin today. I was going to go back to Boston.”

“Because of me?”

She shook her head. “Because of me. Because I’m confused about a lot of things, and I’m losing focus on what matters. The only thing that should matter—”

“Your vengeance.”

“My promise, yes.”

Tegan came to stand in front of her, his broad chest filling her vision, radiating a warmth she wanted so badly to feel against her again. She closed her eyes as he began carefully unbuttoning her bloodstained blouse. He peeled the sticky silk off her body and let it drop to the floor.

Maybe she should have felt awkward or at least resistant, allowing him to undress her after the awful way things had gone between them last night. But she was sickened by the gore on her clothes, and there was a shaking, distressed part of her that welcomed Tegan’s care. His touch was protective, not sexual, all steady strength now. Capable and compassionate.

Her ruined pants went next, along with her socks and shoes. And then she was standing before him in just her bra and panties.

“The Minion’s blood soaked through to your skin,” he said, frowning as he ran his hand over her marred shoulder and down along the line of her arm. In the adjoining bathroom, the shower turned on. “I’ll wash it off you.”

She walked with him into the spacious bath suite, saying nothing as he gingerly removed the last of her clothing.

“Come on,” he said, guiding her around the wall of mottled glass bricks that separated the large shower area from the rest of the room.

Warm steam rolled around them as they neared the spray.

“You’re getting all wet,” Elise said when Tegan strolled in ahead of her without taking off his jeans.

He merely shrugged. Water sluiced all over him, into his tawny hair and down the thick, banded muscles of his shoulders and arms. Cascading rivulets ran over the beautiful lines of his
dermaglyphs
, and onto the darkening denim that covered his long, powerful legs.

She looked at him and felt as if she were seeing him with fresh eyes…seeing him for the first time. There was no mistaking what he was—a solitary, deadly male, trained to kill and nearly perfect in his apathy. But there was a stunning vulnerability about him as he stood in front of her now, soaking wet, his hand extended out to her in kindness.

And if the warrior in him gave her pause before, this new vision of him was even more unnerving.

It made her want to run into his arms and stay there, forever if she could.

“Step under the water with me, Elise. I’ll do the rest.”

She felt her feet moving beneath her, her fingers coming to rest in the warm center of Tegan’s palm. He brought her into the soft rain of the shower. Smoothed her hair back from her face as they both became drenched together.

Elise melted into the warm water and the even greater heat of Tegan’s body brushing against hers. She let him soap her skin and shampoo her hair, glad for his comforting touch after the ugliness of her day.

“Feel good?” he asked as he rinsed her off, the low vibration of his voice traveling through his fingertips and into her skin and bones.

“It feels wonderful.”

Too much so,
she thought. When she was with Tegan, especially like this, he made her forget about her pain. He made it all too easy to accept the void that had existed for so long in her heart. His tenderness could make her feel so full, pushing away all the darkness. Right now, as he caressed her and held her so safely in his arms, he made her feel loved.

He made it far too tempting to imagine a future where she could be happy again. Whole again, with him.

“I’m failing in my promise to my son,” she said, forcing herself to draw away from the comfort of Tegan’s touch. “All I should be concerned about is making sure Camden’s death wasn’t in vain.”

Something flashed in his eyes, only to be shuttered an instant later by the fall of his spiked, wet lashes. He reached behind her and shut off the water. “You can’t spend your life living for the dead, Elise.”

Reaching above her, he grabbed a folded towel from the supply stacked on a high shelf built into the marble of the shower. When he passed the towel to her, Elise met his gaze. The hauntedness reflecting there took her aback.

There was a bleakness staring back at her. The pain of an old wound, not yet healed.

She’d never noticed it before…because he’d never allowed her to see it.

“You blame yourself for what happened to your mate, don’t you?”

He stared at her for a long, quiet minute, and she was certain he would give her an aloof denial. But then he exhaled a hushed curse, ran his fingers through the wet hair at his scalp. “I couldn’t save her. She depended on me to keep her safe, but I failed her.”

Elise’s heart stumbled a beat in her chest. “You must have loved her very much.”

“Sorcha was a sweet girl, the most innocent person I’ve ever known. She didn’t deserve the death she was given.”

Elise wrapped the towel around herself as Tegan sat down on the marble bench that ran the length of the shower stall. His thighs were spread, his elbows resting on his knees.

“What happened, Tegan?”

“After her abduction, some two weeks later, her captors sent her back to me. She’d been raped, tortured. As if that hadn’t been cruel enough, whoever held her also fed on her. She came back to me a Minion of the one who brutalized her.”

“Oh, God. Tegan.”

“Sending her back like that was worse than killing her, but I guess they left that task to me. I couldn’t do it. In my heart, I knew she was gone, but I couldn’t end her life.”

“Of course not,” she assured him gently, her heart breaking for him.

Elise closed her eyes on a softly whispered prayer as she eased down onto the bench next to him. She didn’t care if he rejected her compassion; she needed to be close to him. He had to know that he wasn’t alone.

When she put her hand on his bare shoulder, he didn’t flinch away. He pivoted his head to the side, meeting her sympathetic gaze. “I tried to make her better. I thought if I drew enough of her blood away and gave her my own in return—if I could feed her from my veins and siphon off the poison in hers—maybe by some miracle she’d revive. So, I fed to feed her. I went on a blood rampage that lasted for weeks. I had no control. I was so consumed by guilt and the need to make Sorcha better that I didn’t even notice how quickly I was slipping toward Bloodlust.”

“But you didn’t slip, did you? I mean, you must not have, to be sitting here now.”

He laughed sharply, a coarse, bitter sound. “Oh, I slipped all right. I fell, like all addicts do. Bloodlust would have turned me Rogue if it hadn’t been for Lucan. He stepped in, and put me in a stone cell to wait the disease out. For several months, I nearly starved, feeding in only the smallest quantities needed to keep me breathing. Most of those days, I prayed for death.”

“But you survived.”

“Yeah.”

“And Sorcha?”

He shook his head. “Lucan did for her what I wasn’t man enough to do. He freed her from her suffering.”

Elise’s heart lurched with understanding. “He killed her?”

“It was an act of mercy,” Tegan answered tightly. “Even though I hated him for it all these past five hundred years since. In the end, Lucan showed her far more compassion than I was able to. I would have kept her alive only to save myself from suffering the guilt of her death.”

Elise smoothed her palm over Tegan’s strong back, moved by his confession and by the love that had been taken from him so long ago. She had thought him cold and unfeeling, but it was only because he hid his emotions well. His wounds went deeper than she could ever have guessed. “I’m sorry for everything you’ve been through, Tegan. I understand now. I understand…so much now.”

“Do you?”

The bleak, narrowed gaze that met her eyes was penetrating in its intensity.

“When I saw you downstairs, covered in blood—” He broke off abruptly, as if unable to form the words. “Ah, fuck…I never wanted to feel that kind of fear and pain again, do you understand? I didn’t want to let myself get that close to anyone again.”

Elise looked at him in silence, hearing his words, yet uncertain he could actually mean them. Did he really mean to say that he cared for her?

His fingers were a feather-light brush against the dull throb of her bruised cheek. “I do care,” he said, a quiet reply in answer to the question he’d read with his touch. He brought her under the shelter of his arm, just holding her, his thumb idly stroking her arm. “With you, I think it would be very easy to care too much, Elise. I’m not sure that’s a risk I can afford to take.”

“You can’t…or you won’t?”

“There’s no difference. Just semantics.”

Elise leaned her head against his shoulder. She didn’t want to hear this now. Didn’t want to let him go. “So, where does that leave us now? Where do we go from here, Tegan?”

He didn’t say anything one way or the other, just held her close and pressed a tender kiss to her brow.

CHAPTER
Twenty-five

T
he rest of that day passed in a blur of tactics and information gathering. At sundown, Reichen had sent a couple of his associates out to Irina Odolf ’s residence. The report had come back that the Minion was gone, evidently on his own motor, even though Elise had certainly slowed the bastard down based on the amount of blood he’d left at the scene.

Armed with her description of him, Reichen was already in town looking for possible leads. Tegan hoped like hell they located the Minion son of a bitch because he was looking forward to finishing what Elise had started.

As for her, as much as Tegan might have liked to have kept Elise in his arms—or, better still, naked in his bed—he knew it was a path that would only lead him deeper into complicated territory. Instead, he had turned his attention to the journal they’d intercepted from Marek, and the stash of letters Elise had recovered from Petrov Odolf ’s belongings.

Both contained instances of the same peculiar phrases:

castle and croft shall come together under the crescent moon

to the borderlands east turn your eye

at the cross lies truth

It was a riddle of some sort, but what it meant—if it meant anything at all—remained to be seen.

Petrov Odolf didn’t seem to understand it either, despite the fact that his Breedmate said he’d been scribbling those very words compulsively in the time leading up to his turning Rogue. Like his brother before him had as well.

And like who it was that once owned the old journal with Dragos’s
dermaglyphic
symbol scribbled onto its pages.

Now Tegan stood across the containment cell from Petrov Odolf, eyeing the restrained Rogue with precious little patience. He and Elise had been at the facility for the past hour, getting exactly nowhere in their continued round of questioning with Odolf.

His medication had been reduced, so at least the Rogue was conscious, but he was far from lucid. Strapped into a free-standing, vertical steel-mesh body cage, his muscular arms bound down at his sides, feet shackled together, Petrov Odolf looked every bit the dangerous beast he was. His big head sagged down on his chest, glowing amber eyes shifting back and forth across the cell without focus. He snorted and grunted through his elongated fangs, then began another round of futile struggle against his restraints.