Rob Thurman - Deathwish

“But you did leave,” I said, “finally.” There was judgment in that last word. There was no denying it.

“Finally.” Her voice hardened slightly. “And I heard he changed. I saw him again, and he seemed to have genuinely altered his ways. I wouldn’t have involved us with him otherwise, never, but tell you about him and my past?” Her lips tightened. “You don’t know the time we lived in. What we had to do to survive. What the humans would’ve done to the three of us if we’d been caught. You have no idea.”

“No, I don’t, because you didn’t tell me.” Not once as we lay there with sheets twisted around our bodies.

“No, I didn’t, did I?” Her temper spiked. “Maybe I didn’t want to see how you would look at me when I told you in detail the killer that I used to be. That my family was no more than a trio of monsters, living no matter the cost to the innocent.” The temper, the regret—it faded, to be replaced with puzzlement. “You’re difficult to live up to, Niko. You are not quite twenty-three years old. You’re a child in comparison to me, but you live this life, this black-and-white life. You have this unbreakable core.” Her hand rose to my cheek, then fell away. “Honor. It’s a wonder. It’s a curse.” The hand went back to my chest and she pushed me away. “You have your watch. Go.”

I didn’t. I needed trust, but I needed Promise as well. She hadn’t lied. I held on to that. She hadn’t actually lied. But neither had she told the truth—and it was a great deal of truth not to tell.

And that was something I couldn’t pretend hadn’t happened. I couldn’t close my eyes and pretend she hadn’t held back a major part of her life, that she had hidden the knowledge of her family from me. And more.

“You met him while Cal and I were fighting on the beach. He smelled him on you.” I stared, unblinking, at her. “A business meeting or reminiscing about that past you don’t want to talk about?”

“Business, although it is honestly none of yours.” The heat was back, but she reined it in and tried again when I didn’t move, saying, “Except for Seamus and Cherish, I’ve been honest with you since we’ve been together, Niko.”

Except for my family, my mate, my life. Except for all that.

“Except” . . . a small word to do so much damage. This time I did go. Silently. Leaving her behind.

And I felt . . . nothing. I walked to the living room, hollowed out—an empty shell called honor. I didn’t believe in ghosts, not even in our world, yet at that moment I was one.

So be it.

If I was a cold ideal, with every bit of compromise stripped away, then that was survival. If I were an abstract, that’s how it had to be. Never mind the things it made me wonder. As in, Had Sophia won? As in, Outside honor, did I truly exist at all?

Then Cal punched me in the nose and, as a starburst of pain flared behind my eyes and I tasted blood, I decided that I did. I wasn’t precisely happy about it at the moment, but I did exist. “Better?” he asked, shaking out the ache in his hand.

I wiped at the trickle of blood on my upper lip and replied honestly, “Actually, yes.”

“I didn’t break it. Hell, I’d need a baseball bat to take out something that big.” He went to the kitchen and returned with a hand towel full of ice. “Here.” He was the one I was relieving. During his watch, he’d finished taping up the window with black plastic. The Vigil, ever efficient, had removed all the blood and glass with the bodies. If not for the missing window and rug, you wouldn’t have known what had taken place. “And since you let me hit you,” he added, “I figured you needed it.”

I had let him and I had needed it. An odd thing to need, pain. A smaller one to set a much larger one free. If it’s not free, you can’t acknowledge it, you can’t see it. And if you can’t see it, you can’t fight it.

I hadn’t known, but Cal had. Cal wasn’t black-and-white like me. Cal was all shades of gray. He knew right from wrong, unlike Cherish, but that didn’t mean the end result was any different. He never let that knowing stop him from making the necessary choice. He had a care for some, and such a ferocious carelessness for others that the contrast was . . . stark. Cal wasn’t the good man Promise labeled him, but he was a man. He struggled every day to be one—to be that and not the monster he suspected was ready to crawl out at any second. Endlessly stubborn, utterly loyal, and could throw a fairly decent punch when needed. Compared to that, good was highly overrated.

With black hair shoved behind his ears, he wiped a blood smear from his knuckles onto his jeans and offered, “You know, I’ve never had a problem with hitting a girl.”

Promise was correct: I really had raised him right.

I pulled the ice pack away from my nose and felt the bridge—straight and unmarred. As he’d said, unbroken. “A girl might be one thing,” I said, the taste of salt still on my tongue. “You’d be hitting a woman who would then paddle your ass like the Whiffle-ball-bat wielding child that you are.”

“Ye of little faith.” There was a dark tone under the flippant words that had me shaking my head.

I cuffed his head lightly. I did have one person to depend on always. It was well worth remembering. I filled him in on what Promise had told me. Seamus’s agenda had more history behind it than we suspected. It made his brutal jealousy easier to understand.

“In all honesty, I’m not sure who’s to blame, Promise or me.” Everyone else—Robin, Cherish, and her companion—had gone to bed. Cal and I stood alone in the living room. The lights were low but I could still see my breath form in the cold air leaking around the plastic. “Sophia made sure you and I both have our issues.”

“Issues?” he echoed incredulously. “Jesus, Nik. People on Dr. Phil have issues. We have atomic-powered, demonic-flavored, fresh-from-the-pits-of-hell, full-blown fucking neuroses. Freud would’ve been in a corner sucking his thumb after one session with us. And don’t ever think our bitch of a mother did worse by me than you. She stole your childhood, she was the reason you had to stand between me and her again and again, she made you the one that had to tell the truth, because all she could do was lie. Thanks to her, we both have walls around us like steel. If she ever taught us anything, it was that the only one we can trust is each other.”

He looked at me and winced. “Black eyes. Sorry.” Pushing my hand with the ice pack back toward my nose, he continued, “We learned differently with Robin. He lies for fun. He doesn’t mean it. He’s so full of shit with us we wouldn’t believe him for a second.” Which was true, and a puck’s way of being honest. “But Promise . . .” Cal shrugged.

I waited for him to say “I told you so.” He was the one who had smelled Seamus’s scent transferred from her to me. I expected him to tell me to cut her loose immediately. But he didn’t. Not quite.

“She didn’t tell you the truth,” he went on. “Maybe she didn’t lie outright, but she didn’t tell you she has a kid, about Seamus, that they were a family. That’s a big deal. Huge. If she’s not telling you that, what else isn’t she telling you?”

“You think I should give her up, then?” That freed pain wasn’t going anywhere. It simmered and swelled like the ache of a broken bone. It wasn’t alone. There was anger there as well—anger and betrayal.

His lips turned downward at the corners. “What do I think? Let’s see. I have a woman who loved me but I couldn’t be with because—forget truth—she wouldn’t tell me any damn thing at all. And I’m sleeping with a wolf who if she wants an after-sex snack might decide that’s me, but I still like her anyway.”