The conviction in his voice is absolute, and it’s exactly what I was afraid of. “What are you planning?”
“Right now?” He quirks a brow. “Nothing.”
I nearly sag in relief. Thank the goddess he’s being reasonable. I know how angry he is, but going after the ACW is suicide. Besides, I’m not ready to fight the war that such a move would invoke. Right now, I have more than enough on my plate just trying to get used to Declan and my new powers.
“You look shocked,” he tells me.
“I am. I thought you’d be more . . . difficult about this.”
“Difficult? Why would I be difficult?”
He’s going for innocent, but all of a sudden I don’t trust the look on his face or the shadows in his eyes.
“Declan, you can’t . . .”
“Can’t what?” Those eyes narrow.
I swallow nervously. Even after everything we’ve shared, it still overwhelms me to have all that gorgeous intensity focused so completely on me. “The Council is too strong. You need to let what happened to me go.”
“Let it go?” He doesn’t bother to hide the incredulity in his tone. “You think I’m just going to let it go?”
He steps away from me to pace the long, narrow length of the bathroom. Though I know it’s stupid, I feel immediately bereft without his warmth wrapped around me.
“They don’t get to do whatever they want. They don’t get to play with people’s lives—with your life—and get away with it.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know yet,” he says in a harsh voice barely above a whisper. “But I’ll tell you what I want to do. I want to rip them all apart. To kill every Councilor—in as bloody and as terrible a way as possible—for what they did to you. I want to shred the whole fucking lot of them, make examples of them so that no one, ever, thinks it’s okay to come after you again.
“But I can’t do that. Not now, not when you’re in Austin. Because the only thing I want more than their blood is your safety. And this”—he gestures to the bruises still evident on my skin—“isn’t safe. I would never do something that would double back on you. Never do anything that could make you suffer the way this has.”
I hear what he’s saying—of course I do, because I feel exactly the same way about him. But I also hear what he isn’t saying. “Is that supposed to make me feel better? Knowing that if I wasn’t around, you would kill every single one of them?”
“What do you want from me?” He’s snarling now. “They raped you. They tortured you. They had every intention of killing you. And what? I’m just supposed to let that go? Let them get away with it?”
He whirls away from me, slams a fist into the wall. Pulls it back and does the same thing a second and a third time, until his fingers are swollen, his knuckles bruised and bloody. And still the rage pours off him.
He thrusts his uninjured hand into my hair, tightens his fingers into a fist and pulls me close, so close that I can see the silver flecks in his eyes. Feel the heat pouring off him. So close that we’re breathing the same air.
Part of me wants to stop pushing. To bury my head some more and pray that it all goes away. But even I’m smart enough to know that’s not going to work.
Gathering my courage, I take a deep breath. Close my eyes. And ask again. “What are you going to do?” Because he has a plan. I know he does.
He doesn’t answer, which only makes me more concerned. “Damn it, Declan. Don’t shut me out—you owe me that much. What are you thinking?”
In lieu of answering, he reaches for me. Pulls me into his arms. Then thrusts me away so that he can glide his fingers over my rib cage, my shoulder, the undersides of my breasts.
It takes me a minute to figure out what he’s doing, that he’s tracing each of the bruises and cuts I still bear from eight nights ago, when Kyle had me strapped to a table in some macabre offering to the sickness inside him and those he worked for. He presses kisses on them all—even ones that have faded or disappeared completely. He knows each and every one of them, and for the first time, I understand just how destroyed Declan is by what was done to me.
“Living like this, for revenge, isn’t healthy.” I brush my lips across his forehead.
“It’s healthier than eating myself up every minute of the goddamn day, thinking that they’re going to get away with what they did.”
“They aren’t going to get away with it. Kyle is—”
“Already dead. He just doesn’t know it yet.”