Lover Mine(108)

He'd come here at first to protect someone. Bella had not been the reason.

Mary, she thought. Rhage's shellan, Mary. But how had they met?

Odd . . . that was a blank wall. He was shutting her off from that part.

"Bella got in touch with the Brotherhood and Tohrment came for you."

When he nodded again, she gave him back the bracelet, and while he fingered the symbols, she marveled at the relativity of time. Since they'd left the mansion, only an hour had passed, but she felt as though they'd spent a year together.

God, he'd given her more than she'd ever expected . . . and now she knew precisely why he'd been so helpful as she'd flipped out in the OR.

He'd endured a hell of a lot, having not so much lived through his early life as been dragged through it.

The question was, How had he gotten lost to the human world in the first place? Where were his parents? The king had been his whard when he'd been a pretrans--that was what his papers had said when she'd first met him in ZeroSum. She'd assumed his mother had died, and the visit to the bus station didn't disprove that . . . but there were holes in the story. Some of which she got the impression were deliberate, others of which he didn't seem to be able to fill.

With a frown, she sensed his father was still very much with him, and yet he didn't appear to have ever known the guy.

"You're taking me to one last place?" she murmured.

He seemed to take a final look about and then he poofed off and she followed him, thanks to all the blood of his that was in her system.

When they resumed form in front of a stunning modern house, his sadness overwhelmed him to such a degree that his emotional superstructure actually started to cave in on itself. With force of will, however, he managed to stop the disintegration in time, before it couldn't be righted.

Once your grid collapsed, you were cooked. Lost to your inner demons.

Which made her think of Murhder. On the day that he had learned her truth, she could remember exactly how his emotional construct had appeared to her: The steel girders that were the basis of mental health had been nothing but a crumbled mess.

She had been the only one who hadn't been surprised when he went insane and took off.

With a nod to her, John walked up to the formal front door, put in a key and opened the way in. As a draft ushered out to meet them, she could smell the dust and the damp, indicating that this was another structure that was empty. But there was nothing rotten inside, unlike John's former apartment building.

As he turned on the light in the foyer, she nearly gasped. On the wall, to the left of the door, was a scroll proclaiming in the Old Language that this was the home of the Brother Tohrment and his mated shellan, Wellesandra.

Which explained why it pained John so much to be here. Wellesandra's hellren wasn't the only one who had saved the pretrans from the projects.

The female had mattered to John. A helluva lot.

John walked down the hall and flicked on more lights as he went, his emotions a combination of bittersweet affection and roaring pain. When they came to a spectacular kitchen, Xhex went over to the table in the alcove.

He had sat here, she thought, putting her hands on the back of one of the chairs . . . on his first night in this house, he had sat here.

"Mexican food," she murmured. "You were so afraid of offending them. But then . . . Wellesandra . . ."

Like a bloodhound following a fresh trail, Xhex tracked what she sensed of his memories. "Wellesandra served you ginger rice. And . . . pudding. You felt full for the first time and your stomach didn't hurt and you . . . you were so gateful you didn't know how to handle it."

When she looked across the way at John, his face was pale and his eyes a bit too shiny and she knew he was back in his little body, sitting at the table, all curled into himself . . . becoming overwhelmed at the first kindness anyone had shown him in a very long time.

A footstep out in the hall brought her head up and she realized Qhuinn was still with them, the guy loitering about, his bad mood a tangible shadow around him.

Well, he didn't have to tag along any longer. This was the end of the road, the final chapter in John's story that pretty much caught her up-to-date. And unfortunately, it meant by all which was right and proper, they should go back to the mansion . . . where no doubt John would make her eat some more and try to get her to feed again.

She didn't want to return there, though, not yet. In her mind, she'd decided to take one night off, so these were her last few hours before she got on the vengeance trail . . . and lost this soft connection between her and John, this profound understanding they now had of each other.

Because she wasn't going to fool herself: The sad reality was the powerful tie that linked them was nonetheless so fragile, she didn't doubt it was going to snap once the present came back into better focus than the past.