Lover Mine(21)

No reason to make a run for it. And tackling him hadn't worked, either. Nor had going the symphath route, because she was blocked mentally as well as physically.

All she could do was watch him and wish she could get at him somehow. God, this impotent drive to kill must be the same for zoo lions when their keepers entered their cage with the brooms and the eats: The other guy could come and go and change your environment, but you were stuck.

Kind of made you want to bite down on something.

After he left, she went over to the food. Getting angry at the steak wasn't going to help her and she needed the calories to fight back, so she ate everything there was. To her tongue, the shit all tasted like cardboard and she wondered whether she would ever again have something because she wanted to and liked the way it was seasoned.

The whole food-as-fuel thing was logical, but sure as hell didn't give you anything to look forward to during mealtime.

When she was finished, she went back to the window, settled in the wing chair, and brought her knees up against her breasts. Staring down into the street, she was not at rest, but merely motionless.

Even after all these weeks, she was looking for an escape . . . and she would be that way until she drew her last breath.

Again, like her urge to fight Lash, the drive was not just a function of her circumstance, but who she was as a female, and the realization made her think of John.

She had been so determined to get away from him.

She thought of when they'd been together--not the last time, when he'd paid her back for all the rejection, but the other one at her basement place. After the sex, he'd made a move to kiss her . . . clearly, he'd wanted more than just a quick, hard fuck. Her response? She'd pulled away and gone into the bathroom, where she'd washed herself off as if he'd dirtied her. Then she'd hit the door.

So she didn't blame him for the way their last good-bye had gone.

She glanced around her dark green prison. She was probably going to die here. Probably soon, too, as she hadn't taken a vein in a while and she was under a great deal of physical and emotional stress.

The reality of her own demise made her think of the many faces she'd stared down into as lives had leached out of bodies and souls went soaring free. As an assassin, death had been her job. As a symphath, it had been a kind of calling.

The process had always fascinated her. Every one of the people she'd killed had fought the tide, even though they knew, as she'd stood over them with whatever weapon she'd palmed up still in her hand, that if they managed to pull themselves out of the spiral she was just going to strike again. Hadn't seemed to matter, though. The horror and the pain had acted as an energy source, food for their fight, and she knew what that felt like. How you struggled to breathe even though you couldn't get air down your throat. How the cold sweat formed on top of your overheated skin. How your muscles became weak, but you still called on them to move, move, move, damn it.

Her previous captors had taken her to the brink of rigor mortis a number of times.

Although vampires believed in the Scribe Virgin, symphaths had no conception of an afterlife. To them, death was an exit ramp not to another highway, but to a brick wall that you slammed into. After which there was nothing.

Personally, she didn't buy the whole holy-deity bullshit, and whether that was breeding or intellect, the outcome was the same. Death was lights-out, end of story. For fuck's sake, she'd seen it up close so many times--after the great struggle came . . . nothing. Her victims had just stopped moving, frozen in whatever position they'd been in when their hearts had halted. And maybe some people died with a smile on their face, but in her experience, that was a grimace, not a grin.

You'd think if they were getting a boatload of bright white light and kingdom-of-heaven crap, they'd be beaming like they'd won the lottery.

Except maybe the reason they looked so bitched was less about where they were going and more about where they'd been.

The regrets . . . you did think about your regrets.

Aside from the fact that she wished she'd been born under different circumstances, there were two transgressions among her many that weighed more than all the others.

She wished she'd told Murhder, all those years ago, that she was half-symphath . That way, when she'd been taken up to the colony, he wouldn't have come to rescue her. He'd have known it was inevitable that the other side of her family would come claim her and he wouldn't then have ended up where he had.

She also wished she could go back and tell John Matthew she was sorry. She still would have pushed him away, because that was the only construct under which he wouldn't have repeated the mistakes of her other lover. But she would have let him know it wasn't him. It was her.

At least he was going to be okay in all of this. He had the Brothers and the king of the race to look after him, and, courtesy of her shutting him down, he wasn't going to do anything stupid.