Nightbred(68)

Would she be there waiting, or was it all a ruse?

Jamys had known something had changed the moment Chris had found the strange symbols on the journal’s bookplate. He thought at first she had been frightened, but then he detected the complexity of the dark change in her scent. She felt fear, yes, but there was more to it than that. He knew only too well how mortals smelled when they felt despair, and rage, and disgust. She had felt all those things, and winding through them an abysmal amount of regret.

Whoever this Stryker was, Christian despised him. He could hear it in her voice each and every time she uttered his name.

Jamys returned to the Golden Horde’s mapped course and reached the marina rendezvous point at Key West some two hours later, and saw Christian waving to him. He guided the boat to the empty slip she indicated, securing the sails and mooring lines before he climbed out onto the pier.

“You made it.” She hurled herself at him. “I was beginning to worry.”

“I took a slight detour.” When she began to pull away, he wrapped his arms around her and kept her close. “I think we should stop our search for the night. There is a place I want to take you. Come on board, and we can go there now.”

She looked up at him. “Someone else might find the jewels, and you’d miss the chance to rule Ireland. Isn’t that everything you want?”

“I know what I want tonight.” He caressed her cheek. “It is not Ireland.”

Her smile slipped. “I get it. You figured out that I didn’t tell you everything about Stryker.” She bumped her forehead into his shoulder three times. “Okay. He hired me to work at some of his parties. I didn’t have sex with anyone, at least, not . . .” She made a frustrated sound. “Look, everything I did, I did by myself, with people watching me. I’m not proud of it, but I was fifteen and alone and no one else would give me a job.”

“Was there no one to help you?” he asked. “Your family?”

“My family.” She made a bitter sound. “My father—the man I thought was my father—was a drunk and a beach bum. He didn’t like finding out I wasn’t his kid, so he left me and my mom. That drove my mother crazy, and she killed herself two years later. My grandparents blamed me for all of it and turned me over to the state. I don’t know who my biological father is, and everyone who knew his name is dead or won’t speak to me, so he’s out of the picture.” She made a dismissive gesture. “That pretty much covers my family.”

Now he understood so many things about her. “You cannot blame yourself for their actions.”

“Jamys, I’m the only reason my parents got married, my father left, my mother committed suicide, and my grandparents disowned me.” She blinked a few times. “I didn’t do it on purpose, but yeah, I destroyed my entire family.”

“Christian.”

“I’ve learned to live with it,” she assured him. “I didn’t ask to be born. I loved my dad and my mom. I tried to love my grandparents. I was a good kid—at least, I think I was—until I met Stryker.”

This was her secret shame? “Christian, you were a desperate child, alone in the world. You did what you had to in order to survive.”

She shook her head. “I was old enough to know better. I could have stayed in foster care after my mom died.” Her hand went to the cross hidden under her shirt.

“The cross you wear,” he said, startling her, “it belonged to your mother?”

She nodded. “She gave it to me the night before she killed herself. Took it off her neck and put it around mine, and said I’d have to carry it now. I thought she was just being crazy again.” She pulled the cross out from her shirt to look at it. “She never took it off, not even when she went swimming or showered. I don’t know why; she wasn’t religious.”

“Do you wear it to remember her?”

She shrugged. “I kept it to spite my grandmother; she wouldn’t let me take anything with me when she dumped me in foster care.” Her eyes met his. “I hate what my mom did, but I loved her, too. It’s all I have left of her. And it’s all I have to remind me not to be her.” She sighed. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“I know what it is to love someone you hate.” He thought of all the nights he had spent alone in his tower chambers and, before that, locked inside his silence. “I knew what my mother had done, and I didn’t tell my father. I let him think she had been tortured to death in Dublin.” He met her gaze. “It drove him mad, Christian. I let my father become an animal because I could not face what my mother had done to us. Because for all the horror she had brought upon us, I loved her still. So yes, I do understand.”