She shrugged. “We each had our crosses to bear. Mine was Minton’s fraying ropes and being strung from a cliff rising hundreds of feet above a river that cut through the mountains. Joseph excelled at finding our fear and exploiting it. Bullet’s was water, Arrow’s was the dark and mine was heights.”
“Fuck,” Dmitry bit out viciously.
He made a move to get up and she narrowed her gaze on him. “Do not, Asinimov. You began this. You will allow me to finish.”
He raised his hands in the air, the action desperate.
“He would anchor the ropes to bolts in the rock face and then he would make me climb down, sometimes using the threat of punishing my sisters as motivation when I would hesitate, and then Minton would be lowered in front of me, crisscrossing the ropes over my torso and forcing me to hover over the gorge for hours, sometimes days at a time.”
He moved then and grabbed her. Surprisingly, her will to fight was decimated at the touch of his hands. He enfolded her, pressing his face into the hollow of her throat and simply holding her tight.
“The ropes would squeak and they felt like sandpaper. They were always frayed you see, so that if I moved, they would split farther, the braid giving way to age and Minton’s machinations. There were times the ropes were useless and I was simply holding on by my hands and feet. Do you know what it is to see your death waiting, to long for it so badly, but be unable to fling yourself to meet it? I hate myself,” she admitted.
Her sob came from somewhere in her past.
“Do not do this,” he pleaded.
“I wanted to die, Asinimov, but it is the truth I wanted to kill more,” she said on a near scream. “And so I held on for death.”
She had lost control but instead of striking out she clung to him, climbing up his body and wrapping herself around the man who offered her safety in the midst of her memories.
Long minutes passed, her sobs subsiding and leaving her fatigued and unsure. He held her through it all, stroking her back, kissing her neck and murmuring soft words to her.
She both hated him and wanted to live in his arms forever.
“You are not what he made you,” Dmitry said at her ear.
“That is all I can be,” she responded firmly.
“Serdtsa muzhchinam razbivaet ne nachalo i ne konets, a to, chto praishodit mezhdu,” he told her. “I will make your in-between more than what you have known if you will let me.”
“I will not break,” she murmured at his neck.
“I know,” he said, taking her lips.
He walked her to the bed, sat down and simply held her. For how long she didn’t know and the passage of time wasn’t as important as what he offered her with his actions. Nothing was as important to her in those moments but that one thing.
Hope.
Chapter Thirteen
She did not kiss his lips. She did not stay and watch over him. Bone glanced at Dmitry’s sleeping form, noticing how his skin stretched taut over his heavy muscles, seeing how his eyes darted under their lids from the effects of his dreams. She inhaled once, the scent of pine and juniper taunting her.
And then she walked out of the room.
She dressed silently in the darkness, grateful her sister had delivered cargoes, a tank top, a sweatshirt, and combat boots to the room earlier. She braided her hair and washed her face, though she refused to wash his scent from her body. Bone accepted what it was and what it could never be and then she kissed her bag, hung it up in the closet and walked down the stairs.
The walls of the house seemed to hold secrets Bone would likely not live long enough to try and solve. She did not want to remain here, close to her temptation, because her goals would not be met by holding Dmitry in her body, feeling his kiss on her neck and his warmth in her soul.
Death could not live where hope resided.
She needed the cold. She stopped at the base of the stairs, skin tingling as she sought the darkness for her sisters.
She raised her chin. “It is time.”
“Be safe,” Arrow whispered.
“Kill them all,” Bullet urged.
The silence around them was absolute. She found herself torn, ripped in two at the thought of leaving the man who’d stolen a piece of her.
Bone nodded. “I will.”
“Nodachi has been found,” Bullet told them softly.
“So Blade’s rince leis an lann will begin soon. That’s as it should be. The boy is fine?”
“She has no visual on the boy yet. There is another stalking her as she stalks Nodachi. And Grant—she has seen Grant many times in Sydney,” Bullet imparted.
“Nameless,” Bone said firmly, knowing in her gut it was the woman from that black night so long ago. Grant’s presence solidified it.
“Surely it is. I can only wonder if she suspects the truth of it all…if Grant told her what was done in the darkness of her pain,” Arrow mused. “You have the phone we left for you?”
She nodded. She’d attached it to her side under her clothing.
“Call us when it is done, sister, or we will worry,” Bullet demanded.
Adam Collins stepped from the shadows, his midnight eyes narrowed on her. “He will follow you, Bone.”