“Why have you come, Kat?” Sean said in a low, angry voice, without turning.
He stood on the far side of the circular stone chamber, framed in a tall, narrow opening cut into the stone, the wind gusting waist-length black hair around his body, ruffling the feathers of enormous raven wings. “Leave. Now. There’s nothing for you here.”
If I’d not seen Christian first, and felt his heart, Sean would have terrified me. My love was once a handsome, rugged fisherman, toiling on the ocean, having turned his muscled-from-pulling-nets-all-day back on the mighty, deadly O’Bannion clan. With his black hair, dark eyes, and quick, easy smiles, I’d learned to trust him in that frightened, wide-open state in which I’d spent my earliest years. Of all the people I’d met, his had been the only heart that rang true to me, void of complicity.
Despite his appearance, nearly identical to Christian and Cruce, he didn’t frighten me now. I could feel him, I was close enough. He was lost within, drifting in a land far more barren and wasted than what spread, so ugly and black, beyond these castle walls. His sociopathic cousin Rocky O’Bannion’s credo, inscribed on the back of a watch of gold and diamonds he always wore, had been: Isolate the mark. He’d sworn that every man and woman, regardless of education, pedigree, or wealth, would ultimately fall prey to it; that we couldn’t stand alone. Yet Sean had been perched in dangerous isolation for two years and hadn’t succumbed. That gave me hope. “I disagree,” I said, moving farther into the icy room. “You’re here.”
“I may be. But Sean is not,” he said bitterly. “He’s been gone a long time.”
“I don’t believe you.”
When he whirled in a storm of dark feathers and flashing, alien eyes, I inhaled sharply but stood my ground.
My love, I thought. Oh, my love, I’m so sorry.
Both born into powerful Irish crime families, we’d spent our entire lives running from the darkness of our own blood.
But the darkness had found him.
I hazed the vision of my eyes, the better to focus the gaze of my heart.
“Get out, Kat. I don’t want you here. You’re nothing to me,” he said coldly. “Less than nothing. And don’t bloody do that to me. You don’t want to feel it. Leave now and I’ll let you live.”
If I was nothing, why then was the image frozen in his heart, of the day I’d insisted he accept me and my child without knowing? The day I’d erected an impenetrable wall between us and shut him out.
I blurted in a swift rush of words because I knew I’d never get it out otherwise that truth, that terrible, divisive truth that had been eating me alive inside, and cut the ties that bound us: “I lied, Sean. I lied to you. Cruce came to me while I slept. He raped me in my dreams. Rae might be his.” I began to weep the instant it was out, I felt as if an enormous pressure, constantly crushing me, had vanished from my soul. I wept with relief, I wept with sorrow. I wept with confliction because I love Rae. I love her with all my heart and she might be my enemy’s child. What do you do with that?
Sean jerked violently, shuddering from head to toe with the intensity of his emotion. Raven-veined ice exploded in the room, sheeting the floor, climbing the stone walls, dripping from the ceiling in dark crystal stalactites. His voice was deafening when he exploded, “Cruce raped—” He broke off, unable to finish the sentence, jerking violently, hands fisting. “That sonofabitch. That son of a fucking…” He trailed off, snarling, body straining from the effort to control himself.
With a mere emotion he’d turned the room into a cave of dark ice. I shivered, crying silently, but stood my ground. He wouldn’t ice me. Not my Sean.
“Fuck, Kat!” he cried then. “Fuck! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I’m so sorry,” I said, voice breaking. “I wanted to tell you but I was so ashamed. And the longer I didn’t tell you, the longer it went on, the less possible it became.” I didn’t say that I felt complicit. I couldn’t begin to explain how trapped it had made me feel, not without telling him why. That I’d also felt pleasure from it. “You hadn’t begun to change. You were a man, he was a prince. How could you have battled Cruce? What if he’d killed you?”
“I thought she was Kasteo’s!” His voice broke. “I thought you cheated on me with one of the Nine!”
“Och, no, Sean! I was pregnant before that. Didn’t you do the math?”
“She could have been early!”
“She wasn’t. Kasteo taught me to shut out the pain of the world, he taught me to become strong but never—” I broke off, shaking my head violently. “Kasteo’s heart belongs to someone else. Not me. Never me. And my heart has always belonged to you. I love you, Sean, it’s always been you. Don’t you remember what we promised each other?”
“That was then. Before I became the monster I am. You’d never have pledged such a troth to what I’ve become. I’m what raped you!”
“If you weaken, I’ll be strong,” I said, through tears. It was the first line of the vow we’d taken together when we were young, the day we’d run off to Paradise Point by the lighthouse, dressed up as if it were our wedding day, had our own ceremony, pledging our hearts and souls together. Too much passion burns. Tenderness fuses. We’d always been tender with each other. And that passion we shared was rich and good and strong. Until a Fae prince had shattered it with lust inflated by illusion. And made me compare. Never compare. The moment you do, you destroy what gifts you possess, and your gifts are precious. “Let me be strong for you now.”
He spun then, gave me his back, and turned to stare out at the stormy, lashing sea. “It’s too late, Kat. Far too late for that.”
I refused to believe that. “If you get lost, I’ll be your way home,” I said softly.
“Go away! I’m not the man you used to know. There’s nothing left of him and I have no bloody home.”
I shook my head as I wiped tears from my cheeks. Sean was not staying lost within his ugly, horrible place in this ugly, horrible land. Nor was he leaving alone to go God knew where. The Kat I’d once been would have quailed before such a creature, that looked so much like Cruce. The woman I’d been before Kasteo wouldn’t have been able to handle the waves of pain, misery, and self-loathing gusting from Sean’s soul, slamming into me, icy spears, piercing my heart, trying to destroy my hope.
But I’d learned, locked beneath Chester’s by Ryodan, trapped with one of the Nine. I’d learned what I needed to know in order to fix the problem I’d made by failing to heed Ryodan’s warnings in the first place. I wasn’t the woman I’d once been. And, I was angry now, too.