He had fallen in love with her without even trying.
Luna rubbed her finger where her wedding ring used to sit, a tattoo resting in its place. A part of him hated that bare finger, especially when he felt the weight of her ring in his pocket—but he was soothed, somewhat, because of the skull she’d had placed there.
It was enough—for now.
“I waited too late,” she said. “I should have done something sooner.”
Kit shook his head. “It could have been you in her place, or another girl, but the blame shouldn’t rest with you. You tried, and if that’s no solace, take comfort in the knowledge that you avenged her.”
Most first assignments were fairly easy—at least Kit’s had been when he’d joined the Lotus Society. Truthfully, most of the work he’d done for them was relatively clean and simple, the deaths meant to look like accidents.
But there was nothing about what Luna had done to Lawrence that was clean. He’d been a mess of cuts and bruises, blood pouring from wounds that even he thought had to be painful.
And Luna, his precious Luna, hadn’t batted an eye at the horrific sight of a man bleeding out in front of her. No, she had been too lost in her rage to see what she had done.
Shrugging as she folded her arms across her chest,a defensive move he’d learned to recognize, Luna said, “Maybe.”
“Not maybe,” Kit said gently. “You fulfilled your promise to her when you went back. That’s what matters. You kept your word.”
“I would like to pause here,” Donna said setting her pen down. “It seems you two were at a precipice that night.”
Luna’s lips twitched, her grief forgotten for a moment as she fought a smile. “If that’s how you want to look at it.”
Even as it was hard to accept some of the things she was saying as she recounted their past, he thrilled in seeing her smiles as she recalled days when everything was good between them.
Donna asked, “How would you look at it, Luna?”
“It was the day everything changed,” she explained. “Kit always treated me like a fragile little bird that he couldn’t touch because he thought he would break me.”
“Whether you believe it or not,” Kit cut in, “you were fragile.”
“Not since that night in your dungeon,” she said, brown eyes steady on him.
His gift, the first of many.
It was never that her strength was lacking, only that he’d wanted to ensure that she wanted what was between them and not because she thought of him as some kind of savior.
“Is that the point where your relationship changed?” Donna asked looking between them, letting the question hang between them.
“No,” Luna said, “if anything that’s when our relationship started.”
Kit had stopped fighting the draw to her—or rather, he had finally pushed the images of her when she’d first arrived in his home out of his mind and focused on the present.
Once he saw her—really saw her—that was it for him.
Luna smiled absently, as though remembering that time. “Those were the good years, I think. Everything was simple—just the two of us. I loved you and you loved me, and that was all that mattered.”
“What changed?”
Everything had changed, Kit thought. And he knew, without her having to say, the exact moment when their perfectly put together world started to fall apart.
“I woke up from the dream,” Luna said softly. “Everything was great, better than I could have wished for. And I was happy until I found out the truth about him.”
“Would you care to elaborate?”
This time, it was Luna beginning the tale, but as it always were when it came to hurdles in their lives, it began with Uilleam.
Chapter Sixteen
Luna found that she did rather enjoy Kit’s gifts, even if she wasn’t sure what all they would bring.
Sometimes they were things that made her laugh, like the new set of serrated steel blades and the thigh holster that came with them.
Another time he had shown her exactly how loud she could scream when he tortured her in that special way of his.
But this, even if she wasn’t entirely sure what ‘this’ was, topped those by far.
It had been a late morning spent tucked against his side as she cursed the need for the sun to rise as she wished she could sleep longer. Her last job had felt never ending as she spent three months infiltrating a company to steal classified computer files.
It wasn’t extraneous work, but tedious and boring, but once it was done, she was just glad she could spend more time with Kit until she was called back in.
He had even promised to take a few days for just the two of them to spend together.
Luna hadn’t anticipated he’d meant flying her out of the country to an undisclosed location. And when he said alone, he meant it.
Not even Aidra had come along with them on this trip.
“Where are we going, exactly?” she asked, looking to the man that continuously surprised her.