When he walked toward her, Lexi looked away. Christan crouched down, enfolding one of her hands in his. Her skin was soft but cold, and his callouses were probably rough against her palm. It felt good, just… good to hold her hand. He shouldn’t be touching her. She shouldn’t be letting him. It surprised him when she did. He remembered, now, how this woman always surprised him with her ability to see what he wanted hidden. At least she had, until the end when she hadn’t wanted anything from him at all.
And now he crouched at her feet, holding her hand as if he wanted something from her.
“Help me understand,” he said.
Lexi resisted. He expected her to, needed her to, because there was no other way she could protect herself. Trust wasn’t something Christan was extending to himself right now. Not if he’d needed his second-in-command to challenge his behavior. Arsen wouldn’t say another word, that was the way they were. Once was enough in their world, and if someone didn’t listen, well… that was why Christan was an enforcer.
He was ashamed of his behavior. And that was an odd sensation, one he didn’t like and had only ever felt when this woman was involved. Lexi wasn’t of their world, not really, even with all the reincarnations. Once, it had been the most important thing to have her be part of them.
But he’d destroyed all that. She’d destroyed it. He wasn’t sure they could get it back or even if they should. Not after what they did to each other in Florence. And yet, she was still sitting here and he was asking her to tell him what he’d never allowed her to tell him before. Why she wanted so badly to go to Florence. Why she needed to help a girl she didn’t know. Because it meant thwarting a man she certainly did know, despite all the names he gave himself.
Asking, for God’s sake, and not ordering. Asking her to trust him. Christan didn’t think she would.
“Words won’t explain what it’s like from my side of the experience,” she said. “You go into my mind as easily as you do everything else.”
Christan looked away. How many times had Kace violated her mind in the past? And what the hell had he’d been doing last night? He was fairly sure Lexi thought it was the same thing. Arsen said the apology offered earlier wasn’t owed to his second. Arsen was right. The words would be difficult. Christan drew in a deep breath.
“I was wrong last night. I shouldn’t have done what I did and I have no excuse.”
Lexi was trying hard to be resilient. She looked vulnerable, defensive. Christan dragged his thumb along the memory line that curved around her forefinger. If she was aware of what he was doing, connecting through the line, she didn’t pull her hand away.
“Will you tell me about the dreams?” Christan hadn’t asked about the dreams before, wasn’t sure he wanted to know. Now it seemed important.
After a moment, Lexi said, “Dreams like the Gabrielle dream feel real, where I’m experiencing and not dreaming. They’re long, or at least the experience has a distinct element of time passing.” She glanced at the memory line he was still stroking. Hesitated. “I dreamed about a girl named Gaia, too.”
His hand tightened around her fingers. “Do you dream anything else?”
“The ones Marge calls night terrors, violent beyond description.”
“Try.”
Christan heard the steel in his voice. The pulse began to beat in her throat like a wild bird, and he wanted to pull her into his arms. Didn’t understand the complex demands that pressed in on him. Finally, she sucked in a shuddering breath.
“It’s a dirty, icy city. I’m holding the hand of a little boy. We’ve reached the corner where there’s so much snow we can’t walk side by side. I tell him to step into the street ahead of me. He’s dancing the way kids do, with a snowball in his hand. I’m thinking how much I love him when the truck comes around a corner. It doesn’t stop. Doesn’t swerve. Just runs over him while I watch. His arms and legs jerk up. It looks like he’s hugging the tire and it feels like my heart is being ripped out.”
Christan was staring at a point on the wall. Lexi pulled her hands away and said, “I’ve learned not to think about those dreams.”
Her body was tense and trembling. He saw it in her hands, and the way she still wouldn’t look at him. Christan stood abruptly, prowled toward the window, staring out.
“The dream about the boy,” he said without looking at her. “It wasn’t real.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I know your entire existence, in every lifetime.” He twisted around. “Even in the Void, I knew where you were, what you did.”
Her face paled. “In how much detail?”
“You were never in a place that was cold. There was never a little boy who danced in the snow. It did not happen,” he enunciated with deadly calm, the immortal Enforcer who was both judge and executioner.
“Then why would I dream it?”
“To terrify you.” Torture you.
Christan rolled his shoulders and tried to explain. Marge had suggested it first. The rest came from Ethan’s reports, after the San Francisco warrior had analyzed the meditation app on Lexi’s phone. There was a subliminal suggestion that worked like hacking techniques. Probe for weak points. Apply pressure. Find the vulnerability and then exploit it. The purpose became obvious. Night terrors—through the sheer fear they generated—weakened the thin wall in the human mind. They broke through the natural defenses separating the past from the present, allowing the memories to bleed through.
But Christan wasn’t finished. Marge’s theory came next, and she’d described her own night terrors as short and sharp. They were knives, Marge had said, stabbing in the dark, preventing sleep until pure exhaustion took its toll. Then the past life dreams would start. They were different, unfolding with languorous detail so rich the dreamer tasted the food on her tongue, warmed to the sun on her face. Ached with desire.
“And once the memory lines appear,” Christan said, “the girls remember fragments, until...” The rest remained unfinished. Lexi rubbed a finger across her wrist.
“Were you around for Gabrielle?”
“She lived in France. I wasn’t there.”
“But Gaia?”
Christan felt the memory like a stone on his heart. “Our first life.”
“We were happy?” Lexi asked after a strained moment.
“We were.”
“But you left.”
“I did.”
The pain in her eyes was a fading sun that drew him, and gently, he walked toward her, urged her to her feet and enclosed her within the warmth of his arms. Lexi shuddered when he dragged his broad palm over her hair. After a moment, he pushed his fingers through the strands, untangling and smoothing them around her shoulders.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“I need you to tell me why,” she whispered.
“I know you do. But… I can’t.”
His moods were razor-sharp since he’d come back from the Void. But he couldn’t tell her how, in his selfishness, he had condemned her to lifetimes filled with pain. Not yet. Not when she didn’t understand enough to forgive him. Once, he thought this woman understood the man he was, but now he overwhelmed her even when he wasn’t trying; it was a loss of something he could never recover. He stepped back, withdrew to a place where he knew she couldn’t reach him, felt the visceral loss of connection.
She stepped back, too; the air in the room seemed to diminish. “Where does that leave us?”
“I don’t want you in Florence,” he said.
“I don’t need your permission.”
“You need my help if you expect to get anywhere.”
“And you need mine with Katerina Varga. You can’t talk to her the way I can. You haven’t experienced Kace the way I have, and if she’s having dreams, she won’t trust you the way she might trust another woman who has dreams, too.”
Those striking amber eyes met obsidian, a splash of sunlight battling black ice. A single beat in the air before it shattered. The immortal Enforcer crossed his arms, widened his stance. Gave in.
“Fine, but you play by my rules. You don’t go running off on your own and you listen to what I have to say.”
“You ass. Could you be any more difficult?”