"You're wrong."
"I'm very rarely wrong, Riley." His brief smile was so sad and gentle it made my soul ache. "I guess that leaves us with only one option."
Something inside me clenched, and for a moment I had trouble breathing, let alone thinking. "That's not an option," I somehow managed. "That's suicide."
"It's only suicide if I lose."
Don't do this, I wanted to plead. Don't destroy us.
But there really wasn't an 'us' to destroy. Just two people fate should never have thrown together.
"How should we play it, Riley?" he continued softly. There was an odd light in his eyes—a joyous light. A maniacal light. "As an old fashioned stand and shoot, or shall we play cat-and-mouse in this big old mousetrap?"
Trap being the operative word, given what Kade had told me. "There isn't an option number three?"
"No," he said, then raised the gun, the movement so fast it was almost a blur.
I dove to my right, throwing myself behind a machine, landing on all fours and crushing the fingers on the hand that held the gun. I swore, but the words were lost to the sound of his gunshot. It pinged off the top of the metal above my head, sending sparks flying into the shadows.
"You're as fast as any vampire I've come across," he said, his voice coming from my right. I raised the gun but didn't fire, simply because he was on the move.
"That's because I am part vampire." I was answering more to let Kade know I was okay rather than any real desire to speak to the man who was trying to kill me. "And that's also the reason you can never have what you want, Kye."
I shifted position, keeping the machine at my back as I scanned the walkway above me. A shadow flicked between one office and another, and I pressed the trigger. The shot reverberated and my heart froze, waiting for that moment of soul-death that would indicate I'd aimed accurately.
It didn't come, and I breathed a silent sigh of relief.
God help me, I didn't want to do this. Didn't want to kill my soul mate no matter how intent he was on killing me. No matter what Dia had said, no matter what Kye himself had said, I just didn't want to do it.
"If what you have with the vampire was truly strong, you would not have kept coming back to me," he said. His voice was coming from the shadows just to the left of the doorway. I raised the gun, my mouth so dry it hurt, and fired.
I waited, for what seemed an eternity, as the bullet sped across the distance between us and blasted its way through the wall.
And heaved another sigh of relief when there was no indication that I'd hit anything, let alone flesh.
I ran across to the next machine, hunkering under its protecting weight. Though I could feel his presence in the room, I had no real grip on his actual position. It was as if the deadener he was wearing was somehow blocking my more basic senses as well as the psychic and electronic ones.
I flicked to infrared, quickly scanning the upper floor. There was no telltale blurs of red, but that could just mean he was hiding behind the thick patches of darkness that my infrared couldn't see past.
"What I have with my vampire satisfies one half of my soul, but I am a being with two very different souls, Kye." Even if I'd spent most of my life denying that the vampire half of me had needs every bit as strong as the wolf. "I might not be able to deny the pull of the soul mate bond, but that doesn't mean it's all I want in my life."
Even if I'd spent most of my life wanting that very thing.
I slipped through the small gap between the floor and the machine and came out the other side, moving quietly across to another machine.
I still had no sense of him. The air was rich with the scent of machine oil, dust and metal, but remained steadfastly free of the man who prowled above me. Unless he spoke, I had no idea where he was, and that was scary. I relied so heavily on my senses in situations like this that being without them left me feeling almost helpless.
And I hated that sensation. It reminded me too much of my years of growing up and being thrown from pillar to post by Blake, the man who now led the Jenson pack.
I shook the memories of him from my head, even as I wondered why he was in my thoughts so often of late, and scanned the rooms above me again.
Nothing.
It was so frustrating. I knew he was there somewhere, but I just couldn't—
The thought froze as a prickle of warning ran down my spine. I rose and spun in one swift movement, the gun held at arm's length and my finger on the trigger, close, so close to pulling it.
Kye stood near my original machine, his gun raised, his golden eyes so cold they froze my soul.
I couldn't pull the trigger. I just couldn't.
I didn't want to destroy the dream.
"I think what we have here is commonly called a standoff," he said, voice calm, expression so cool.
And yet I could feel the heat of him, taste the desire in him. Heard the answering response from deep inside of me.
"Put the gun down and give it up, Kye." Please put the gun down. "We both get to live that way."
He smiled. Again, it was a sad and wistful thing that tore at my heart. The heart that supposedly didn't belong to Kye. "Run away with me."
I blinked. "What?"
"Run away with me," he repeated softly. "We make a good team, you and I. We could make a fortune together."
"I'm not a killer, Kye. I can't do what you do for a living."
"You already do."
"No. I chase people like you, people who destroy others for the fun of it. Money might change hands in your case, but we both know that is not the motivating factor."
"Then we die—as simple as that." He gave me a smile.
"Pull the trigger, Riley. I dare you."
I stared at him for the longest of moments. I was holding the gun so tightly my hand ached, but no matter what I did, I couldn't force my finger to retract against the trigger.
I just couldn't kill the dream, no matter how much of a nightmare it had turned into.
I lowered the gun. "If you're going to kill me, just pull the damn trigger and get it over with." My voice was weary, yet filled with anger and sorrow.
He smiled. "I never said I wanted to kill you. All I wanted to do was control this situation."
"Some things will never be controlled, Kye, no matter how hard you try." Especially when it came to something as nebulous as love.
"I've never yet hit such a situation. You, on the other hand, have wasted a number of good opportunities. Take, for instance, your much despised pack leader. When you put the fear of god into Blake rather than taking him out like you should have, you placed the control back into his court." His gaze narrowed a little. "That will come back and bite you in the ass, you know. He has a serious yen for revenge, and already his plans have begun to unfold."
"Right now, I don't fucking care. If you don't want to kill me, and you won't be arrested, then what the hell do you want?" I paused, then added heatedly, "And don't fucking say me, because I've answered that."
"What I wanted—" He paused, and his nostrils flared.
I sucked in a deep breath, tasting the air. Kade was near. His rich, summery scent was coming in from behind me.
"Riley," Kye said, his voice flat and yet filled with an odd sense of disappointment. "I told you to come alone."
"And you really thought I would?" I hoped Kade was listening, hoped he was aware that he'd been sensed. "I'm not that stupid, Kye. Nor is the Directorate."
"This was between you and me," he said, and something in his manner hardened. It sent goose bumps skittering across my flesh and had the hairs on the back of my neck rising. "It didn't have to be this way. It didn't have to end this way. "