“I can’t.”
She actually snarled, but her eyes held pain and fear, not rage. “Why not?”
“You’re all that matters.” He smoothed his hands over her cheeks and tried to make her understand.
“I’ll save every damn person in the world if I can, Kat, but if I ever have to choose between them and you… It’s not even a choice. It’ll always be you.”
And there it was. The answer to the question she hadn’t dared to ask all those endless days ago. The reason he’d learned first aid and weapons and fighting. Everything. Andrew didn’t want to be a hero.
He wanted to be her hero.
Her body trembled. Tears filled her eyes, but she blinked them away, and when she met his gaze this time, clear blue stared up at him. “Do I get to save you sometime?”
“Every day. More than once, if you want.”
“Oh, good.” She shivered again, and her eyes fluttered shut. “When Patrick and Anna get out, you have to get me to Julio. I have to try to undo what I did before it hurts him.”
“It’s okay.” Andrew pulled her closer, tucked her face against his neck. “Everything’s going to be okay.”
“I killed the man who was shielding me,” she whispered. “I blew his mind to pieces, and then I went back and crushed the pieces into dust. And I don’t feel bad. Not at all.”
“Because they did this,” he whispered. “No choice, remember?”
Kat nodded. “Do you think—” She stiffened as Patrick’s voice rose in a single incoherent roar of grief and anger, audible over the crackle of the fire. A moment later he screamed again, this time in pain.
Kat’s fingernails pierced Andrew’s skin. “We have to do something.”
The others had already come running, but by the time they reached the garage, Anna had made it to the door. She dragged Patrick bodily behind her, nearly lifting him off his feet even though he was easily twice her size. “One of the rafters went,” she ground out.
A wide strip of the shirt covering his upper back had been burned away, revealing red, blistered skin beneath. “We need to get him to the clinic,” Andrew told her.
“And you,” Jackson cut in. “There’s a hole in your shoulder.”
Andrew had forgotten again. “I can barely feel it.” Then again, that might not be a good thing. “We can handle arrangements for—for all this on the way.”
Arrangements. A nice, bland way of talking about covering their tracks, but reality was reality, and sometimes it was necessary. They could never walk away from a fight clean and free, with no worry about exposure or what came next.
Kat’s hand slid into his, and he closed his fingers around hers. “Let’s go.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
It took Sera, Mackenzie and half a bar of soap to get Kat clean.
She ended up in the shower at the clinic, stripped to her bra and panties as the two women helped her scrub dried blood from her skin. Jackson had sprung the locks on the handcuffs before they made it back to New Orleans, but the damage was already done.
Kat winced her way through a haphazard bandaging before Sera dragged her under the spray. Then she stretched her aching hands out in front of her and watched through a dream as the pinkish water circled the drain until it finally ran clear.
Sera braided her damp hair while Mackenzie found her a pair of scrubs to wear. By the time she had her wrists clean and redressed, Andrew appeared, his own bandage just peeking out of the neckline of his T-shirt.
He took her hand and lifted it, studying her wrist. “Okay?”
“I’ll be fine.” Everything felt distant—surreal—except for the brush of his fingers. Shivering, she leaned into him. “I think I have a new understanding of pain now.”
“Julio’s going to be fine,” he whispered. “Most of the wounds are already healing.”
The wounds were the least of it, and they both knew it. Julio’s berserk frenzy had exhausted his body, but it had taken Sera’s touch to lead him back to sanity. The magic of a true submissive shapeshifter, the power to balance rage with gentle acceptance. Sera might be trapped into obedience, but the true dominants—the good ones—were just as bound by their need to protect her.
Not so different from the balance between herself and Andrew, Kat supposed, though so much cleaner.
She and Andrew would always be tangled up in an edge of danger and the knowledge that they could hurt each other. It had taken her this long to realize it didn’t matter. They were creatures of instinct, both of them, and their first impulse would be to keep each other safe.
Turning her head, Kat pressed a soft kiss over his heart. “What about Patrick?”
Andrew hesitated. “The burns on his back are probably going to scar. Right now, understandably, he’s more upset about Ben. Anna took him to the apartment over Mahalia’s to get him set up there.”
Sera had been the one to break the news about Lia, conveyed in a soft whisper as she worked bloody snarls out of Kat’s hair. Maybe it was a blessing, that Ben had never found out. That he’d died so fast, so suddenly, and with no idea that the woman he loved was already gone.
Andrew stroked the tears from her cheeks. “The cleaner settled everything. He managed to stop the fire too, so Patrick can bury Ben after the ME releases him.”
“Okay.” The numbness was fracturing. No, melting—like ice around her heart laid bare to the sun.
Andrew’s warmth surrounded her, and the lingering echoes of pain drifted up. She’d made it her own, and she’d used it, and now she had to let it go, let tears wash away everything but the knowledge that she’d never have to cry alone again.
He rocked her and murmured gently as she cried, soft assurances that no matter what happened, horrifying and joyous and everything in between, he would be there. Holding her.
It was enough. Not a cure, not even more than the start of one, but it was comfort enough as she sobbed through the pain, through Julio’s pain, the agony he’d borne that had gone beyond the flesh. He hadn’t cried, not really, so she cried for both of them, until her head ached and she felt empty and hollow.
Swallowing hurt, but she managed, then rested her cheek against his chest. “I get it now. The instincts.
Being alpha. It’s not just because you love me, is it?”
“No,” he whispered. “That’s not all of it. I love you, and that’s the only reason I can rein it in sometimes. Because I know the crazy alpha shit makes you miserable.”
It would always be his challenge. Hers would be to love him enough to forgive him when the instincts spilled over. “I don’t know what hurt Julio more. Being tortured, or knowing they were using him to hurt me and not being able to stop it.”
“That.” He seemed certain. “Being helpless to stop someone else’s pain.”
He’d been helpless to stop hers for too long. All of them had been, and maybe that was the real truth behind Alec’s anger, the truth even Anna hadn’t picked at. He’d watched Kat cry, and it would have been so much easier if he could have dragged Andrew to her by the scruff of the neck and forced them to make up. But Andrew had been a danger to her, so Alec couldn’t stop her pain.
She didn’t have to be in pain anymore. So she let it go and struggled for a smile. “Thank you for coming to get me. I mean, we were in the middle of rescuing ourselves, but I’m just as glad I didn’t have to wrestle with Julio after I gave him the empathic version of a shot of adrenaline.”
He didn’t laugh. “Of course I came for you. Don’t ever think I won’t. Ever. ”