A deep breath, ebony eyes shifting to the right.
Following her gaze, Judd saw the water bottle. He picked it up and held the straw to her lips. She took a sip, two, before halting. Waiting until he’d put the bottle back, she said, “A broken kaleidoscope. Those are my memories.”
“Yet you know what a kaleidoscope is.”
A faint smile on that too-wide mouth. In the photo, her mouth had seemed perfect for her face, her smile huge. But here, her face all jutting bones, the lushness of her lips didn’t fit. “Yes,” she said. “Strange place, the mind. I’ve lost me, but I’ve retained the world.”
Her intelligence was clear, even now, when she was so damaged. It made him wonder who Alice would be if she ever again regained her full self. “Do you know when you are?” A hundred years, more, had passed since the beginning of Alice’s forced sleep.
“Yes.” Such loss in that acknowledgment. “I had parents. I remember them. They’re gone.” Simple words to describe an ineffable truth.
“I’m sorry.” There was something about Alice that made him think “she’s one of us,” though the scientist was human, and from a time long gone. Perhaps it was because she had tried to study the most outcast of all designations.
The sorrow in Alice’s expression was replaced by a quiet knowledge as she watched him. “You wanted to break me,” she said. “Any Arrow would.”
“I needed the knowledge in your mind.”
Alice’s lashes came down, lifted, her chest rising and falling. “Strange how I remember the Arrows.”
“Perhaps we were the last thing you saw.” His historic brethren could well have been the ones who had taken her.
A frown, the smooth skin of her forehead wrinkling. “No,” she whispered. “Zaid wouldn’t have allowed them to put me in a box.”
Za-eed.
Alice’s pronunciation of the name, Judd thought, was perfect. It was her acquaintance with it that surprised him. Zaid Adelaja had created the squad, been the first Arrow, a telepath with a ferocious ability in mental combat. “You knew Zaid?” It wasn’t impossible—if Judd was right about the date of Zaid’s death, the other male’s lifetime would’ve intersected with Alice’s.
Her hand fisted on the white sheet. “I think so.”
Shattered memories, he reminded himself, certain she wasn’t healthy enough to lie. “You’ll remember.”
“You sound more certain than the lovely healer with the black curls.” A pause, her fingers rising to touch the computronic skullcap that covered her shaved head. “I had curls. So many colors in there—as if my father’s blond and my mother’s black hair collided in me.” Dropping her hand, she stared at the wall, her gaze distant.
He wondered what she saw, but he kept his peace for now. Force would not make Alice remember, regardless of how important it was that she did. Rising, he returned the chair to its spot against the wall and was about to leave when Alice spoke again.
“All I remember before you,” she whispered, “is sadness, such terrible sadness. It made my heart tear in pain, until the agony took over my world. Zaid … Zaid was there.”
ARRIVING back in the den four hours after she’d dropped off Lisette, Adria might’ve allowed herself a little more room to breathe, hope struggling to find a ray of light in the darkness, but then she saw Riaz walking toward her, and knew time had run out.
Riaz’s smile reached his eyes. “Hello, Empress.”
“Hey you.” Flowing into his arms, she let the strength and heat of him surround her one last time. “Do you have time to talk?”
“A few minutes,” he said, wrapping the long tail of her hair around his hand as he had a way of doing. “I have to head in for a discussion with Hawke about BlackSea.”
“Something come up?” Such an everyday question. Such a quiet intimacy she’d never again experience. The next time they met, it would be as senior soldier and lieutenant, not lovers who had become friends … more.
“No.” His chest rumbled against her. “Just a case of setting up a permanent communications line. We’re thinking Kenji for the liaison, since I have the Alliance.”
A sharp lance of pain, and she thought, perhaps it was better to do this here. If they went behind closed doors and he fought her, she might give in. But out there, with packmates at the far end of the corridor, and the exit not far behind her, she was, in a strange way, protected from her own weakness where he was concerned.
Drawing back until she could look into his face, she said, “I saw Lisette—she told me she’s getting a divorce from her husband.”
No surprise on his face, just the intense determination of a dominant who intended to get his own way. “It doesn’t change this, doesn’t change us.”
“It changes everything.” Her voice a harsh whisper, she stepped back, breaking the connection between them.
He didn’t like that—she saw it in the flash of temper in eyes gone pure wolf.
Breath a jagged blade in her chest, she shook her head. “Don’t tell me you don’t wonder, don’t th—”
“I fucking don’t!” He grabbed her upper arms, held her in place, the raw fury in his voice a wild thing. “I made my choice, and I chose you. Don’t you do this. Don’t you destroy us.”
It was so tempting to give in, but she knew that in spite of what she’d tried to convince herself, the idea of his mate would always be a painful silence between them. Still … she wasn’t that self-sacrificing. She wanted to keep him, and if he wanted to stay, surely it was all right?
Agony seared her blood, her wolf howling in bone-deep sorrow.
And she knew she loved him too much to steal this joy from him. “Go,” she whispered, and it was torn out of her. “Be happy.”
The sound that came out of Riaz’s throat was that of a mortally wounded animal. Gripping her nape, he hauled her against him. “No.” A single brutal word spoken against her ear.
Tears burned in her eyes, choked up her throat. She wanted so desperately to hold on, just hold on, but in her head played the nightmare of waking up one day to find that he hated her, as Martin had hated her. Her former lover had resented her strength, but Riaz would have a far deeper reason to hate her.
No, she wouldn’t do that—to him, or to herself.
She was worth more. She was worth being the first, the only. Not second best, not the one who’d caught this incredible man when he was hurting from a loss a changeling alone could understand … not just a trusted friend he couldn’t bear to hurt. “Go,” she whispered again, brushing her lips over his jaw in a final caress that held her heart. “She’s yours. You need her, and she needs you.” Ripping herself out of his arms, she shoved through the nearby exit and began to run.
Her feet pounded the earth, her blood thudded in her veins, and her heart … it splintered into a million fragments.
RIAZ stared at the exit. He could catch her—the crushed berries and ice and hidden warmth of her scent was embedded in his every cell. He could track her through wind and hail and snow. But he couldn’t go after her.
Not now.
Not when he didn’t know the words to say to convince her of a love that had come to define him, a love that bore the name of his prickly, generous, beautiful Adria.
“Fuck.” He slammed his fist into the stone wall of the den, scraping the skin and leaving a streak of blood behind. It barely registered. Instead of howling with possessive fury, he grit his teeth, reined in his wolf—who clawed at him in a confusion of rage and pain—and strode out the same door Adria had used.
He needed to think, to plan. Because no way in hell was he letting her go. She was his, had given herself to him. He wasn’t a generous man when it came to his empress, wouldn’t return her heart. It goddamned belonged to him and he was keeping it.