Lily held a steaming cup in her hand. “I saw them setting up the coffee station. Thought you could use a shot of caffeine.”
His eyes drank her in and overflowed. He covered them with his hand. “Thanks,” he said thickly.
Her shoes clicked toward him. She held the cup out. He drained it in a couple deep swallows. It helped. He grabbed her hand. “Don’t go.”
“Um.” She stared down to where her wrist was swallowed by his hand. She was looking at his scars. He wasn’t sure at what point in their adventure he’d gotten them. That whole last day was a blur of pain and fire, with a few highlights pointing out, like spikes.
Like the part where he’d let King convince him that Lily was one of the guy’s operatives.
She wasn’t pulling away, though.
“So you’ve got the kids,” she said. “You’ve adopted them?”
“I’m in the process. They’ve been with me for a few weeks now.”
“Are they, um . . . OK?” she asked, delicately.
He shrugged. “They seem to be OK. They’re great kids. Holy terrors, particularly Tonio. Zia Rosa tells me he’s exactly like me.”
“How did you find out their names?”
“We didn’t. We named them, Zia and I. For Tony and Mamma. Antonio and Magdalena. They didn’t have names. Evidently King didn’t assign names until the third year, when the programming began.”
She shivered. “How awful.”
“It’s better,” he said. “It was appropriate to name them for Tony and Mamma. Tonio’s a big boss. He runs the show, or thinks he does. And Lena’s a diva, pulling all of Tonio’s strings. They’re awesome.”
“And you?” She tugged his hand gently. “How is it for you?”
He smiled and shook his head. “It’s good,” he said. “Difficult. Crazy. I don’t sleep much, but I never really did. I love those kids. And I’m glad to be doing something hard, and important. I’m lucky I have something to give a shit about.” He paused. “Under the circumstances.”
A tremor went through her. “So,” she said, with forced brightness. “What do they call you, then? Bruno? Uncle Bruno? Zio Bruno?”
“No,” he said. “They call me Daddy.”
She blinked. “They don’t need a brother or an uncle,” he went on. “They need a father. I never had one, but they’re damn well going to.”
“Ah.” There was an awkward silence. “Well. It’s amazing. And so lucky that you got them before King started, um, messing with them.”
“Wouldn’t have mattered if he had messed with them. King messed with me, and my mamma still thought I was worth saving.”
“Of course you were,” she soothed. “I wasn’t questioning that.”
Her eyes were big, wary. He was making her nervous.
Cool it.
“What happened to those other kids we found?” she asked timidly. “The teenagers who were in the white room? Are they OK?”
He shook his head. “They’re struggling,” he said. “The fewer years of programming they’ve gone through, the better off they are. There were thirty younger ones, and they’re hanging in there. But don’t you know all this? I figured Liv or Edie would keep you up to date.”
Since you refused to take my calls or respond to my e-mails.
“I’ve been incommunicado,” she said. “Trying to figure out what to do withmyself. Everything is different, now that Howard’s gone. I don’t have to write term papers for pay anymore, thank God. After what happened, I couldn’t stomach any more of that. Whatever I do from now on, it has to be real. Even if I make only a quarter of the money.”
“I hear you,” Bruno said, with feeling. “So you’re going to write papers for yourself, then?”
“I was considering it. I think I’d like academia. Maybe teaching English, or writing, at the high school or college level. We’ll see.”
“You’d be good. Your students will love you and fear you.”
“We’ll see,” she hedged. “Who knows.”
“I know,” he said. “Believe me. I know.”
She flapped her hand at him. “And the adult operatives? Did they ever find the ones who were running around loose?”
Bruno shook his head. “The older kids identified some of them for us, but they’d committed suicide by the time we tracked them down. Probably all of the operatives out in the field did, when they heard about King dying. There’s no way to know for sure.”
She winced. “That’s terrible.”
“Yeah. They were monsters, but they never had a choice.”
Her lips tightened. She waited for a moment before asking the next soft question. “How about your biological brothers and sisters?”
“We found them,” Bruno said quietly. “At least, I assume we have. We can’t be sure until they do genetic testing, and that’ll take time. King told me there were sixteen embryos brought to term, and that Tonio and Lena were the last ones, besides Julian, after all the cullings. If there had been more alive, he would have taunted me with their existence, rather than lying about it. And there were mass graves on the property. Some of the older kids talked about the cullings. They found the graves using infrared aerial photography.”
She winced. “Oh, God, Bruno. I’m so sorry. How awful.”
“Some were more recent. Some were older, corresponding to the info my mother left on those disks that she hid in the jewelry box.”
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered again. “It’s so horrible for you.”
“Yeah, it messes with my head that there were sixteen of my mother’s children alive, and now they’re all murdered. Some by me.”
“Bullshit!” she burst out. “You never murdered any of those people! They were trying to rip you to pieces! And me, too!”
He was taken aback. “What, defending me now? I thought you hated my guts.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Lily jerked her hand away. “I just know a self-pitying, masturbatory load of shit when I hear one!” She wound her arms across her chest, which did awesome things to her lush cleavage.
He dragged his eyes from her tits. “That’s intense.”
“Oh, you have no idea,” she told him.
He contemplated the hot buzz in the air between them. The glow of heat. Of hope. It took a long time to work up the nerve to risk it.
“Then you still have feelings for me,” he ventured, quietly.
Lily’s face contracted. She took a step back. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice choked. “It was a mistake to come here.”
He headed her off at the door. “No. Please, Lily. Let me talk.”
“It’s not going to work.” Her voice shook. “It doesn’t matter what my feelings are. It doesn’t matter.”
He reached behind to the knob and clicked the lock shut. Maneuvered her back into the room, setting her into the chair.
“There’s no point in going over this.” The words burst out of her. “You didn’t trust me when things got bad. And in my experience, things get bad a lot. If we don’t have trust, we don’t have anything.”
He sank down in front of her. “I know. But listen to me.”
“I can’t face that again. I couldn’t survive another—”
“Listen!” he broke in. “I’m begging, Lily. On my knees. For you to just listen to me for a second. OK?”
She nodded, swiping angrily at the tears rolling down her face.
“It does matter, what your feelings are,” he said. “And this is why. Remember that first conversation we had, in the diner? I offered to kick asses for you? And you said, ‘you are my champion. ’”
“Yes.” She wouldn’t meet his eyes.
“King told me that phrase triggered my programming,” he said. “Later on, Seth and Con and Davy went through the diner, and they found remote-activated sound gulpers attached to every table. He had a record of our conversation, Lily. That’s where he got that phrase.”
“So?” She opened her eyes, glassy and glittering.
“So? My error was in assuming that it was impossible that we could have been overheard in the diner. If we weren’t, then there was no other way he could have known that phrase.”
She shrugged. “I fail to see how it changes anything. You were wrong. Why does it matter what the reason for your wrongness was?”
His scarred knuckles turned white. “What matters is how I felt about it,” he said. “It blew my mind. That I could know for a fact that you were one of his, and still love you. Still be willing to die for you.”
Her mouth quivered. She looked almost scared.
“I thought, at the time, it was because he’d programmed me. But it wasn’t that, Lily. It was my heart that knew the truth, all along.”
She shook her head, eyes squeezing shut. “That’s not fair.”
“I don’t give a shit about fair. King messed with my head that day. But he never touched my heart. My heart never faltered, Lily. I don’t have to make excuses for it. I don’t have to apologize for it. It loved you all along. Only you. I always will.”
Lily rubbed at her eyes with the backs of her hands. “I don’t know if I can do it again.”
“Do what?” He grabbed her hands, kissed her wet, salty knuckles.
“Trust you,” she said. “It’s not like I have manual controls. It’s an ‘open sesame’ kind of thing. It’s magic.”
Hope leaped up, hot and eager. “That’s no problem,” he said. “I like magic. I go for challenges. I’ll make you trust me again. Let me give it my best shot. You can give me regular updates on my progress, say, every fifteen years or so? Sound good?”
She dissolved in giggles, sniffles. “You are so full of shit.”
“Not about loving you.” He cupped the back of her head, pulling her into the kiss he’d been dying for ever since he jumped out the window of that inferno.
And she didn’t pull back.
It bloomed, hot and wild and beautiful, warping them into that magic place, out of time, out of this world. He’d known they could make it back here, to this wild, secret verdant place where their souls were joined. That in this place, he would be able to show her how deep the roots of their love penetrated. To the ends of the earth, and beyond.
He offered himself to her, and joy exploded in him as she did the same. Her heart had never faltered, either, beneath it all where the real truth lay, like a secret pearl.
They twined together, trying to get inside each other.
Her dress was down to her waist and her bra undone before he knew what he was doing. He was cupping, suckling, licking, and worshiping her sweet, kissable tits with frantic tenderness while his other hand was busy under her skirt. Stroking and petting for those velvet hot inches of soft bare skin above the gartered hose.
He lifted his head to admire her, glowing against the black lace underwear, thighs wide. His heart was going to crack open. She was so beautiful.
He plucked the panties aside and stroked the tight, furled folds of her pussy, glowing, gleaming with lube. Cherishing her, hungry and breathless and reverent as he kissed her, mouth, fingers, and tongue delving, dipping into both sweet-hot wells of sensation at once.
He could have made her come right off, but he danced around it. This was too important to rush for a quick thrill. This moment would seal their bargain, for all time. He could wait and wait. Every sweet stroke a message, a poem. A song of love and longing.
After a whole lot of that, she was lifting herself against his hand, her pussy clenching around his fingers. Pawing the front of his pants.
“Damn it, Bruno,” she panted, crabbily. “Give it to me!”
“But I wanted to make you come before I—”
“Now!”
she snarled.
Oh, well. That worked for him. He helped her with the pants and whipped it out. He was hard as cast iron, hot as a brand. He hoped he’d last long enough to bring her off. Please, God. At least that long.
She grabbed his forearms, her nails digging into the coat of his tux. Their eyes locked, jaws clenched at the terrifying significance of every gasp, every sigh. He fitted himself against her. They moved, seeking the angle . . . found it . . . and oh, God. The heat. The wetness.
The long, tight, blissful slide to oneness.
They paused. He was terrified to let her move, afraid he’d explode, that it would be over too soon. Then Lily touched his face and brought her fingertips, wet with his tears, to her mouth.
His fear vanished, drowned in a swell of emotion. Her legs wound around his, and they surged and moved. Her bright gaze was the thread that held him to the world as he knew it. He never wanted it to end, but it wasn’t up to him. It was life itself, swelling up huge and glowing.
Until it burst its bounds and carried them away.
Some time later, he felt Lily’s hand in his hair, gently stroking the scar. She smoothed the mark on his cheekbone with her thumb.
“There’s something you’ve never said to me,” he prompted. Not giving a shit if he came across as needy or grasping. “I said it to you, but you never said it back. At least, not directly.”