Authors: Amber Belldene
Pedro and Lucas came out of the dining room hand in hand. Lucas’s eyes homed in on Kos, and Lena’s stomach flopped—he knew. Kos lunged for him, growling.
Pedro cut him off, stepping between then. “It’s true then?”
“What?” Andre asked.
Pedro’s face twisted. “We need to talk. Let’s go into the dining room.”
Lena scanned the faces. “Where’s Uta?”
“I here.” She practically floated out of the cellar door, dangling Leo from his ankle. His hair brushed the floor, but his head cleared it by inches. Until then, Lena hadn’t really noticed how tall she was.
Pedro pushed Lucas into the dining room ahead of him, shielding him from Kos, who tugged Lena through the door. Uta followed, sweeping the floor with Leo’s curly mop. Andre sagged on Zoey, who braced him with her shoulder. Lena expected him to be angry or suspicious, but he just looked defeated. Everyone filed around the table, taking places, but no one sat. Finally, Lena pulled out her chair and everyone did the same.
A window stood open, and an acrid breeze blew in, chilling her. She shivered.
Kos pulled her chair closer to his, and rested his warm hand on her thigh. “You need a hot bath.”
Hell yes, she did. But it could wait. “I’m fine. We need to be here.”
He nodded, then his eyes went gray and he leaned across the table. “Did you know, Lucas?”
“I don’t know anything.” His eyes flicked to Andre and back. “But something felt wrong about the phone call.”
Kos stood, his chair toppling over backward. “Why the hell didn’t you say so—”
“And risk being wrong? Risk Lena? I wasn’t certain.”
Oh God. They’d all sacrificed so much for her. She couldn’t look at any of them. She slid to her knees on the floor and righted Kos’s chair. He brushed her face with his palm, his touch and his eyes promising she was worth all their costs. Warmth seeped into her from his hand.
Then he turned back to Lucas and tucked his chin, the barest hint of a bow.
“I’m sorry.” Lucas clenched his fists on the table. “I’m so sorry. I thought…”
Lena pitied him. But when he saw it in her eyes, he shook his head, and she swallowed the humiliating emotion. He didn’t deserve it any more than she ever had.
Pedro clasped one of Lucas’s balled hands between his own. “What happened?”
Kos took a deep breath. “Lena dove off my deck into the ocean so we wouldn’t sacrifice the vines.”
“Oh, no.” Zoey covered her hand with her mouth.
Lena’s body flushed. They didn’t wish she’d succeeded at all—didn’t think her life was less important than what they’d lost.
Kos went on. “Uta went after Bennett, but she got skewered when my house exploded.”
She snorted. “Fuck you.”
“It’s true. Ethan got away. Afterwards we realized that a Hunter, we guessed he was Leo’s father, had my voice on tape.” Kos took a deep breath, and Lena willed him courage. “I never called Andre. They tricked us.”
Leo squeaked, his head still dangling above the floor.
But where was Andre’s bellow? His fist pounding into the table? His cursing? He stared at the wall, his jaw slack for once, his eyes glassy.
Zoey sniffed. Her words came out as sobs. “All for nothing?”
“No.” Lucas spoke with the definitiveness of a leader, capturing Lena’s attention. “You cannot do this to yourselves. You didn’t know. This is how Ethan wins. He gets inside you. Eats at you. Don’t. Let. Him. Win.”
Kos was riveted to Lucas, too, and nodded in agreement. “He’s right.”
“Why do you think it was Leo’s father?” Lucas asked.
Uta lowered Leo’s head to rest on the floor, and then released his ankle. He landed on his back with a thud, grunting.
She yanked him to sitting, took out her phone, and showed him the screen. “This your father?”
Leo crawled up to sitting, caught his lower lip with his teeth, and nodded. “Is he dead?”
Lena’s heart grew heavy for his grief. How was that possible, given how many times it had already been burdened and broken in one day?
Uta sheathed her phone in the pocket of her jacket. “The explosion is killing him.”
“
Krist.
You did it.” Kos jumped up, lunging at Leo. “
You
tapped my phone, just like my email. You set the whole thing up.”
Uta blocked him.
“No. I—” Leo crumpled to the floor. “I’m sorry. I suggested it, during the operation. We got all of your numbers. But that was the last I heard. If I’d known, I would have told you…”
Kos gasped, rubbing his sternum.
The gesture panicked Lena. “What is it?”
He stared at Leo, palm over palm pressed against his chest, frowning.
“Kos?” She prodded him with her elbow.
“He’s telling the truth. I can feel it. I fed from him, and I can feel his emotions.”
Zoey groaned. “You fed from him?”
“Really, Zoey?” Kos lashed out in a rare display of anger. “Ms. I-Used-To-Fuck-Ethan-Bennett.”
The table split in half with a loud crack, collapsing along the fault line. Andre’s fist hung over it, in mid air.
Lena slumped in her chair. Oh thank God. Pissed-off Andre was so much better than paralyzed-with-grief Andre.
“I have had enough. I do not blame any of you, even you, boy. But I cannot listen to another word. I am going to lock myself in my room with my Zoey, and it will be a long, long time before we come out.”
He moved in a blur to the door, holding Zoey around the waist like she was a football.
Chapter 34
W
ITH
K
OS’S
H
AND
on the small of Lena’s back, he guided her from the dining room. His oversized clothes hung from her, stiff and crusted with salt. Her hair had dried into a wind-blown sweep of gold waves, and somehow, bedraggled as she was, he’d never seen anything more beautiful. When they reached the foot of the broad stairwell in the foyer, he tried to pick her up.
She retreated. “I want to walk.”
Okay. It was probably a good sign that she was still stubborn as hell.
She clung to the handrail and paused at every step. At the landing, she halted in front of the old painting, the one of the house on Šolta, with a young Kos playing in the foreground. Perched behind her, he couldn’t see her face. Her pulse, her breathing remained steady. But, her posture was unreadable, which left too much room for his dread. After everything, would she leave him? He couldn’t let her.
At the top of the stairs, she veered left, toward her old room.
“Lena.” He pulled her to the right.
“Really, I can stay in my room, there’s no nee—”
He held his ground. “We’re past this.”
She didn’t look at him.
“We have a lot to talk about, but first you need a hot bath, and there is no way I’m letting you go back there to take it.”
Wordlessly, she let him pull her along.
Once she’d settled into the tub, he knocked on the door. “I’m going to shower in a guest room. Take as long as you need.”
She took forever.
He brought her a tray of food—fruit, a ham sandwich, cocoa, baklava leftover from the party.
Clean, warm, dressed, he waited for her in his armchair, unable to read a word of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. He even tried Agatha Christie…
Would she still want him, after everything she’d been through?
The door knob clicked, and wrapped in a towel, she emerged, pink from head to toe.
“Better?”
“Much.” She sat on the end of the bed, facing him with her knees together. Good thing it was a big towel, it covered most of her tempting skin from armpit to kneecap.
He sucked his thumb into his mouth and leaned forward to trace his saliva over the wounds on her neck. The flesh repaired itself instantly, becoming the lovely ivory of her healthy complexion.
“Eat.” He pointed at the tray. “I’m sorry the cocoa’s cold.”
She swallowed it in one gulp and started on the sandwich.
“I need to tell you I didn’t know about Mason. I should have, but I never connected the dots.”
She took her time chewing. “I know. You never would have let me go there. I hope he wastes away in a tiny hot hut in the Mexican desert.”
“Wastes? No, he’ll have a worse fate than that, once Uta gets her hands on him.”
“Good.” She stared over his shoulder at a blank patch of wall.
“One day, when you’re ready, I hope you will tell me what happened.”
She tilted her head and fixed him with her bottomless eyes. Would he ever look at them again without imagining the sea he’d nearly lost her to?
She curled her hands around the edge of the mattress, sheets and blankets rasping under her weight. “You’ll imagine worse if I don’t tell you now.”
He let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding.
“He wanted to push me. To scare me.”
Kos’s stomach clenched, but he kept his face impassive. “Go on.”
“He bit me, while another woman…touched me.”
His clenching gut contorted into a full-fledged knot. To have your body tricked into wanting what you did not want—it was sick. “
Krist—
”
She let go of the mattress to drape a comforting hand over his knee. “Actually, it wasn’t so bad. Not my thing, but at least now I know. Susan always told me I should try it at least once.” Her slight smile turned all the way into a chuckle.
Damn, she was either braver than a special ops unit, or completely hysterical.
“Did he force…” His tongue got stuck against the top of his mouth.
“Another woman. But, no. Not me. We didn’t even…”
When he grasped her meaning, tension melted from Kos’s muscles. His shoulders dropped to their natural, relaxed position for the first time in days. He drew in a full breath. “Thank God.”
“I’m sure it would have come to that, and worse. But Ethan arrived. Who’d have thought I’d be grateful to him?”
“Can you eat some more, or have I stolen your appetite?”
“I can eat.”
She finished the sandwich, an apple, the baklava. Watching her tongue dart out to catch stray flakes of pastry stirred his desire, reminding him of their honey-hunting expedition in the pantry. But she treated the dessert no differently than the rest of her food. She only left a banana on the tray. He didn’t blame her. He’d never tasted one, but it did not smell at all enticing.
He knelt down—the obligatory position for what he had to say. “Lena. I’ve made so many mistakes with you. I don’t know where to start the apologies. But—”
She wrapped her hands around his forearms, trying to pull him to standing. “You don’t have to—”
“Let me finish. I was afraid. But now I know I was wrong.”
“Wrong?” She let go of him.
“About my mother and father. Their love didn’t fail. It was never strong to begin with. Ours is.”
“Oh.”
Silence.
What? Had he thought she’d jump up and down for joy? Maybe she’d already moved on, put him behind her. He couldn’t let her go again.
“Lena. I’ve cared for many women. But I’ve never loved one before. It scared me to death, that I would fail, and destroy you.”
More silence. His shoulders bunched again. She was not making this easy.
“But I love you.”
“I know. Your friend with the boom box told me.” The slightest smile ghosted across her lips. “And then Andre was so kind. Like I was the daughter he never had, even after he lost everything.” She wiped at her eye with the back of her hand.
He laid his palms on her knees. “Lena, will you have me?”
“Of course.” She draped her hand over his like a cool damp cloth—a passionless resignation—not what he wanted at all. She went on looking at the wall. “I fell for you the moment you brought me to your room and read to me. If you’re sure you want me, there’s no way I can say no.”
This was not how it should have been. If he’d admitted it earlier, this declaration would have thrilled her, and he could have witnessed her exultation. But this bland acquiescence was all he deserved, even if it tasted like ash in his mouth.
“I do. I will, forever.”
“Good. Then it’s a deal.” She nodded, sounding matter of fact, like she’d just taken a perfectly cooked turkey out of the oven.
A deal—great. He sat back on his heels.
There, on the floor near the nightstand, was his answer—
New and Selected Poems
.
How could he have forgotten? “Uta told me something.”
“What’s that?”
At least he’d captured her attention enough to finally merit eye-contact. “How to make a baby.”
“A baby?” Her red-rimmed eyes widened, and her voice was barely a squeak.