Chains of Fire (26 page)

Irving had his nurse.

He was surrounded by his Chosen.

He was going to be okay.

And she was outta here.

She made it all the way through the foyer before Martha clutched her arm and asked, “Where are you going?”

“Out to smoke.” Dina jerked herself free.

“You’re running away.” Judgmental as always—and right.

“What if I am?” Dina said. “What do you care?”

“I care because Irving cares. After what you did to him—”

“After what he did to me!” Dina pointed to her nose. “This is his fault.”

“If you hadn’t gone running back to the Others—”

“If I hadn’t gone running back to the Others, they would have caught up with me anyway.”

“If you hadn’t joined them in the first place, you wouldn’t be in trouble for breaking your vows to them.”

They always picked up just where they left off, fought the same fight, hated each other in the same way.

“That’s true.” Dina looked her sister in the eye. “I could have been like you, part of the Gypsy Travel Agency and a female who was never as important as the males. Remember the men who always imagined themselves to be better than anyone else, and never mind that I had a gift and the most important thing any of those jackasses possessed was a dick?”

“The sixties were difficult,” Martha allowed.

“And the seventies and the eighties and the nineties. At least with the Others, the organization wasn’t run by men for men about men. People like me with gifts of power were honored for our contributions.”

“That’s no excuse for turning to evil.”

“Maybe I’m just evil. Maybe it runs in the family.” Dina stepped forward until she was standing on Martha’s toes. “Have you ever thought of that? That our mother and father were evil for abandoning me, for leaving you to find me and keep me and raise me? Have you ever thought that evil is bred into our bones, and there’s no escaping our destiny?”

“No!”

Dina was glad to see her sister back away. She’d been thinking about her parents her whole life; now she had taken her sister’s oh-so-perfect nose and rubbed it into the pile of crap that had been their early days. “Maybe that first time when Irving tossed me out on the street, I could have run away and hidden myself well enough to live.” She sneered. “We’re about to find out.”

Martha recovered her superiority. Of course. She always did. “I knew it. You are running away.”

“You know, I can’t make you happy no matter what I do. You don’t want me to stay, but you bitch at me because I’m leaving.” Dina lost her temper. “What do you expect me to do? By now, the Others know I’ve been caring for Irving, and I like these Chosen kids, but they can’t protect me from . . .
him
.”

“You’re going back to
him
.”Martha’s dark eyes, so much like Dina’s own, snapped with rage.

“No, I’m not.”

“Why should I believe you? You’ve already switched sides twice.”

“Right. You don’t trust me. I don’t trust you, either.” Dina had a strength gained from the realities of a life marred by evil and challenged by love, a strength Martha had never had to draw on. “But I’d like to think that since you’re my sister and you practically raised me, you won’t call the Others as soon as I set foot out the door.”

“No. I won’t do that.”

“For Irving’s sake.”

“Yes. For Irving’s sake.”

“Take care of him. For my sake.” Dina slipped out the door. Stopping, she looked back toward the mansion.

Irving occupied her whole heart, but that stupid boy occupied her mind.

Samuel. While half a world apart, she’d been in his mind, communicating so smoothly. While he was in the Swiss bank, she’d heard his every thought clearly, as if he’d been speaking. And he heard her, too, and it hadn’t taken the usual effort.

She thought . . . well, she suspected there might be a reason for their success, or at least a better reason than the fact that they were both reprobates.

She suspected they might have a blood connection between them.

They were, obviously, both Romany.

She couldn’t linger here, so she started walking. Fast.

Samuel was facing challenges that in his cockiness he couldn’t comprehend.

She ought to worry about herself and let him fall on his face on his own. But she recognized his arrogance, and she wanted to spare him a little of the agony that had broken her life.

So she sent him a message.
Be careful where you use your gift. There are traps that catch power like yours, and you can’t trick the devil. Believe me. I know.

She heard his bewildered response.
What?

But she shut down the connection and hurried away.

Walking to the window, Amanda watched Dina hasten down the street, her hat pulled over her hair, her collar pulled close around her neck. “No. There isn’t. We all go to hell in our own ways.”

Samuel, being Samuel, paid no attention, and led her—dragged her—toward a door under the stairway. A door that led to the winter coat storage.

She set her heels. She did not need to be reminded of Frau Reidlinger’s fur and what it felt like on her naked skin, and how he used it to brush her nipples, her belly, and how she had reciprocated.

Opening the door, he pushed her inside, followed her, and shut the door behind him. When he faced her, he looked pleasant.

This was Samuel. So she didn’t trust pleasant.

“What a surprise when you weren’t there to greet me after my rescue!” he said.

She would have sworn he was going to be furious that she had fled before he was rescued, but . . . he actually did look amiable. Genial. Friendly.

It was spooky. “I . . . thought it would be best if I returned right away to give a report to John and the team.”

“So generous of you to take that burden off me.” He took a long step toward her.

She backed up against the coats, hangers clanging.

She didn’t mean to, but she was definitely cowering.

He kept talking, kept looking pleasant. “I am so glad to know the things we did together . . . you know, the things?”

She nodded.

“It’s good that you realize it was only desperation and fear that made us act that way.”

“Right.”

“I would hate to think that we meant the things we said to each other.”

Isabelle opened her mouth, but no words came out.

“My point is”—he grasped her upper arms and brought her close—“people who think they’re going to die say things they don’t mean. They do things they shouldn’t. We did. Right?”

“Right. Exactly.” She swallowed. His body was pressed tightly to hers.

“I fell back on my old feelings for you, and you fell back on your old feelings for me, and there we were, humping our brains out because we thought we were about to take the long dirt nap.”

His body against hers . . . it felt nice. It felt right. Warm. Tough. Comforting. She wanted to lay her head on his shoulder, snuggle into his arms, listen to his heartbeat and his voice telling her everything was going to be all right.

But that wasn’t what he was saying. And he was right. The way she felt about him was automatic, a knee-jerk reaction to being close to the guy who for five long days had been everything to her.

Well, longer than that, really, but she wasn’t going to remember their first time together in the window seat, or those months after he returned from law school and they lived together and she had fallen more deeply in love with him than ever. Because that had ended in disaster. . . .

She swallowed again to clear her dry mouth, and said, “A natural occurrence, I’m sure, for us to do what we did—”

“Have sex?”

“Yes. That. It was a natural occurrence in those circumstances. We don’t need to make a big deal about it. We’ve already proved twice that we couldn’t have a relationship and maintain it.”

His hands tightened, then relaxed. “The sex was good, though.”

“Oh, my God. The sex was great!”
Oops
. She’d been a little too emphatic.

“We won’t be doing it again.”

The moment of silence that followed was profound.

Never again?
Even to herself, her inner wail sounded pathetic.

“Not that I didn’t thoroughly enjoy our time together,” he assured her.

“Me, too.”

“But we can’t do these things together unless we’re a couple.” He’d shaved off that tough black beard and now he smelled like some kind of spicy European aftershave.

“I agree. It was a
‘we’re trapped in a claustrophobic place in Switzerland’
thing.”

“Right. It was a Switzerland affair. A vacation fling with too much snow. A visit to the set of
The Bourne Ice Creamery
.”

A laugh caught her by surprise.

He grinned.

They had so much in common. . . .

“No need to tell anyone,” he said.

“No, although . . . well, that’s silly.” What was she saying? Had she lost her mind? But she kept on talking, and she half laughed as if she were joking. “I’m so jet-lagged, I’m still on Switzerland’s time.”

“Me, too.”

“Here in this claustrophobic little closet, it’s almost like being back in the ski lodge. Facing death.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

They stared at each other, body-to-body, face-to-face.

She didn’t know which one of them moved first, but suddenly they were kissing, touching, making love. . . .