Hard Breaker

by Christine Warren

  Honest.

  He nuzzled her hair. “I am a Guardian. I am guarding you.”

  The playful note in his voice almost charmed her. Almost. But she fought hard to maintain her strong stance for independence. She wasn’t the type of woman to crumble at the slightest temptation. It took at least a moderate level of temptation to sway her.

  “Did you forget what I told you last night?” She cleared her throat and tried to make herself sound stern. Who knew that would be so tough? “I think I’m safe enough in a house full of Guardians and Wardens that you can manage to guard me from off the bed rather than on it. In fact, I’m pretty sure you could accomplish it from another room entirely.”

  “But why would I want to?” He pressed warm, teasing kisses to her neck, working his way down to her shoulder. “This is so much more comfortable.”

  “Baen…”

  He eased back and carefully rolled her to face him. Ivy sent up a silent prayer of thanks that she was still wearing the T-shirt and panties she’d gone to sleep in. At least she had some armor against him.

  “Amare, I remember every word that you said to me last night,” he told her, his expression serious but softer than she had ever seen it. It woke up a whole kaleidoscope of butterflies in her tummy. “I understand that I hurt you by not explaining everything to you from the beginning, and I regret that more than I can express. I also understand that you are being forced to process an enormous amount of changes to your life, to your world, in a very short time. I wish that I could make this transition easier for you.”

  Ivy wished he could, too. She could use all the help she could get. But she could hear the sincerity in his words and see the shades of regret and affection on his face. He was being honest with her, and that counted for something. She hadn’t decided what yet, but … something.

  “From now on, I vow that I will always be honest with you. Completely honest,” he swore, taking her hand in his and toying with her fingers as if he couldn’t decide whether to kiss them or hold them tightly in case she tried to pull free. “I will answer your questions fully and honestly as soon as you ask, and I will try to treat you as my equal, and not as a child I must protect.”

  And here he had been doing so well. She narrowed her eyes. “‘Try’?”

  He huffed out a breath. “Yes, I will try. I cannot change my nature, amare, and that nature tells me that you must be kept safe at all costs. You are too precious for me to risk seeing you hurt or, Light forbid it, killed.”

  Yeah, Ivy didn’t much like the sound of that, either. Maybe she could meet him partway on this one.

  “All right, I can accept that. And I can promise that I’ll try not to take any unnecessary risks.” She saw the way he caught the “unnecessary” part, but she kept going. She needed to get this out. “But you also have to give me some time to deal with all of this. I might have known about the Guild and the nocturnis and that things had taken a turn for the worse recently, but the rest of this stuff hit me out of nowhere. Everyone else around here might be certain that I’m meant to be a part of the Guild and that I’m really your personal Warden, and that we’re somehow—”

  Ivy cut herself off. She just couldn’t go there, not even in her own head, let alone out loud. She was a long, long way from wrapping her head around the concept of fated mates, let alone applying the M-word to her and Baen. Like, light-years.

  “Anyway, it’s a lot to take in,” she finished, feeling—and probably sounding—a bit lame. “I haven’t managed it yet, so I’m going to need some time and space while I try to deal. Understand?”

  Baen nodded, looking resigned if not precisely happy. “I do understand. I can give you all the time you need, amare, but only a certain amount of space. I can agree not to hover over you while others are around to help me keep you safe, but if I believe you are in real danger, there is nothing that can keep me away from you.”

  She glared at him for a moment, then nodded reluctantly. “Fine. I guess that’s not totally unreasonable.”

  He seemed to relax just a titch. He even managed a small—very small—lopsided smile. “You can take it as proof of my desire to please you, amare, because if it were up to me, you would never get far enough away from me that I couldn’t do this at any second.”

  His lips captured hers before she even saw him move.

  Sneaky bastard.

  Too bad it was hard to tell him off when he was kissing the living daylights out of her. Seriously. She was pretty sure it was leaking out her toes.

  He shifted to lean over her, and Ivy sank back into the soft nest of blankets surrounding them. Temptation whispered to her, urging her to give in and pull him fully atop her, to let him press her to the mattress and sink inside her, riding every last doubt from her mind with his huge body and powerful thrusts.

  Damn, but that sounded good.

  She teetered on the edge for what felt like eternity, simply surrendering herself to his kiss. He had a gift for making her feel cherished and consumed all at once, and the heady combination made her ache for him. They had already had sex once. Well, more than once, to be honest. Would another time really hurt?

  Before she could give in, the sound of raised voices joined in the chaos that had originally pulled Ivy from sleep. She tore her mouth from Baen’s and frowned at the closed door. “What the heck is going on out there?”

  She had barely gotten the question out when “out there” decided it wanted to be in here. The door crashed open to bounce off the side of a tall wardrobe, and a mix of familiar and unfamiliar figures came pouring into the room.

  Instinctively, Ivy jerked the covers up over herself. She scanned the crowd, picking out the two couples she had met last night along with Rose, Ash, Drum, and several other people she didn’t recognize.

  “Bloody hell,” she cursed. “Did you people never hear of knocking? What the bugger do you want?”

  Kylie plopped down on the corner of the mattress, making the bed bounce, and grinned like a lunatic. “Out of bed, lazybones! The band is getting back together!”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Twenty minutes later, Ivy sat at the long, gleaming table in the manor’s “informal” (which she was pretty sure just meant improbably smaller) dining room, waiting for her blush to subside. It had appeared when the entire population of the world barged into her bedroom to find her canoodling with Baen, and so far it showed no signs of fading.

  It should have helped that no one other than her seemed the least bit concerned about what had been interrupted. Should have, but didn’t. Ivy just wasn’t the sort of girl who got caught in flagrante delicto. At least, it had never happened before Baen. He was turning out to be such a bad influence.

  She hoped he didn’t think she had missed the subtle hints of encouragement the other Guardians had been giving him since they joined the large group downstairs. They might think they were badass warriors skilled in covert tactics, but when it came to communicating about women, they revealed themselves to be no different from any men, and she wasn’t the only one who noticed. The other female Wardens sent her looks of encouragement and solidarity. Ones a heck of a lot less obvious than those exchanged by their mates.

  Hmph. Men.

  As the last of them settled into their seats, Rose stood at the head of the table and took a deep breath. “I cannot tell you how pleased I am, how enormously relieved, to see you all here in one room. After all this time, I had begun to worry this would never happen, and if it had not, I fear our prospects for the future would not have been worth discussing.”

  Ivy glanced around. Fourteen chairs surrounded the long board, each one filled with someone who took those words very seriously. All six of the risen Guardians and their Wardens had gathered at Maison Formidable. Ash and Drum had arrived straight from Belfast in the middle of the night, and Kees, Ella, Spar, and Felicity had followed early this morning. Aldous and Thiago had once again joined them at Rose’s request. The only piece missing, from what Ivy could tell, was
Rose’s mysterious seventh Guardian.

  “I know from speaking to some of you last night, and the rest of you briefly this morning, that many of you have similar questions,” Rose continued. “I know also that some of you have doubts, about why you are here. About me. I do not blame you, but I ask that you bear with me very briefly while I tell you a story, one that I hope will explain everything.”

  Several of the Guardians shifted restlessly, but their Wardens looked mostly curious, so they settled down again without offering a protest. It struck Ivy how these huge, intimidating warriors seemed to defer to their companions in most situations, though she doubted that would hold true if they scented any real danger. In that case, if Baen’s behavior was anything to go by, she figured all bets would be off.

  “Already a few of you know me, but I will introduce myself to the others. My name is Rose Houbranche, and for the last two years, I have been working in secret to gather up the survivors of the Order’s purge against the Wardens’ Guild.” She spoke clearly and calmly, but emotion was threaded through every word. There was no mistaking that this story of Rose’s was very—deeply—personal.

  “I am like most of you. I have never been initiated into the Guild, and I was not given formal training to use my special gift, or to work with magic as the Wardens do. In fact, before I began my work, I had no knowledge of magic at all. I had never heard of a Guardian or a Warden and I thought demons were a relic of the Catholic church’s paranoia about sin and damnation. In my world, nocturnis and the Order of Eternal Darkness did not exist.”

  Ivy saw several of the other Wardens at the table nod in clear sympathy with Rose. Ella in particular looked as if she were remembering the moment her eyes were opened, and Fil appeared ready to jump up from her seat and shout “Amen” like a parishioner at a revival meeting. Ivy couldn’t blame either of them.

  “I remained ignorant of everything about this endless struggle of ours until the night that the headquarters of the Wardens’ Guild exploded. That moment changed everything, because I saw it happen.”

  A murmur swept through the room as those gathered took in this revelation. If it was true, it had to have been one hell of a way to learn the truth. Ivy, and everyone else at the table, immediately wanted to hear the details.

  Rose didn’t make them wait. She lifted her voice a little so she would be heard until the whispers died down. “My presence that night was purely an accident.” Her lips quirked. “Or, at least, one of those things one calls an accident before one truly understands how Fate makes itself known in our lives. I was in a building across from the Guild, ironically enough, trying to extricate myself from a date that had turned out to be a very, very poor choice on my part. The explosion on the other side of the street was powerful enough to shatter the windows in the apartment of the man who was attacking me, and I used that as a distraction to flee from him. I made it down the stairs and out onto the street in time to see something I thought at first must be a hallucination, or a trick of the light and the smoke pouring from the ruins of the Guild. It was an enormous, winged figure soaring up into the dark sky.”

  Oh, yeah, Ivy thought. That sounded plenty familiar. What was it with the Guardians and their dramatic entrances?

  “Perhaps I could have dismissed the sight,” Rose continued, “had the creature not rushed back to earth and snatched me from the path of a spell thrown by a lurking nocturnis. Not many of them were on the scene, but one who was saw me standing very close to the rubble. Perhaps he thought I had escaped, or perhaps he just did not want to take a chance by leaving a witness to the Order’s crime, but that cultist tried to kill me, and it was a Guardian who saved me. The first, I believe, to waken to the call of the growing danger.”

  For the first time in her life, Ivy got to witness an honest-to-goodness shocked silence. All this time she had thought it was just an expression, but it was as if Rose’s confession had knocked the wind out of all those present; or at least all those who hadn’t known the woman for more than a few hours.

  “Two years.”

  It was Ella who finally shattered the quiet, even her naturally soft-spoken voice sounding like a shout in the tense room.

  “A Guardian rose two years ago, and never tried to contact the rest of us?” The demure art historian fisted her trembling hands on the table and glared at Rose as if she wanted to jump across the polished wood and strangle the other woman. “Because, trust me, I’d know if you had reached out. I’ve dedicated every waking moment from the first time I set eyes on a Guardian to finding the rest of them so that we could figure out what the hell the Order was up to and put a fucking stop to it!”

  Kees looked almost as surprised as the rest of them to hear his mate use that kind of language. He draped his arm across her shoulders and pulled her against him, his hands stroking as if to soothe. From what Ivy could see, Ella didn’t want to be soothed.

  “We’ve all been searching high and low for the other Guardians, for other Wardens, for anyone who could help us deal with this nightmare,” the irate woman continued. “And you’re going to sit there looking like a goddamned ice princess and tell us you were here all along, but you didn’t contact us because you had your reasons? That’s bullshit. Fuck your reasons, and fuck you!”

  On the other side of Ella, Felicity reached out to grasp her friend’s hand while glaring daggers at Rose. The tough platinum-blonde barely stayed in her seat and most of that had to do with her own Guardian, Spar, pressing a firm hand on her shoulder. Still, he didn’t look any happier with the situation than either of the human females.

  “Where is our brother, then?” he demanded, pinning Rose with a blazing stare. “Why is he not with us right now explaining for himself why he abandoned his family? What kind of Guardian allows his Warden to make excuses for him?”

  Rose laced her fingers together over her stomach, the only betrayal of her anxiety. Her expression remained cool and serene, the picture of the ice princess Ella had accused her of being. “Ghrem cannot leave his post. It is why all communication with the rest of you has so far come from me. Please believe that I understand you feel betrayed by our actions, but please allow me to explain why we have had no choice.”

  Wynn pursed her lips, looking no happier than her friends. Oddly, Kylie (the Warden Ivy had pegged as the most outspoken) was the only one not watching Rose with an expression of distrust and anger. The small, usually vibrant hacker appeared intent but neutral in the face of Rose’s upsetting tale.

  “You can give it a shot,” Wynn said, “but I hope you don’t have any money riding on us being happy about it.”

  Beside her, Ivy could hear Baen’s snarl of agreement. He had tensed like a coiled spring at hearing the Frenchwoman’s story, but he’d remained in his chair. Ivy figured the surprising restraint from all the Guardians had its foundation in their innate sense of honor and the fact that Rose was an unprotected woman. Those two small facts were probably the only things standing between their hostess and whatever the French word was for “body bag.”

  “Thank you.” Rose nodded to Wynn, choosing to accept her words at face value instead of reacting to the sarcasm evident in her tone. “Ghrem took me immediately from the scene of the explosion. There was nothing we could do for anyone inside. They would have died instantly, and the few nocturnis fled immediately at the first sound of emergency sirens. They had no desire to face the police or firefighters who rushed to the scene. Sales lâches.”

  She spat out the French insult, and Ivy didn’t have to speak the language to understand the woman’s contempt for the Order’s thugs. The meaning came through loud and clear.

  “Also, I admit that I did not cooperate easily with my Guardian,” Rose admitted, color staining her cheeks. “I panicked when he snatched me up, and I fought to escape him even as he took to the skies. I don’t know what I was thinking, or if I was thinking at all. I could have caused him to drop me, but I was terrified, and I had no idea who—or even what—he was. At least, not unti
l he found a safe place to land and forced me to listen to him. To his crazy story.”

  She shook her head. “I felt certain one of us had to be insane, n’est-ce pas? Either I had lost my mind and conjured up this strange beast with wings and claws like a devil, or his tale of an ancient association of evil cultists sworn to serve the embodiment of evil … One of these things had to be the result of madness. Nothing else made sense. It took Ghrem hours to convince me of the truth of his words and then for him to calm me enough to accept them. To accept that he had recognized me as his Warden, and that he had been woken from his sleeping spell in order to save me so that we could discover the Darkness’s latest threat and put a stop to it.”

  Once again, everyone around the table seemed uncomfortably familiar with the scenario Rose described. Every one of the Wardens appeared to be recalling a situation where they had found themselves in Rose’s shoes. It was the first step in perhaps allowing them to understand the reasons for her long years of secrecy.

  Perhaps. No one looked very happy yet, but then, Rose wasn’t finished with her tale.

  “Perhaps if we had been able to regroup, to step back and make plans calmly, we would have been able to reach out to you all and gather you here with us sooner,” she said, “but we were not allowed to make that choice. That nocturni who had attempted to kill me had seen Ghrem rise, and he escaped to report this back to his masters. They came after us immediately.”

  Her voice trembled as if she were reliving that experience, and based on her own recent trials Ivy felt inclined to sympathy. She understood fear and panic and the chaos of being chased and attacked by people who wanted you dead.

  Boy, did she understand it.

  “We barely escaped.” Rose shuddered, though she made an obvious attempt to control the visceral response. “Ghrem killed several of our attackers, but I had no magical skills, so I was nothing more than a liability for him. In the end, he had to turn and run in order to keep me alive. I do not think he has forgiven himself to this day for what he considers an act of cowardice. He will not listen no matter how many times I remind him that I would be dead had he made a different choice.”