by Sunny
Dante’s thoughts and emotions were in chaotic turmoil. He loved her, hated her, wanted her like no other . . . and despised her with almost blinding, seething fury for kindling that want, that helpless need within him.
As if Dante’s very thoughts had procured her, he heard her voice above. Heard the treacherous news fall from her own lips that she had yet again fled a rescue attempt by his father. The Warrior Queen had indeed served vengeance upon him cruelly well.
You made me love you! Made me think you might love me, too.
Betrayed, betrayed . . .
It seeped within him and rose like a poisonous well until livid fury drowned all thoughts in a deafening roar for blood and vengeance. The sight of her, as she came through the door, was like a blow bludgeoning his chest. Love and hate, yearning and betrayal, mixed together in tumultuous disorder.
He twisted against his silver bonds, shouted muffled words of wrath. Then fell silent as she pulled Roberto in behind her, bound and gagged, with his arms handcuffed behind his back.
Mona Lisa hesitated at the sight of the wild captive chained to the wall. She had thought him frightening before in his eerie fighting calm. Now the calmness was gone and something akin to madness gleamed in his pale silver-blue eyes. The sight, the shock of it, jarred loose another broken memory.
The same young man in a near-naked savage state straining against silver chains, padded oddly with fleece, his hair unkempt and wild, eyeing her like a famished beast.
It overlay the current reality like a ghostly afterimage for a heartbeat, and then disappeared. The momentary shift in reality unsettled and confused her enough to make her ignore the dangerously enraged state of the bandit.
She ripped off his gag, asked him desperately, “I . . . I know you, don’t I?”
Her question punched through Dante’s rage and shocked him still. “Mona Lisa. What game are you playing at?”
“Do I know you?” she persisted.
“Hell, yes, you know me!”
His shout galvanized her into action. “Where are the damn keys?” she asked. Turning to Roberto, she searched his pockets.
“You don’t need keys,” Dante snarled. “You’re strong enough to break the chains yourself.”
“I can?” She seemed surprised.
“Yes, silver doesn’t weaken you.”
“No, you’re right. Silver doesn’t bother me.” Still, she seemed astonished that, with one simple tug, she was able to wrench open the shackles that had contained him.
The chains fell away with a clank, and he was free, looking wildly dangerous and threatening, those pale blue eyes burning so hot and fierce as he stepped toward her.
“What’s your name?”
Her question stopped him cold in his tracks again. “You know my name,” Dante said, jaw clenched.
“Maybe once but not now. I don’t remember. I hit my head. I don’t remember any of you.”
He stared at her intently then said, “I’m Dante.” When she showed no reaction to his name, he nodded toward Roberto. “What about him?”
“He’s the bad guy, right?”
A cold, deadly smile lit Dante’s face. “Yeah, he’s the bad guy.” He moved toward Roberto, who fell back, mumbling frantically, trying to force words out past his gag.
“Wait.” She gripped his forearm. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to kill him.” He had fallen back into that eerie calmness. Said it as if it were a foregone conclusion. As if it was normal practice for him—and her—to kill the bad guy. But whatever Mona Lisa didn’t remember, she couldn’t have changed that much. The thought of killing Roberto made her instinctively recoil.
“No, leave him! We have to go. There were other guards coming to the house. I took off before they arrived. They may be on their way here.”
The sound of a car pulling up and people getting out, weapons being readied, filtered down from outside.
“Too late, they’re here,” Dante said and ran up the stairs as fast as his wounds allowed, cursing the silver still lodged within him limiting him to only human speed.
He grabbed a knife from a fallen guard and one of those automated pistols—.22 caliber, Dante noted, why the bullets hadn’t blown through him like a more powerful 9 mm weapon would have. Mona Lisa followed behind with Roberto. Stuffing the pistol in his waistband, Dante grabbed Roberto, bringing the naked blade to his throat. “Knife, I think. A more visual threat. You’re going to tell your men to throw down their weapons, understand?”
Roberto nodded frantically as Dante ripped off the mouth tie, allowing him to spit out the gag.
Dante glanced around for Mona Lisa, but she was gone. He felt his heart give a frantic thud at the discovery. “My lady doesn’t want you dead,” Dante snarled in fluent Spanish as he jerked Roberto outside, using him as a human shield. “But give me a reason and you will be. Tell them to drop their weapons now!”
Roberto yelled out the order. There were four men, all armed with automatic pistols. Two of them started to drop their weapons, but the two others farther away still held their guns trained at Dante. In a fast, blurry motion, Mona Lisa came up behind them, knocked the two armed men unconscious, and followed suit with the two surrendering guards.
“I did what you said!” Roberto babbled in English as his men thudded to the ground.
“Pity,” Dante said, removing the sharp knife from his neck. He shoved Roberto down onto his knees. “Stay here. You move, you die.” He strode to Mona Lisa, stopping two feet away from her. Any closer and he would be tempted to grab her and shake her. “What the hell did you think you were doing?” he gritted out as fear and adrenaline pounded madly through him.
“Disarming them.” She started gathering up the weapons, handling them with dainty distastefulness.
“You should have stayed safely inside instead of risking yourself,” he growled.
“I didn’t want any more bloodshed, yours or theirs,” she replied softly. Only a discerning ear would pick up the faint, trembling edge in her words. She was not as calm as she appeared. That sign of nerves oddly calmed his own fear and rage.
Dante watched as she went to the car parked farthest out in the driveway. Popping the trunk, she hastily dumped the weapons she had collected in there.
“You should kill them,” he said with calm practicality.
“No.” Just one soft word.
“They’ll follow us.”
Slowly, carefully, she took the knife from Dante’s hand. “Not if I can help it.” Going to the other cars, she slashed their tires with quick efficiency. “Let’s go,” she said, sliding behind the wheel of the last car, the only functioning vehicle left.
“What about him?” Dante asked, casting a hard glance back at Roberto.
“Just leave him, please.”
She scrambled out of the car in alarm as Dante went back to the other man. “I’m just getting his wallet and leaving him a warning,” he said. Crouching down, Dante whispered low into Roberto’s ear, “Be grateful for your miserable life. Come near her, or any one of us again, and I will kill you slowly and very painfully. Comprende?”
Roberto nodded frantically.
Dante returned to the car and they drove off.
TEN
GOD, WHAT AM I doing, leaving with someone even more dangerous than Roberto, the asshole drug lord?
My eyes couldn’t help glancing down at Dante’s hands. At where those long and lethal claws had sprouted out from his fingertips. He’d used them like knives. Fought with them calmly, as if he’d done it many times before. It was hard to tell how old he was under all that hair, beard and mustache covering his face.
“How old are you?” I finally asked.
“Twenty.”
Twenty to my twenty-one. Jesus Christ, I’d thought him ten years older. He was one year younger than I was but only in physical years. His eyes were those of a much older soul. That of a hardened soldier’s.
I eyed him warily as he slumped bac
k against the seat. “You’re injured,” I said, feeling silly stating the obvious, but in the midst of all the fighting he’d acted with such competence and menacing purpose I had completely forgotten the fact that he had been shot twice.
“Yeah, the bullets are still in me,” he said, eyes closed. “You have to get them out.”
“I’ll take you to the hospital.”
“No, too long. You’ll have to take them out.”
“With what? My fingernails? Unfortunately, they don’t grow out long like yours do.”
He grinned, actually grinned. A slight, brief upward tug at the corners of his mouth. “You can dig them out with the knife.” The knife he had held to Roberto’s neck.
I didn’t know whether to believe him or consider it a joke. It didn’t sound like the latter despite that brief grin. I drove blindly, wondering if my companion was a madman.
I made random choices whenever the road forked or intersected, but some deity must have been watching over us because after several minutes of blind driving, we somehow found our way back onto the highway. Ten miles later, smelling the ocean, I exited onto a smaller road, following the briny scent.
“What are you doing?” Dante asked, opening his eyes.
“Getting rid of the guns.” Nodding to the blue ocean looming up before us, I parked and popped open the trunk.
Dante silently watched as I grabbed the guns and tossed them one after the other into the crystal blue seawater.
“Keep one for yourself,” Dante instructed.
“I’m not too familiar with guns,” I said, watching as he pulled out his own automatic pistol and competently popped the clip to check the ammo.
“My father trained you. You can shoot a gun.”
“I can? Well, that’s certainly news to me.” Gingerly, I took the gun he handed to me.
“How much memory did you lose?” he asked.
“Six months. The last thing I remember is being a nurse working in Manhattan.”
“You were a nurse? I didn’t know that.” The gun was shoved back into his waistband.
I stopped fiddling with my gun and glanced at him. “So you weren’t in Manhattan? You didn’t help me move out of my apartment.”
“No, I met you in Texas near the border of your Louisiana territory.”
“Louisiana? What, I own property there?”
“Yes. Quite substantial property.”
“I do?” This was getting more and more bizarre. “Where did I get the money to buy property? First you tell me I know how to shoot a gun. Now you tell me that I’m apparently quite wealthy, too. Are you sure you haven’t mistaken me for someone else?”
Or maybe the answer was even simpler than that. Maybe he was crazy. Out of his mind.
“You’re a Queen. A Monère Queen.”
I was getting an awful feeling in the pit of my stomach.
“Monère?” I tested the word carefully. “Is that one of those small countries somewhere in Europe?”
“Nope.” He looked at me as if I were the unhinged one. “It’s not a country. It’s a race of people descended from the moon.”
With blurring speed, I snatched his automatic weapon away from him. Pointing the gun at him, the gun he had assured me I knew how to handle, I backed carefully away. “I’m sorry but I don’t know you, and the only memory I have of you is chained up in this wild, crazed state.”
“You think I’m crazy.”
“In a word—yes.”
“You saved me from that. From going crazy.”
“How?”
“By sharing the moon’s light with me.”
His words halted my retreat as I recalled that other memory fragment I’d had. Of moonlight filling me up with indescribable energy, and, more recently, of my skin glowing, illuminated, along with Roberto’s.
“How much do you remember of me like that, in that wild state?” he asked.
“Just that you were shackled . . .”
“. . . with fleece-lined cuffs around the wrists and ankles.”
“Yes,” I whispered. Licking my lips, I asked, “How did I share the moon’s light with you?”
“By having sex with me,” he said plainly, pale eyes locked with mine. “Your skin filled with light and you shared it with me.”
The gun dropped limply to my side.
A part of my brain still screamed denial of everything he told me. Another part of my brain told me he was telling the god-awful, appalling truth. “So we’re . . .”
“Lovers.”
It was hard looking at a complete stranger who’d just announced that he had been intimate with me.
“My skin didn’t glow before when I had sex,” I said, grabbing onto something concrete, something that I knew for certain.
“Did you feel pleasure?”
“No.”
“Then your partners were human.”
“Yes,” I said hesitantly. “I’m still trying to wrap my mind around the idea that I’m not human.”
“But you are. You’re a Mixed Blood—one-fourth human, three-quarters Monère. The first Mixed Blood Queen in Monère history.”
There he went throwing that queen stuff at me, but I stayed on track, sticking to one thing at a time. “My skin glowed just from kissing Roberto, even though we didn’t have sex.”
Dante’s hands, I couldn’t help noticing, curled into fists. “We glow only with pleasure, and only at the touch of another with Monère blood.”
“I didn’t know Roberto was a bad guy when he kissed me,” I offered lamely, driven, for some reason, to explain that to him.
“Do you believe me now?”
“Yeah I guess . . . though I still have a lot of questions.”
“They’ll have to wait. Can you get the knife from the car? It’s on the front dash.”
“Why?”
“To dig the bullets out of my back.”
“I thought you were kidding.”
“I wasn’t.”
“I’m a nurse, not a doctor,” I felt compelled to point out.
“I know. Don’t shoot me,” he warned, going to the passenger seat. I watched carefully as he retrieved the knife. Gesturing me over, he handed the blade to me, hilt first, then, unbuttoning and removing his shirt, he presented me with his bare back, hands braced against the side of the car.
I cast an appalled glance at him, which he didn’t see. “I don’t have anything to sterilize the knife with.”
“I’m a Full Blood Monère. We don’t get infections. If you don’t cut it out now, the wound will heal over and make it even harder to get the bullets out.”
It had been less than an hour since he had been shot, but the wounds were already starting to knit together at the edges.
“Mona Lisa, you have to do it now. We don’t have much time.”
“Why? You think Roberto will still come after us after the way you threatened him?”
“He’s a wealthy and powerful, arrogant drug lord who grew up faster and stronger than anybody else. This is probably the first time he’s ever been humbled, so, yes, I think he’ll come after us. You should have let me kill him.”
“You know, you’re pretty bloodthirsty for a twenty-year-old.” More than a little ticked off at him and the situation, I stomped around the car and rummaged inside. Nothing but a box of tissues, but at least we had that.
“Okay, brace yourself.” I felt him tense as I laid my hand over the first bullet hole and let my senses sink down into the wound. When I had ascertained the depth of injury, I moved to the second hole. “The bullets are in pretty deep,” I muttered. “Here goes.”
I prodded gently with the sharp tip of the knife and cursed when the wider part of the blade started cutting into his flesh as I inserted it deeper. “Goddammit, the knife is too wide.”
“Don’t stop,” he said through clenched jaw as the knife clinked up against the bullet.
“It’s hurting you and you’re bleeding. A lot!” Enough to completely soak the wad of tissues I ha
d pressed to his back.
“It doesn’t hurt as much as the silver stuck inside me—burns and acts like poison. Weakens me. Just get the damn things out. I’ll heal up.”
I was unable to get any leverage and finally had to remove the knife and make a new incision along the outer edge of the wound, cutting deep down into muscle before I came to the end of the bullet. Deep enough that I started worrying about puncturing his lung. Deliberately cutting into him was one of the most horrible things I’d ever had to do. Then came the awkward maneuvering with the blade.
He endured the torture in silence while my hands shook. Tears ran in a silent stream down my face. Stupid tears, I thought, wiping my face against my shoulder. He was the one hurting, not me. “It’s out,” I said hoarsely after what seemed like eternity.
“Get the other one out.”
“You’re fucking kidding me!”
He turned impatiently. Stilled at the sight of my tears. “Don’t cry,” he said, looking unexpectedly bewildered. “It feels much better with the silver out.”
“Oh yeah? You didn’t see the mess I made of your back,” I said, damning the tears. A sob jerked out of me and then I was crying, really crying, no longer silent.
How oddly natural it felt for him to draw me against him, press my tear-drenched face against his bare chest.
“This is so screwed up,” I muttered against his hard shoulder. “You should be the one crying, after what I just put you through.”
“I know this must be confusing . . . overwhelming to you. You’ve been so brave.” He stroked my hair with a tenderness that made the tears flow even more. “I just need that last bullet out, and then I can start healing and be strong for you.”
“God! You don’t ask for much, do you?” I snorted and pushed away from him. Scrubbing my face dry, I took a deep, cleansing breath. “Please tell me there’s something else we can try to get that last bullet out of you.”
He hesitated.
“There is, isn’t there?” I said, pouncing. “Tell me.”
“You have an affinity for metal,” he finally said.
