by Jade Kerrion
Typically he enjoyed driving on his own, even though being alone was largely an illusion. His parents had standing orders. He was always escorted by a team of bodyguards, unless he was with Danyael. It had taken months, years, actually, to convince his parents that he was safer with Danyael than with anyone else and that Danyael was far more effective than an army of bodyguards. Even then, his parents had not been convinced until Danyael singlehandedly foiled an attempted kidnapping six years earlier, saving Lucien as well as the lives of his bodyguards.
There was little Danyael could not handle when he was well. The only problem was that Danyael had not been well since he had started medical school, and most certainly not since he started his job at the free clinic at Brooklyn. Lucien hated visiting Danyael in New York. He hated watching helplessly as Danyael sat by the usually cold radiator, too tired to speak, too sick to eat, and too hungry to sleep.
Why would Danyael not take his money? Why did Danyael insist on working to exhaustion at a job that paid barely anything at all?
Because if Danyael took Lucien's money, Danyael would not be Danyael, Lucien acknowledged with a soft chuckle. In his quiet way, Danyael was stubborn. He wanted to be where his mutant powers were most needed, where he could be perceived as a blessing instead of a curse. He needed to prove that he could live his own life, that he could be normal, or as close to normal as a powerful alpha empath could ever pretend to be. And he had done it. In spite of the odds, Danyael had succeeded. Lucien could not be prouder of his friend.
Lucien eased his foot off the accelerator. McLean's winding roads weren't forgiving of mistakes. He was five minutes from home when his bodyguards in the black SUV accelerated and passed him. What was going on? Lucien braked when they did. Annoyance transformed to alarm when another dark SUV pulled into view behind him. He reached for his cell phone, but he had no signal. They were jamming him. Damn it.
The doors of the SUV in front of him opened, and he cursed again. The two men stepping out of the vehicle weren't his bodyguards. His carelessness was going to cost him dearly. He glanced at the rearview mirror; four men stepped out of the SUV behind him. He triggered the silent alarm in his car, trusting it to transmit the emergency call by satellite to his home.
Even if it worked, he knew that help would not arrive in time. This time, Danyael was not around to save him.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Zara woke slowly and languidly, a gradual rising to the surface, the layers of sleep separating and thinning as she drew closer to full awareness. Her eyes fluttered open, but she winced as a defense against the dim orange glow in the room. Soft sounds and scents permeated the room, weighing down the atmosphere with sensation. Flames crackled quietly. The familiar scent of aromatic cedar wafted past her. She turned her head and saw Danyael seated in a chair by the fireplace, staring thoughtfully into the dancing flames.
So beautiful. Too perfect.
She must have uttered a sound. He rose from the chair, graceful as a dancer, and sat on the bed beside her. "Zara?"
Danyael. No. Her mind rejected what her heart instinctively embraced. Not Danyael. Never, ever Danyael. Galahad...
She clung to his presence, an anchor through the fog of pleasant lethargy. She could barely make out his eyes, but she sensed concern and worry in the dark depths, concern and worry for her. It was unnecessary---if she had not been emotionally cut adrift from her intellectual moorings, she might have been insulted---but it was charming, even touching.
His ethereal features came into focus as her vision sharpened. His pale blond hair formed a golden halo about his face. His fathomless eyes, darkened by pain, seared with aching loneliness.
A fallen angel---the flawless beauty scarred, and yet enhanced by a difficult past and quietly lingering heartache. Danyael. No, Galahad. "My angel..." she breathed. She reached up and wrapped her arms around his neck. "Galahad."
"Zara, it's---"
"Hush," she murmured. The need was strong. It had churned within her for too long, and she thought it had peaked when he touched her cheek and coaxed her to sleep. She was wrong. It was nothing compared to the slow burn she felt now. She would die if she could not have him.
Still he resisted. Why? He wanted her. He needed her as much as she wanted and needed him. She was absolutely certain of it. Why wouldn't he give in to the moment? Frustrated, she rose, twisted sharply, and pushed him down, the motion reversing their positions. She pinned him to the bed. He tensed when her lips touched his. She thought he would pull away, but then inexplicably, he relaxed, surrendering to the kiss.
"Much better." She smiled into the kiss. "Make love to me."
"Zara, I'm not---"
Danyael. She knew that. She could not have Danyael. She did not want to have Danyael. Galahad was the one she wanted; she was certain of it. The odd emptiness she felt would have to be assuaged some other way. With desperate yearning, she clung to him, trusting her emotions to align with the act of physical intimacy. "I love you, Galahad," she whispered softly into his ear as her fingers tugged impatiently at his T-shirt and trailed down his taut, leanly muscled stomach to unbutton his jeans.
She tried to believe it, while her heart quietly whispered Danyael's name.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The dreams faded, but the supposedly cold and harsh light of reality was a pleasantly soft hue. It took Zara a while to recognize it for what it was, a feeling of utter satisfaction---of mental relaxation, physical contentment, and emotional wellbeing---that she had never experienced in its entirety ever before.
Her eyes flickered open into narrow slits, then widened in surprise. Unexpectedly, she chuckled. She had not imagined the fireplace, after all. The bedroom was charming, a far cry from dully-similar hotel rooms they had occupied over the past few days. How on earth had Danyael managed to find a place like that?
Danyael---
The rose-colored glasses shattered. Blood drained from her face, leaving her pale and cold as she sat upright in bed, clutching the sheets to her bare breasts. She scanned the room. He stood by the window, his back to her, shirtless and clad only in jeans. The sudden jolt of desire she felt was immediately dismissed as the aftereffects of his emotional manipulation.
The wrenching sense of betrayal was real. "You fucking monster!"
Danyael scarcely reacted, his shoulders moving in a shrug or with a sigh. "Good morning to you too," he said mildly. Only then did he turn to face her. The faintly amused smile that curved his lips did not reach his eyes. "You've woken up grumpy two days in a row now. You're well on your way to a trend."
She flung the blanket aside, heedless of her nudity. He had seen it all; there was nothing left to hide. With predatory grace that came naturally to her, she crossed the room and flung her strength into a backhanded slap. He made no attempt to avoid it. The blow caught him full across his face. "You seduced me."
Danyael did not wipe the blood from his split lip. "What do you remember?" he asked quietly.
Mind-blowing sex, but far more than that, shattering intimacy. The type that wrung quiet tears of disbelief. Absolute trust. Ultimate surrender.
Nothing but lies in the light of day. "I thought you were Galahad."
"I know. You called his name, many times."
"Then you know I don't want you!"
"Yes, I know."
"So why did you do it?"
"Zara, I didn't---"
"Is this a game to see how badly we can double-cross each other?"
The light in Danyael's eyes cooled, then hardened. "What did you do?"
She raised her chin. Fury allowed the truth to tumble out. "I set the cops on our trail."
"You called the cops?" His voice was quiet. "That night, when the cops showed up at the hotel, you'd called them. Within hours of promising that you'd keep me safe, you called the cops and told them where I was?"
"I had to. With your empathic powers, you could have stayed hidden indefinitely. If they couldn't find your trail, they would have looked else
where for Galahad."
"You're using me as bait?"
"My promise was to keep you safe, and I did," she snapped. "If they'd arrested you, they would have learned that you're not Galahad, and then the real hunt would begin for Galahad. As long as they knew that you were out there, they would look for you, not Galahad. I had to keep the trail fresh."
He shook his head. "You have no idea what you're doing. You have no concept of how badly it could have gone---"
"How can you have the audacity to talk about what's wrong with me, after everything you've done to me?"
"Zara, I---"
She spun around, snatched the dagger that lay on her discarded clothes, and lunged at him. He ducked, evading her first strike, and instinctively brought his hands up to fend her off. The serrated blade of the dagger sliced diagonally across his lower left arm. Danyael inhaled sharply, though from pain or shock, she could not tell. Blood welled up along the length of the injury, tiny rivulets combining into a steady stream of crimson.
The sight and scent of blood, sharply metallic, stunned her. She had hurt him. She could have killed him. What was she doing? She raised her shocked gaze to his face, but he was no longer looking at her.
His attention seemed focused on the injury. Danyael pressed his right hand against the wound, but the pressure scarcely stemmed the flow. "I'm sorry," he said quietly, finally raising his gaze to her. "I...care very much for you, Zara, and I---"
She felt her heart leap and falter. She had been subconsciously waiting to hear those words, but they clearly meant nothing to him. His actions made a lie of them. The words---too few, too late---did nothing to mend the jagged tear in her heart.
Because she hurt, because she had lost him and lost herself in the process, she struck with devastating precision at where she knew she could hurt him most. Her voice was cool, her composure artificial, but nevertheless impenetrable. "You're a monster, Danyael. You're an empath, but you know nothing about what it means to have empathy for others. You use your powers to hurt the ones you claim to love. You drive them mad until they strike out to hurt you physically. Your mother abandoned you. Your brother shot you. Your father had your memory wiped. I'm just another statistic. Another data point in a series of failed relationships."
Pain ripped fast and brutally hard through his eyes. She felt its echo as it smashed against his psychic shields, the full impact contained only through the sheer force of his will. The whisper of his emotions surged out like a sword twisting in her gut, tearing through everything that ever meant anything. Hot tears trickled down her face, but Danyael's dark eyes were completely dry. The awful, staggering pain---the mere echo of which had almost driven her to her knees---vanished into the fathomless depths. His eyes had never been emptier, had never seemed less human than when he turned away. He turned his back on her and walked to the window.
He was waiting for her to strike.
A memory, too recent to be relegated to the distant past, seared with striking clarity through her mind. Several nights earlier, Galahad had stood by the window at Pioneer Labs, his back to her, waiting for the killing blow to land.
Not the same thing, her mind shrieked in protest. Galahad had been innocent. Danyael was guilty. With that single act of violation, he had destroyed everything they had built together---trust, even friendship. She inhaled deeply, enunciating each word with perfect clarity. "You can forget the promise I made to Lucien. We're done. Forever."
She turned away from him. Anger coiled into a cold shell around her. She ignored the hollow ache grinding in the pit of her stomach. She could not possibly be hurting for him.
* * *
Zara was in the dining room with the other guests when Danyael walked out the front door. He did not stop to acknowledge her or to say goodbye. She was right. They were past the point where words could have made any difference.
He walked past their rented car; he had not even thought to take the car keys. A path took him down narrow country roads. Where it led he did not know or care. Her accusations stunned him. The facts she had let slip destroyed him. My fault. He curled his hands into fists, the motion tugging painfully at the wound he had cleaned and bandaged.
What had his family been like? Had they been normal before he drove them insane with his empathic powers? There was only one way not to hurt others. He knew the answer; he had always known it, and yet, like a stupid fool, he still tried to cross the impassable boundaries---seeking friendship, craving the emotional intimacy that he could never have.
Except for Lucien. It was the only mercy he had ever received---a friend immune to his empathic powers, whose friendship he could be certain he had not manipulated and willed into existence.
Danyael squeezed his eyes shut. The brief darkness signaled a transition, the only physical expression of the titanic mental and emotional shifts taking place within as he struggled to rebuild the walls that saved him from the madness of emotional isolation.
His cell phone rang, the shrill sound yanking him out of his thoughts and into the reality of his precarious situation.
It was time to move on. Forget his family. Forget Zara. He had to return to what he knew he had: Lucien, the protection of the council, and his job at the free clinic in Brooklyn. Surely there had to be a way to explain his way out of the mess. Surely there was someone willing to listen.
The cell phone kept ringing. He did not recognize the number, but accepted the call anyway. "Yes?"
He heard a female voice, one he did not recognize. "Danyael, it's Xin."
"Xin?"
"Yeah. We need to talk about..." her voice trailed off. "You don't remember me, do you?"
He closed his eyes wearily, a gesture born equally of resignation and frustration. "No, I'm sorry, I don't."
"We met in D.C. a few days ago. I'm one of Zara's associates."
"Zara and I aren't traveling together anymore."
Xin gasped. "Why?"
I hurt the ones I love. "She's safer away from me."
Xin muttered something in a language he did not understand and exhaled noisily. "Danyael, I...there's no easy way to say this. Lucien was kidnapped."
An icy fist closed around his heart. The impact drove the air from his lungs.
Xin pushed on. "The facts are still coming in, but as far as we can tell, he was stopped while returning from a late dinner in the city. We found his car abandoned. Blood---not much---but definitely his, was found around the car. He probably put up a fight."
Segment. Separate. It got a great deal easier. He could focus on something outside of himself. "Who's behind it? Why would they take him? Any ransom requests?"
"No ransom demands so far, but it's early yet. I'm trying to get to the bottom of who's behind this. Lucien's been interfering a great deal to take the pressure off you and Galahad."
Damn it, Luce. These are my problems; I'll solve them myself. You did not need to get involved. "You think the Feds are behind this?"
"In my opinion, it's more subtlety than they're capable of managing, but if it's the Feds, I can easily blow the lid on that."
"How?"
"I work for the Feds. I know, or can find out easily, what they're up to."
"You what?"
"That's my day job. I work for Zara, the rest of the time."
The paradox boggled his mind. "How do you keep your loyalties straight?"
"Good question, isn't it? You're the only one who has actually thought to ask. Anyway, I've been able to keep tabs on what the Feds do. Still, my guess is it's not the Feds. As soon as I find out anything, I'll let you know." She paused briefly. "Do you know where Zara is?"
"Back at the Oak Lawn Bed and Breakfast."
"Is she okay?"
You mean other than the fact that she believes I raped her last night? "As far as I know. She was having breakfast when I left."
"I tried to call her before I called you. She's not picking up her phone. She's not usually careless like that."
Her words sent a fissure of
alarm through him. He glanced sharply over his shoulder in the direction whence he had come. "I'll check on her," he promised before hanging up the phone.
Danyael turned around. His empathic senses reached out, scanning for anything out of the ordinary. The answers returned far swifter and far more acutely than he had expected. Fear...panic...terror...
He did not waste time cursing as he accelerated to a sprint. When he arrived at the house five minutes later, the fight was already under way. Ten men, armed with weapons, closed in on the house. Occasionally, they shied, ducking from return fire in the house.
Over the sounds of gunfire, he heard hysterical screams and sobs inside the house. Too many innocent bystanders were around, and they weren't shielded. He could not simply cut loose.
He raced to a man, grabbed him by the arm, and pulled him around. The man brought his rifle up swinging, but checked the motion abruptly, his eyes widening in surprise and alarm.
They're under orders to take me alive, Danyael realized. The surge of relief was not enough to neutralize the precariousness of his situation. Orders were helpless in the face of panicked reflexes. He could still be shot by accident. Gritting his teeth, he shoved his empathic powers through the physical contact and saw the man's eyes flare with gut-wrenching pain. The man's eyes emptied of all emotion before he slumped, unconscious to the ground.
Grimly, he approached the men clustered outside the house in turn, catching them off guard as he closed in from behind them. His empathic powers sent fear surging through them, stunning them briefly into inaction long enough for the dark side of his healing powers to transfer pain from his body to theirs. It was just as well; he had much to spare, after being sick for so long.
The fight was over quickly.
Zara was the first to emerge from the house, followed hesitantly by several frightened people. She stalked up to him. "I had this under control."
