by Nalini Singh
But his own smile was long lost, for he’d finally reached his destination . . . only to discover that Nina wasn’t here. Judd and Kaleb hadn’t been wrong—a woman who could well be his Nina had been in this village less than a month earlier. She’d been standing in for the village medic who’d gone away for training, had moved on to her next post once the medic returned.
He swallowed, looked down at the letter he was writing, started again.
In my fantasies, I used to imagine that perhaps you’d lost your memories and that was why you hadn’t searched for me, but if this is you, then you remember your training, you remember being a nurse. You’ve chosen to stay here, far from me. You’ve chosen to change your name so I won’t find you.
My heart breaks at the thought of it but I won’t turn back now. I must know if it’s you and if there is any hope of begging your forgiveness. The villagers tell me you don’t have a lover that they know of—they are loyal to you, but an elder here recognized me as the man of God who had helped a friend in another village once. She was willing to trust me.
I must believe her. For the idea that you now belong to another—
Xavier’s hand shook.
Leaning his head back against the tree trunk, he blinked away the heat in his eyes, then put away the notebook and his pen. It took but a moment to pull on his backpack. Seconds later he was heading away from this village and toward where the elder had told him the woman named Ani had gone.
• • •
TWO days of trekking through the mountains and Xavier was a bare fifteen minutes from his new destination. Instead of carrying on, he forced himself to stop by a small waterfall. If this was to be his last meeting with Nina, he’d show her his best self. Stripping, he took out the biodegradable soap in his pack—thanks to a small care package that had been gifted to him by Judd’s mate—and washed himself.
Drying off afterward, he pulled on underwear and a pair of khaki-colored cargo pants before using his phone camera as a mirror while he scraped off the ink-black beard that had grown in during his journey.
Nina had always liked him clean-shaven, though she didn’t mind stubble.
Especially when they kissed.
Gripping the memory of her touch, her kiss, in a tight fist, he finished shaving, then splashed on aftershave from the same care pack. His hair, tightly curled as it was, needed no brushing. Reaching to the bottom of his pack, he pulled out a pristine white T-shirt, shrugged into it. The color was stark against the teak shade of his skin, the fabric a little stiff because it was so new. Beneath it lay a necklace he’d worn for years.
Socks and boots on, and he was as ready as he’d ever be.
His pack felt heavier this time, but perhaps that was his heart weighing him down. No matter. He had to go forward, had to know.
Stepping back onto the path, he made his way to the village.
Children saw him first; they always did. Pelting away at light speed on bare feet, they called out to their parents and other elders in a language that wasn’t identical to his native tongue but that was close enough for him to understand.
Making his way to the edge of the village, he waited with screaming patience until an elder, his brown-skinned face gnarled with life, came to him, asked him his business.
“I’ve come to see Ani,” he said.
The elder’s wary welcome turned into a scowl. “Who are you to look for our Ani?”
“I’ve been searching for my Nina for many years,” he said softly. “Since the day the Psy destroyed our village. My friends tell me Ani is Nina.”
A snort. “If she is? She’s changed her name. Seems to me she wants to escape you.”
A dagger to the heart, those words made him stagger within. “Yes,” he accepted even as he bled. “But I need to hear that from her.” He met the elder’s dark eyes. “You have no need to fear me. All I want is a moment with her.”
Then he heard it: Nina’s laughter.
Head jerking up, he dropped his pack and walked past the elder without looking back. He was conscious of further scowls and grumbling around him, conscious of people following, but he didn’t care. He had to see her, had to beg her forgiveness.
Then there she was, dressed in a simple dress of pale yellow that swirled around her calves as she spun and spun with her hands locked to those of a child of about seven or eight. Other children danced around them, laughing and calling out for their turn.
“Ani! Ani! Me! I want to have a go!”
His heart, it was a massive drum whose beat thundered in his ears. He would’ve gone to his knees except that he wanted to see Nina’s eyes . . . and then the spin stopped and she turned laughingly toward him . . . and there was no recognition in her eyes.
She looked straight through him.
Xavier’s breath turned into jagged shards in his lungs before his mind caught up with his heart. Regardless of how angry she was with him, Nina would never be able to coldly ignore him. They’d been too much to each other for such distance.
Yet though her face was turned toward him, she didn’t meet his eyes.
Then he knew.
Walking toward her, he watched her head angle a little to the left, her awareness of his approach clear. “It’s Xavier,” he said when he was only a foot away from her.
Her lips parted in a whisper. “Xavier . . .” A hand rose, trembling.
He bent so she could touch her fingers to his face, so she could trace the lines of him. His beautiful Nina with her dark, dark eyes that were so much paler now, the hue watery blue. The color of someone undergoing regeneration after catastrophic damage to the eyes.
It took up to a year for the regeneration to work, and if Nina had been hurt during her jump into the water and remained up in the mountains all this time, the delay was understandable—regeneration was highly specialized and came with the attendant cost. Nina would’ve had to qualify for a grant or be given the treatment by a sympathetic clinic. Even then, if an attempt failed, she’d have had to wait the mandatory three years before a second attempt.
Today, those sightless eyes seemed to meet his as she shaped her fingers over his face. A tear rolled down her cheek. “Xavier,” she whispered again. “Xavier.”
He took her into his arms even though he knew he should wait, should be sure she wanted him to do so. But he couldn’t stand by while Nina cried. “Shh,” he whispered, the sound rough because his own throat was thick, his eyes hot. “Hush, my love.” He spoke in their shared dialect, a dialect that had only been spoken in a village long destroyed. “Nina, please don’t cry.”
But she continued to sob and then he realized he was crying, too, and they were holding on bruisingly tight to one another. He was vaguely aware of children being drawn away, of the adults leaving, until he was alone with his Nina and she wasn’t pushing him away but holding him close.
“. . . you were dead,” she said in a shaky voice. “They told me you were dead.” Again and again, she repeated that.
Stroking his hand over her mass of curling black hair, he kissed her temple, her cheek, the taste of hot salt in his mouth. “I searched,” he said. “I searched for so long. Where were you?”
Their words merged together until they weren’t words any longer. They’d been apart too long to do anything but hold on to each other, rocking. The world was quiet around them, the villagers’ voices some distance away, when he and Nina were finally able to breathe enough for more words.
Pressing a kiss to her hair, he reached down for her hand, her bones slender and her skin a lusher brown than his. “Walk with me?”
Her fingers wove into his in a silent answer, and the two of them walked into the verdant greenery around the village, until they were private, alone. Then, his hands cupping her face, Xavier admitted his guilt. “I should’ve never made you jump.”
Her hands found his face again, held him
with sweet tenderness. “Then I would be dead.” Her voice was raw from her tears but resolute. “Everyone died. That’s what they said.”
“Who?”
“All the people I asked, and I asked so many.” Jagged rasps of breath. “The water was so fast, so hard. It swept me far from our village and at some point, I hit my head and I can’t remember what happened next—I know I was taken in by other villagers, but they didn’t find me until four days after the attack.”
Her hands kept touching him, as his kept touching her. “My rescuers took me to an off-the-grid local clinic and the doctor there did what he could, but I was in bad shape, barely coherent for over two months.”
“Why didn’t they take you to a bigger hospital?” Even as he asked the question, Xavier knew the answer—the Psy had been doing fatal damage throughout the region at that time, until the people who called these mountains home no longer trusted the cities or the big hospitals staffed by Psy.
Nina said the same, then added, “Even after those two months, I wasn’t quite right. I had broken bones and other injuries that were still healing, but my head was the worst. I couldn’t hold on to thoughts, on to memories.” She trembled. “For a while I thought I’d never find myself, always be lost, but it came back over the next eight months.”
She slid her arms around him once more. Locking his own around her, he said, “You began to ask questions the instant you were yourself again,” he said, knowing his Nina. “And people told you everyone had died.”
A jerky nod. “I didn’t believe them. I went back home but there was no village there, nothing but an empty landscape cleared of all signs of our families, our friends.”
“The Psy did that,” he told her. “The same Psy whose soldiers murdered everyone we knew.” It was important to him to differentiate the one from the group; the years since the attack had taught him that the Psy race wasn’t one big entity but millions of separate individuals.
Just like him. Just like his Nina.
She thumped fisted hands against his chest. “Why didn’t you leave me any signs? Why didn’t you tell people you were alive?”
He wanted to shield her, couldn’t. “I took a telepathic hit,” he said and felt her flinch. “When I came to, everyone was dead and I knew the Psy would be back to clean up.” He swallowed. “I couldn’t bury anyone, or it would’ve alerted them to possible survivors. God forgive me for that choice.”
“You could’ve never buried so many, Xavier,” Nina said softly. “God knows your heart.”
Holding on tight to her words, he said, “I haunted the mountains searching for you and eventually joined up with a small group of rebels who’d made it their life’s work to sabotage or destroy all Psy operations in the area.” Those men and women had been driven by the same need for vengeance that had kept Xavier alive at the start, even through the worst despair.
“I stayed nearby for three months, but my work with the rebels eventually took me some distance away in the opposite direction to this village.” Unknowingly separating him from his heart. “When I was shot in an operation, they doctored me until I could take care of my own wounds, then left me in a cave with enough supplies to see me through.” Injured as he was, the rebels had considered him dead weight.
“I couldn’t move more than a few meters for over a month.” He’d tried to crawl to his devastated village at one point, wanting to die on home ground, only to be forced to turn back after he came dangerously close to unconsciousness. No one in his condition could survive a night in the cold of the mountains without some kind of shelter.
Even knowing he’d never have made it, Xavier wanted to tell his younger self to keep crawling, to find his way back to the village and to Nina. “By the time I returned, the nearby villages had been long deserted and people farther out knew nothing.”
His shoulder muscles knotted, his fist clenching in her hair. “I asked over and over.” Yet the mountains were big, and back then the people who called it home often moved because of fear or need or environmental factors, a multitude of reasons. It wasn’t improbable that Nina hadn’t spoken to any of those same people when she came to look for him. Especially since she’d returned long after him.
“Why do they call you Ani?” he asked, his heart in a painful vise.
“It’s what my rescuers named me at the time when I wasn’t myself . . . and after . . . when I thought everyone was dead, that you were dead, I didn’t want to be Nina again.”
A heartbreaking answer that betrayed the depth of her pain.
“I searched for you,” he said, needing her to know, to believe. “I’ve been true, loved no other.” Falling to his knees as her tears began to flow again, he dared say the words he’d held inside for so long. “Say you’ll forgive me, Nina.”
“Xavier.” Going to her knees in front of him, she shook her head and his heart sank, his world narrowing to only her face and to this instant that might forever break him.
“There is no need for forgiveness.”
He took a harsh breath, another.
“I know you did what you did out of love.” Her kiss was a benediction. “I love you, Xavier. I’ve listened for your voice even after the world convinced me you were dead.” Her fingers shaped his lips. “I’ve loved no one but you.”
Shaking, he was the one who fell into her embrace this time. She held him with love in every breath. “My Xavier.”
• • •
“THE regeneration might not work,” she said to him a long time later, as she sat cradled against his chest while he leaned his back up against a sturdy tree with dark green leaves. “This is the second and final attempt.”
He was happy to hear no worry in her tone that he’d feel differently about her. She knew he loved her, regardless of her physical appearance or health. “You’re revered as a nurse.”
“I have an apprentice who acts as my eyes, and together, we manage.”
She was more than managing, he thought, considering the fidelity she’d engendered in people used to being loyal only to those they’d known all their lives. “I have connections now, Nina. I can get you to better doctors if you want.”
“I’ve learned to live how I am, even thrive, but I could do my work better with both eyes or at least some vision.” Her fingers grazed his jaw. “I’m selfish, too. I want to see you again.”
Joy was a sweet pain through his veins. “Then we’ll find the best specialists.” He knew Judd and Kaleb would both help him without question; family, he’d learned, had many different faces. His now included two Psy with deadly abilities.
“There are others here,” Nina said. “So many people still isolated, disbelieving of the changes within the Psy and unwilling to return to the lives they abandoned in order to survive. Many need proof they won’t be murdered should they return to their lands. Others need medical help, access to wider education—”
“I’m with you.” Xavier had fought beside his friends for years. Now it was his time to walk beside Nina. He’d said good-bye to his parishioners at the outset of this journey, wanting to go into it with his whole heart and soul. But he hadn’t abandoned them. Never would he do that to people who had given him as much succor as he had them.
He’d left them in the gentle, capable hands of a young woman of God who was ready for her own congregation. She had strength enough to offer a shoulder to those in need and heart enough to open it to any soul that walked through the door.
He was at peace with his decision to leave San Francisco, could think of no better life than to live it beside Nina. “I’ll call on every favor I have to help the people who kept you safe until I could find you again.” Until he could hold her close again, his heart beating in time with her own.
“Will you ever ask me?” Nina chided an hour later. “Really, Xavier, you’re taking the concept of becoming your own man first too far.”
His
smile was startled joy on his face, memories cascading through him of a young Nina rolling her dark eyes when he proudly told her he’d ask for her hand only when he could build her a home worthy of her spirit. “I think we’ve both waited long enough.”
Reaching for his necklace, he tore it off to drop a ring formed of gold, and set with sapphires and diamonds, onto his palm. He’d bought it years earlier, after he came to San Francisco and found a steady position. Being a Second Reformation priest didn’t pay much, but Xavier hadn’t needed to spend much, either. He’d saved it all for Nina’s ring. The stones were small but the delicate beauty of them perfectly fit her bone structure.
He reached from behind to lift her hand. “Will you marry me, Nina?”
“Today, if you arrange it,” was her answer, her smile as radiant as the moon.
• • •
TWO days later, when Xavier called Judd to ask for assistance in getting specialist help for the woman who would soon be his wife, he got far more than he’d bargained for. Judd not only put him directly on the phone with the SnowDancer healer—who was then able to get Nina into treatment at the best facility in the world—the other man spoke to his alpha, and Xavier was suddenly in touch with the AzureSun Leopards.
The leopards’ connection to SnowDancer came through the SnowDancer-DarkRiver pact, with the AzureSun alpha, Isabella, the grandmother of a DarkRiver sentinel. And, he was proudly told by said alpha, the namesake of one of three newborn members of DarkRiver.
“My great-grandchildren,” the alpha had said, while appearing not the least like a great-grandmother.
Isabella Garcia was a powerful alpha who held the loyalty of her people, despite being in her eighth decade. Even Xavier hadn’t realized changelings didn’t always go for physical strength in an alpha. Wisdom was also treasured, with the sentinels acting as the alpha’s physical arm.
While AzureSun’s power base was in another part of South America, they had contacts in Xavier’s region on whom he could call should he have the need. They also gave him permission to access certain resources that would help ease his and Nina’s journey as they fought to undo the damage that had been done to the people of these mountains.
