Random had just used Aspect to blink right out of it. In front of the Council.
“You shouldn’t have done that.”
He shrugged. “It was instinctual. And I didn’t do anything illegal. If they want to punish me for doing what I once told everyone I could, I’d like to see them try.”
Her mind was still reeling from the whole teleportation thing. No one in the recorded history of Aspect use had ever done it. It wasn’t a recognized branch of Aspect, it wasn’t a recorded ability.
“Your Aspect is desire based,” she said softly.
“Yes.” His vocal cords sounded as if they were so tight they might break.
Random had wanted to keep her father from touching her so badly—had wanted to protect her so badly—that he’d performed an impossible feat. One he hadn’t managed to replicate even when he’d been a kid being mercilessly bullied, when one little teleport would have turned him from a pariah into a golden child.
He’d teleported them. For her. And now he looked like he was afraid she’d run from him for it. She hated herself for doing that to him, for putting that wariness in him. She couldn’t change the last year. But she could try to change now.
She closed the distance between them and kissed him, long and slow, until he looked slightly dazed when she pulled back. “Have I ever told you you’re amazing?”
He blinked. “That would be a definite no. Usually you tell me I’m insufferable, or cocky, or ridiculous, or—”
“You’re amazing,” she said, and kissed him again, parting his lips this time, her tongue delving inside. She pressed the length of her body against his, needing to feel closer to him, to erase the terror that had flooded her system at seeing Elijah again.
She could tell herself a million times, a million ways, that Elijah would never control her again. But no reassurance could change years of conditioning that told her she was powerless in his presence. That no matter how hard she fought, she would lose. Her body remembered every bruise, every broken bone, every iota of pain he’d ever exacted. Remembered, and feared.
She hated being afraid, hated feeling powerless. So she lost herself in Random. Because when she touched him, she didn’t think about anything other than him. And when he held her, the only thing she felt was safe. Wanted.
She slid her hands beneath his shirt, ran them up the firm muscles of his back and felt him stir against her in response.
He groaned. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but shouldn’t we be talking about what just happened?”
“It happened.” She bit his lower lip, released it. “It’s done.” She kissed her way across his jaw, down his throat. “What’s there to talk about?”
“How about what actually happened back there? Pretty sure your original plan was not to publicly tell Elijah to go fuck himself.”
“I don’t want to talk about that right now.” She attacked the buttons on his shirt, wanting to just rip it off, but figuring she shouldn’t ruin two of his shirts in one day. She was halfway down when his hands caught her wrists.
“Kyrie.”
She sighed. For a man who’d spent a year chasing her, she kept having a remarkably difficult time getting him to sleep with her. “You have two options,” she told him.
“Do I?”
“Option one, you keep pushing me on this.”
“How does that go for me?”
“I push back, we both get pissed.”
“Option two?”
“You could fuck me in the shower.” His body was entirely on board for option two, if the statement his cock was making against her was any indication. The man, however, was in the mood to push. Valkyrie saw it in the set of his jaw. So she leaned back and pulled the dress over her head, noting with satisfaction his sharp intake of breath.
“That is cheating.”
“Winning’s winning,” she answered.
“We’re going to have to talk about what happened sometime.”
“Sometime,” she agreed, noting that for once the lawyer in him had failed to specify a time frame. Apparently the secret to winning an argument with him was taking off her clothes. “But not now. So what’s it going to be?” She stepped back, shucked her bra and underwear. His eyes turned molten and she knew she had him.
“Fucking you in the shower?” he offered.
“Good choice.”
Valkyrie turned the water off and stepped out of the shower to find her clothes were gone. She’d been suspicious when Random had insisted she stay in the shower to luxuriate—whatever the hell that meant—and she had now walked into a bedroom that was missing her duffel bag of clothes.
A single midnight blue dress shirt was folded on the bed. She recognized it as Random’s. Every time he wore it he looked like sex personified and she found it impossible to take her eyes off him. Now that she thought about it, he’d worn it a lot around her.
A note rested on top of the shirt and she plucked it off, scowling at Random’s elegant scrawl. I put your clothes in the wash. Try this on for size. I bet you look sexy as hell in it.
She was going to kill him. She pulled the shirt on and, because she wasn’t precisely slender, it was almost a perfect fit. Her scowl deepened as she realized he hadn’t left her anything else, and the shirt barely covered her ass. She stared at her reflection in the dresser mirror. She didn’t look sexy. She looked like a woman wearing a man’s dress shirt that just happened to fit her.
She stopped her brain from going down the dark rabbit hole of wondering if any other women—perhaps prettier, smaller, softer women—had ever worn Random’s clothes. She was never going to be any of those things. Truthfully, she didn’t want to be any of them, would go insane if she tried.
And those other women, they weren’t here now. She was. And if she wanted to have something with Random, something real, she had to let those faceless women go, had to stop being bitter about all the years he hadn’t been hers.
It had been her choice to stay away from him. It had been the right choice, the one she’d had to make, and she would make it again. She couldn’t blame him for not having spent his entire life lonely. She was glad he hadn’t. Goddess knew if she could have drowned her sorrows in someone else’s body without putting their life in jeopardy, she’d probably have done the same thing.
And she mattered to Random. She fingered the sword pendant at her throat and something that felt perilously close to a smile tugged at her lips. That would never do. She was supposed to be pissed off he’d taken her clothes, not grinning like an idiot.
Well, there was one way to solve that.
“Random,” she yelled, opening the bedroom door and heading for the living room. “Where the hell are my clothes?”
He didn’t answer her. She understood why when she found him in the living room, staring at the room’s other occupant.
Ella Tremayne stood just inside the doorway, and the Queen of Death did not look pleased.
14
Valkyrie had spoken with Random’s aunt many times. She’d known Ella Tremayne almost her entire life.
So why did it feel like she was meeting her boyfriend’s mother for the first time?
Possibly because, given Valkyrie’s state of dress, it was pretty damn impossible not to guess what she and Random had just been doing. Fine time to wish she’d put on a pair of Random’s sweatpants, but she refused to shrink from Ella’s gaze. Valkyrie Winters did not shrink. She straightened her shoulders, crossed her arms, and lifted her chin, as if she wore battle armor and not a dress shirt that barely covered the important bits.
“Aunt Ella,” she said, unsure which subconscious part of her clearly longed for death by calling the woman that. Jace called her Aunt Ella, had never called her anything else, but while Kyrie called her that when referencing her to Jace or Random, she couldn’t recall that she’d ever addressed the woman as Aunt Ella to her face.
Neither of the two women were under any illusion that she did so now out of anything other than mulish stu
bbornness.
“Random,” the Queen of Death said, “please give Ms. Winters and I a moment.”
Random had, until this moment, been mimicking a statue. A very surprised, adorably confused, statue.
“Aunt Ella,” he began soothingly, “I don’t think—”
“Don’t you ‘Aunt Ella’ me, boy.” She cut him off in a tone that brooked absolutely no disobedience. “It wasn’t a request.”
Valkyrie had a feeling that, for all the devil-may-care ways of his youth, Random had never once disobeyed his aunt when she used that tone on him. Because when he didn’t immediately leave the room, Ella turned and lifted her eyebrows at him in inquiry.
“Promise me nothing will happen to her.”
Aunt Ella’s eyes softened the barest fraction. “I’m not going to hurt her, boy. You have my word.”
He nodded, but instead of walking out, he walked to Valkyrie and took her in his arms. She hadn’t unfolded hers from across her chest, so she ended up oddly smooshed against him. It wasn’t entirely unpleasant and, despite Aunt Ella’s presence, she couldn’t help from leaning into him a little.
“I promise she’s not as scary as she seems,” he whispered. “I’ll be right outside.”
“You should be more concerned for yourself,” she whispered back. “Because of you, I have to talk to her in your damn shirt. You’re going to pay for that.”
“Do you want a kiss for luck?”
She glared at him and he laughed. He did kiss her—on the cheek—before he dropped his arms from her. Aunt Ella tracked his path from Valkyrie out the front door. Ella considered the closed door for five seconds, ten, before she flicked her hand at it and a spark of Aspect leapt from her to flare through the door and frame.
Random yelped. “Was that really necessary, Auntie?”
“Waylon Jennings Tremayne, do not even think about eavesdropping on this conversation.”
Valkyrie’s eyes widened. On some level, she’d known Random couldn’t be his real name, but Waylon Jennings? Really? Someone’s mother had clearly had a thing for country singers.
“Low blow, Aunt Ella,” Random called. Then he tromped loudly off the front porch and appeared framed in the kitchen window a few seconds later, a respectable fifteen feet from the house walls. He waved at them as if to say, See? I can behave.
Valkyrie snorted.
“Yes, he does have that affect on a person.” Ella Tremayne crossed her arms and tapped her fingers against her biceps, considering her nephew through the window.
“Do you know why I’m here?”
Valkyrie debated a multitude of responses and discarded them all. She figured, when people asked that question, they didn’t actually want you to answer it.
“No.”
“Random’s Aspect isn’t as mercurial as he and I have made it out to be. But it was safer for him if Aspect Society viewed him as a trivial oddity.” She turned her gaze from Random to Valkyrie. “Yes, his Aspect is tied to his desires, but want alone couldn’t bring him to teleport two people from inside the Council’s most heavily warded room. In the entirety of his life, he has teleported precisely once before.”
Valkyrie couldn’t entirely suppress the flicker of surprise that showed on her face. When Random had been the new child laughingstock in town talking about teleportation, he’d said he could prove it, that his aunt had seen it. Ella Tremayne had staunchly denied that any such occurrence had happened. Since Random had been all of eight at the time, no one had felt it necessary to get a Truthfinder involved in determining the legitimacy of a claim of magic use no one believed was possible in the first place.
“Yes, Ms. Winters, I lied to the Council. You cannot have failed to notice, after Siren’s entrance into our world, that they do not like anything that is different. They treat it either with forceful suspicion or dismissive contempt. It was better for the boy to be ridiculed than to spend his childhood under a Council-assigned tutor who would poke and prod him to find out what his limits were. When he was older, he understood why I’d done it.”
“If you dislike the Council so much, why did you join it?”
“To protect him, of course. Because that first time he teleported, Ms. Winters, was to me. I am sure you’re aware that the idea of teleportation has long fascinated the Aspect community. It’s theorized that if it could be done, one would need a very distinct knowledge of both the origin point and the destination point that would involve complex preparation and spellwork.
“Before Random appeared in front of me, there was no preparation. No spellwork. The boy had met me precisely once in his life. When he was two. I don’t believe he even consciously remembers it. His mother was still living here then and her life was, as it always was, a disaster.
“I went to the apartment she was living in and tried to convince her to give Random to me. For all her faults, she did love the boy, and she wouldn’t do it. I told her that if she ever changed her mind, I would be there for him. She left Seclusion two days later and I never saw him again.
“Understand that he had never been to my home. When Random teleported, he didn’t do it to a specific place, but to a person. He came to me, because some part of him remembered that I had promised I would take care of him. Has he told you anything about that day?”
Valkyrie shook her head.
“You know he came to me because his mother died?”
“Yes.” Valkyrie had a desperately bad feeling that she knew where this was going.
“He was holding her in his arms when he teleported into my kitchen. He was eight years old and his mother choked to death on her own blood with her head in his lap.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Valkyrie managed. It was horrific, it was personal, and if Random had wanted her to know, he would have told her himself.
“So you will understand something. Random’s mother jumped from abusive relationship to abusive relationship. It’s why Random took the path with his legal career that he did. From what I understand, though admittedly the boy’s records are spotty given how frequently his mother shifted towns, he hadn’t managed a single use of his Aspect before then. Everyone thought he was a Dud.
“Because while his Aspect does try to give him what he wants, that isn’t his true trigger. It’s love. Love—and fear—for his mother made his first ever use of Aspect to teleport her away from the man who beat her to death.
“So tell me, Valkyrie, why was my son so afraid of you being near your father that he revealed to the Council something we have successfully hidden his entire life?”
Valkyrie didn’t answer. She couldn’t.
Aunt Ella held out her hand, and Valkyrie knew what the woman was asking.
“No.”
“It wasn’t a request, child.”
“You don’t have the right.”
“I have every right. That boy out there,” she pointed out the window, “is mine. In every way that matters he is my son. I raised him, I loved him, and I watched him turn into a shadow of himself over the last year and I know damn well that was because of you. I need to know if you’re worth it.”
Ella’s Aspect surfaced, the full strength of it a dark cloak swirling around her. Her chocolate brown eyes, so like and unlike Random’s, deepened to pure black, the promise of death filling the kitchen like a thunderous fog. Her hair seemed to shift and twist, writhing as if the tendrils were living things that promised to sprout fangs and deliver a stony un-death.
“So you may not like it, but I am not leaving this house until I have the answers I need to keep him safe.”
“We both know I can’t stop you,” Valkyrie spat. She could shield herself, yes, and her Aspect was strong enough that she could hold even the Queen of Death off for some time. But she wasn’t willing to kill Random’s aunt, and that was precisely the force that would be necessary to stop the woman from doing what she intended. It didn’t mean Valkyrie had to like it. “But I’ll be damned if I give you permission. You want to do a blood delineation,
you do it knowing it is fully against my wishes. I won’t grant you absolution because you think you have the right.”
“I’ll bear that in mind,” Ella Tremayne said. She strode across the room and gripped Valkyrie’s wrist.
A blood delineation didn’t have to hurt, and if Valkyrie hadn’t fought the invasion of Ella’s Aspect, it wouldn’t have. But she was incapable of not fighting. Ella’s Death Aspect might be the opposite of Siren’s Life, but they were of the same coin. Both women could see a person’s history written in their physical body, and Valkyrie had no desire to give away her history.
The breaks in her bones, the memories of cuts and bruises and blows, they were hers. No one had the right to see them unless she offered them. No one had the right to read them like a book. But Ella did, and because Valkyrie fought it, the woman’s Aspect burned like acid through her veins.
She didn’t know how long it went on for. It felt like she’d stuck her hand on a live power line and couldn’t let go, but couldn’t die, either. When Ella finally dropped her hand Valkyrie crumpled, barely able to get her hands beneath her to break the fall.
She sucked in air through a constricted throat, her chest tight, and it took several breaths before she could turn her head to glare at Ella. Random’s aunt was as pale as the physical state her Aspect was named for, and she’d taken two steps back after she’d let Valkyrie go.
“Did you like what you found?” Valkyrie asked.
“No,” was Ella’s soft answer.
Valkyrie understood, then. Understood, and laughed. “You bought it, didn’t you? You don’t even like Elijah and you bought it. Battle-happy, slightly-unhinged Valkyrie. Good thing she has Dear Old Daddy to keep her in check. I guess a bastard man’s always more believable than a cold-hearted bitch.”
Ella grimaced. “You have my sincerest apologies.”
“Fuck your apologies.” Valkyrie pushed off the floor. “Did you think I lied to Random? Did you think I knew his history so I told him some sob story about my father to push all the right buttons and get him invested in my survival?”
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