Blood and Fire (McClouds & Friends #8)(173)

Since you refused to take my calls or respond to my e-mails.

“I’ve been incommunicado,” she said. “Trying to figure out what to do withmyself. Everything is different, now that Howard’s gone. I don’t have to write term papers for pay anymore, thank God. After what happened, I couldn’t stomach any more of that. Whatever I do from now on, it has to be real. Even if I make only a quarter of the money.”

“I hear you,” Bruno said, with feeling. “So you’re going to write papers for yourself, then?”

“I was considering it. I think I’d like academia. Maybe teaching English, or writing, at the high school or college level. We’ll see.”

“You’d be good. Your students will love you and fear you.”

“We’ll see,” she hedged. “Who knows.”

“I know,” he said. “Believe me. I know.”

She flapped her hand at him. “And the adult operatives? Did they ever find the ones who were running around loose?”

Bruno shook his head. “The older kids identified some of them for us, but they’d committed suicide by the time we tracked them down. Probably all of the operatives out in the field did, when they heard about King dying. There’s no way to know for sure.”

She winced. “That’s terrible.”

“Yeah. They were monsters, but they never had a choice.”

Her lips tightened. She waited for a moment before asking the next soft question. “How about your biological brothers and sisters?”

“We found them,” Bruno said quietly. “At least, I assume we have. We can’t be sure until they do genetic testing, and that’ll take time. King told me there were sixteen embryos brought to term, and that Tonio and Lena were the last ones, besides Julian, after all the cullings. If there had been more alive, he would have taunted me with their existence, rather than lying about it. And there were mass graves on the property. Some of the older kids talked about the cullings. They found the graves using infrared aerial photography.”

She winced. “Oh, God, Bruno. I’m so sorry. How awful.”

“Some were more recent. Some were older, corresponding to the info my mother left on those disks that she hid in the jewelry box.”

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered again. “It’s so horrible for you.”

“Yeah, it messes with my head that there were sixteen of my mother’s children alive, and now they’re all murdered. Some by me.”

“Bullshit!” she burst out. “You never murdered any of those people! They were trying to rip you to pieces! And me, too!”

He was taken aback. “What, defending me now? I thought you hated my guts.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Lily jerked her hand away. “I just know a self-pitying, masturbatory load of shit when I hear one!” She wound her arms across her chest, which did awesome things to her lush cleavage.

He dragged his eyes from her tits. “That’s intense.”

“Oh, you have no idea,” she told him.

He contemplated the hot buzz in the air between them. The glow of heat. Of hope. It took a long time to work up the nerve to risk it.

“Then you still have feelings for me,” he ventured, quietly.

Lily’s face contracted. She took a step back. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice choked. “It was a mistake to come here.”

He headed her off at the door. “No. Please, Lily. Let me talk.”

“It’s not going to work.” Her voice shook. “It doesn’t matter what my feelings are. It doesn’t matter.”

He reached behind to the knob and clicked the lock shut. Maneuvered her back into the room, setting her into the chair.

“There’s no point in going over this.” The words burst out of her. “You didn’t trust me when things got bad. And in my experience, things get bad a lot. If we don’t have trust, we don’t have anything.”

He sank down in front of her. “I know. But listen to me.”

“I can’t face that again. I couldn’t survive another—”

“Listen!” he broke in. “I’m begging, Lily. On my knees. For you to just listen to me for a second. OK?”

She nodded, swiping angrily at the tears rolling down her face.

“It does matter, what your feelings are,” he said. “And this is why. Remember that first conversation we had, in the diner? I offered to kick asses for you? And you said, ‘you are my champion. ’”

“Yes.” She wouldn’t meet his eyes.

“King told me that phrase triggered my programming,” he said. “Later on, Seth and Con and Davy went through the diner, and they found remote-activated sound gulpers attached to every table. He had a record of our conversation, Lily. That’s where he got that phrase.”

“So?” She opened her eyes, glassy and glittering.

“So? My error was in assuming that it was impossible that we could have been overheard in the diner. If we weren’t, then there was no other way he could have known that phrase.”

She shrugged. “I fail to see how it changes anything. You were wrong. Why does it matter what the reason for your wrongness was?”

His scarred knuckles turned white. “What matters is how I felt about it,” he said. “It blew my mind. That I could know for a fact that you were one of his, and still love you. Still be willing to die for you.”