Steal the Night (Thieves #5)(96)

“I won’t hide in a corner somewhere when I could help him,” I said firmly, but some of what Neil was saying was finding little cracks in my armor. I didn’t like the feeling one bit.

“I’m not telling you not to fight for him.” Neil sighed, his anger spent. “I’m just asking you to be reasonable. Let him go into this surgery, or whatever the hell this is, believing you’ll do what he needs you to do, even if you have to lie to him. Let him concentrate on surviving instead of seeing what will happen when he dies and you do something insane to try to avenge him. He would rather you were happy with Dev somewhere. It’s all he wants. It’s why he does everything he’s done. It was all so you could be safe and happy. Give him this.”

I was crying by the time Neil finished and feeling no small bit of shame. I never meant to fight Daniel. I meant to fight for him, for us. Neil stared at me intently, as if waiting for me to explode, but I wasn’t mad at Neil. I was mad as hell at me. I’d always thought Daniel didn’t trust me to be strong enough to sacrifice for him and he was right. I wasn’t even willing to sacrifice this for him. He had all the responsibilities of a king, all the trouble and pain that went along with the weight of the world on his shoulders, but his own wife wouldn’t sacrifice an inch of her pride for his peace of mind.

I leaned over and kissed Neil on the cheek before making my way to where Daniel sat patiently. He looked up and I saw the fear on his face before it gave way to a tired acceptance of what he thought was about to happen. He thought I was coming over to give him hell about what Lee had just told me. His jaw firmed and he got ready to play the bad guy because that was the position I put him in over and over again.

I sank down onto his lap and rested my head into the curve of his neck. He’d taken off both his jackets and his ruined T-shirt to let Myrddin take a look at his chest, and he was sitting around in jeans and his boots. I let my hands find his cool skin and my cheek press against the swell of his shoulder muscles.

“Z?” Daniel’s hands curled around my waist, pulling me in close.

“I’m scared, Danny.” If he was comforting me, helping me face my fear, he didn’t have to dwell on his.

“Baby,” he sighed into my ear. His hand cupped my cheek and he kissed me sweetly. “It’s going to be all right.”

“We don’t know that.” For the first time in a long time, I just let my fear hang out. Too often I shoved the fear down and let anger be my primary emotion but Neil was right. There wasn’t a place for anger here.

“We have to believe it, Z,” Daniel said firmly and I could sense a shift in him. He already seemed stronger, more confident. He always rose to the occasion when I needed him to. He’d never once let me down.

“Lee told me what you want us to do,” I said quietly.

His whole body tensed beneath me. “Zoey…”

“I’m not fighting you, Danny,” I said. “I just want you to be sure when you give the order. I’ll go and I won’t fight Lee or Neil. I promise. You just promise me that you won’t give that order unless you’re damn sure.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes, Danny.” I couldn’t blame him for being suspicious. I’d pulled some crazy stunts in my time. “I promise you, if things go to hell, I’ll run as fast as Lee’s legs will take us and I’ll hide in the sithein. I’ll understand that if there is any way for you to survive that you’ll come for us. If you don’t come for us…”

“Then I didn’t survive and you can’t come back, Z,” Daniel finished for me.

“My dad…” I started because I couldn’t stand the thought of my dad not knowing what happened to me. He would go looking and he would get in trouble.

“What do you think we talked about that night we called Stewart?” Daniel asked. “We talked about what we would do. He knows if I don’t contact him that things have gone bad. Dev drew out a map to the sithein. He’ll be welcome and so will Sarah and Felix, if they choose to come. I think they will because if I don’t win and they have a girl…”

“Given Felix’s DNA, she’ll almost surely be a companion.” A deep fear lodged in the pit of my stomach. Sarah was known in the vampire world. Someone would be watching. I couldn’t stand the thought of her losing her baby girl to a vampire. I was glad that, according to Oliver Day, Felix’s brother and my guardian angel, I was supposed to have twin boys. I didn’t want to worry about my daughter being sold at auction. It struck me then that if Daniel didn’t win, I really wouldn’t be able to come home. I would live in a sithein and raise my family there. I would live and grow old and die there.

“Z,” Daniel said and I could feel his heart ache. “I wish I’d never started this. I should have done what Marini wanted me to do. I should have taken you as my companion and been his Nex Apparatus. I could have hidden you from him. As long as I did what he wanted me to do, he would have left you alone.”

“Danny, you can’t think like that,” I replied, trying to banish the pain I felt at never going home again. “He was never going to let you be. He would always have found a way to get a look at me, and once he did, his path would have been set. Don’t look back. We just move forward.”

“And we’re having this morbid conversation because?” Dev asked, looking down at us. He carried a sack filled to the brim with all sorts of greenery.