High Voltage (Fever #10)(78)
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I shivered as I picked my way up crumbling, dusty stone stairs. During a hasty meal of cheese and bread, Christian had told me a bit more about Sean, concluding with directions on how to find him. He felt it best I approach alone, as Sean could feel Christian as he drew near and grew even angrier. Then the bloody clouds consume the entire castle, inside and out, he’d told me. It’s not pleasant.
As I’d wandered the eccentric keep, crammed with towering stacks of ancient books and manuscripts, chests and bottles, Ryodan had texted repeatedly and I texted back, answering his questions about Dani, wanting desperately to call him and find out what was going on. But I had my own battle here, and from what Christian had told me, it was going to be a difficult if not terrifying one.
I paused to catch my breath before topping the last few rounds of the spiraling stone staircase. Sean had retreated to the ruined part of the castle, the far tower where, Christian told me, he was wont to loom, a brooding dark shadow, staring out over the sea.
Unlike the rest of the castle, which Christian kept toasty warm somehow, it was freezing here. I tugged the woolen throw Christian had given me more snugly around my shoulders as I finished my climb.
Then only a door remained between me and Sean.
Two long years plus change had passed since I’d last seen him.
I paused again and closed my eyes as Ryodan’s words from long ago floated up in my mind. Words I hadn’t heeded, and suddenly I was back in his office of glass, staring down at Sean, and Ryodan was saying, If you don’t tell Sean that Cruce is fucking you while you sleep, it will destroy what you have with him more certainly than any job in my club could. That, down there, he’d pointed to Sean serving a drink to a pretty, nearly naked Seelie, is a bump in the road, a test of temptation and fidelity. If your Sean loves you, he will pass it with flying colors. Cruce is a test of your fucking soul.
He’d also said: Your god may love soul mates but man does not. Such a couple is vulnerable, particularly if they are fool enough to let the world see how shiny and happy they are. Their risk rises tenfold during times of war. There are two courses a couple in such circumstances can chart: Go deep into the country and hide as far from humanity as possible, hoping like hell nobody finds them. Because the world will tear them apart. Or sink up to their necks in the stench and filth and corruption of their war-torn existence. See things for what they are. Drop your blinders and raise the sewer to eye level; admit you’re swimming in shit. If you don’t acknowledge the turd hurtling down the drain toward you, you can’t dodge it. You have to face every challenge together. Because the world will tear you apart.
Right on both counts, Ryodan, I thought with a sad smile. I should have listened. But I’d been ashamed. Afraid. It had been utterly against my will, but I’d enjoyed it. What does a woman do with that? I’d told myself over the years that it wasn’t my fault. I’d been used at the hands of the most powerful Fae prince in existence, who could make me think I was feeling anything. Still…the shame. I’d never wanted another man inside me but Sean. Yet I’d hungered for Cruce in a way I’d never hungered for Sean. Even if that was an illusion he’d forced upon me, I could still taste the memory of it. And I hated Cruce for that!
I knew why Sean was angry. I knew why he was bitter. We know each other’s every gesture, every twitch, pain, fear, hope, and dream. A deception lived and breathed between us, and it had taken on a dark, rapacious life of its own. If I was to have any hope at all of helping him become the man I believed he could be, he wasn’t the only one that needed to face his demons today.
Inhaling sharply, I squared my shoulders and pushed open the door, praying there was validity to the adage “and the truth will set you free.”
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“Why have you come, Kat?” Sean said in a low, angry voice, without turning.
He stood on the far side of the circular stone chamber, framed in a tall, narrow opening cut into the stone, the wind gusting waist-length black hair around his body, ruffling the feathers of enormous raven wings. “Leave. Now. There’s nothing for you here.”
If I’d not seen Christian first, and felt his heart, Sean would have terrified me. My love was once a handsome, rugged fisherman, toiling on the ocean, having turned his muscled-from-pulling-nets-all-day back on the mighty, deadly O’Bannion clan. With his black hair, dark eyes, and quick, easy smiles, I’d learned to trust him in that frightened, wide-open state in which I’d spent my earliest years. Of all the people I’d met, his had been the only heart that rang true to me, void of complicity.
Despite his appearance, nearly identical to Christian and Cruce, he didn’t frighten me now. I could feel him, I was close enough. He was lost within, drifting in a land far more barren and wasted than what spread, so ugly and black, beyond these castle walls. His sociopathic cousin Rocky O’Bannion’s credo, inscribed on the back of a watch of gold and diamonds he always wore, had been: Isolate the mark. He’d sworn that every man and woman, regardless of education, pedigree, or wealth, would ultimately fall prey to it; that we couldn’t stand alone. Yet Sean had been perched in dangerous isolation for two years and hadn’t succumbed. That gave me hope. “I disagree,” I said, moving farther into the icy room. “You’re here.”