The Thief (Black Dagger Brotherhood #16)(14)

As always, his twin was content not to speak.





SEVEN


Abruptly, Vishous looked up as he sensed Jane’s presence. There, he thought, there in the darkness, in the cold wind, she had come.

He jumped off his rack, his heart beating hard. Without setting eyes on her, he sensed her emotions—and knew she had found out somehow.

“Jane,” he barked as he strode over the bare floor.

Out on the terrace, she was in her ghost form, nothing but an indistinct hologram of herself in her white coat, scrubs, and her Crocs. With her blond hair and her wide, dark green eyes, she was at once achingly familiar…and something from a different, earlier incarnation of his life.

When did this separation happen to us, he wondered.

“What have you done,” she said in a low voice.

Raw pain, the kind that threatened his balance, lit off in his chest. “I didn’t fuck her. I didn’t touch her.”

“Why…” She put a hand over her mouth. Then dropped it. “Vishous, why?”

As a gust tore through the empty space between them, he heard himself say, “I don’t know.”

“You don’t…you don’t know?” As her anger started to come out, her brows dropped low, her hard stare the sort of thing he accepted like a dagger to his chest that he’d well earned. “You meet another woman—female, whatever she is—behind my back and you don’t know why you did it? You’re the smartest person I have ever met, and even dumb people know why they cheat.”

Vishous shook his head. “I didn’t cheat.”

“Where’s your shirt.”

“I didn’t mean for this to happen—”

“You most certainly did. You asked Fritz to bring liquor here, and someone else clearly showed up.”

“I told you, I didn’t touch her—”

“Bullshit! And please spare me the denials. I won’t believe you. Why should I”—she pointed to all the glowing candles—“when I get to have this lovely picture in my mind for the rest of my life? So romantic, Vishous. I hope she was properly impressed—”

“You left us.”

Jane recoiled and then glared at him. “Excuse me?”

“You left me even though you didn’t go anywhere.”

“What the hell are you saying,” she snapped.

“I never see you. We are never together. You are more worried about your patients than—”

“Wait.” She put her palm into his face. “Are you seriously spinning what you just did like it is my fault? Oh, grow up—”

V’s voice exploded out of chest. “After the warehouse fight, I was all fucked up in your clinic with a head injury and you told me you would be back! You were going to get medication for me—but as you walked out the door of my patient room, you know what I said to myself? She’s not going to come—”

“I sat beside you while you were unconscious! For two hours!”

“—back, and you didn’t.”

“You checked yourself out AMA! When I returned, Ehlena said you’d left!”

The two of them were leaning toward each other, screaming into the wind, faces contorted, fists clenched—and in the back of his mind, he felt a sadness that this was what they had come down to: Betrayal. Hurt. Anger. It was the flip side to everything that he had thought they had. Everything he thought they were.

This was the kind of argument that wiped all the good parts away, he thought. Permanently.

Jane slashed her hand through the cold air that neither of them paid any attention to. “I took excellent care of you—”

“How long,” he ground out.

“What?”

“How long until you ended up back in my patient room.” When she looked away and crossed her arms over her chest, he nodded. “An hour, right. Maybe longer. And while you were sitting at my hospital bed, while I was out cold, were you giving orders to Ehlena? Consulting with Manny? Tell me, how many patients did you manage to triage or treat during those two hours when you were supposedly taking care of me.”

Her forest-green eyes shot back to him. “Don’t you dare deflect this onto me. I wasn’t the one making a date with someone else.”

“What I did was wrong, I admit it. But I didn’t follow through on it. I couldn’t. And even though that’s no excuse—”

“Damn right it’s no excuse! You’re a liar now. You’re a liar forever to me—”

Without warning, a truth came out of him. “My mother is dead. Have you noticed that? Have you stopped to think about that at all?”

She was momentarily nonplussed. “What does the Scribe Virgin have to do with this?”

Vishous shook his head slowly. “You never once asked me how I felt. You never even asked me how I found out she was gone.”

Jane looked away again. Swung her eyes back. “I didn’t think it bothered you. You kept going like it was nothing. You hated her.”

“You never asked, is the point.”

Jane rubbed her face with what looked like exasperation, scrubbing, scrubbing. “Vishous, listen, you are not the easiest person to read, and you don’t do emotions. It’s like you’re blaming me for one of your core characteristics. How was I supposed to know—”