Lover Arisen (Black Dagger Brotherhood #20)(104)

And that was when the snap happened.

She just broke in half. It was as if the composure she had maintained was a hard shell, and with enough force exerted on it, it lost its structural integrity—and what was inside, all the horror and regret, the poisonous self-hatred, everything so pressurized, just exploded.

Strong arms wrapped around her, and she went with them as they brought her against a broad chest.

Erika cried so hard, she made no sound, could draw no air, lost track of everything.

Even herself.

But she knew who was holding her. That, she remained clear on.



* * *



All Balthazar could do was hold on to his female. As she released her pain, he reflected that the secrets buried by shame were always the most poisonous ones, and the destruction they wrought was the insidious kind, under the surface and mostly hidden.

And he was honored that he was the one she’d chosen to reveal herself to.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered against her hair as he stroked her back. “Oh, God… I’m so sorry.”

To be that young, that innocent… and to have your childhood ripped away from you by that sort of violence. He had been through a lot in his life, but nothing that came close to what Erika had endured.

That she had gone into homicide made sense. She was trying to do right by others like her family. But he also knew that she never got away from death; it no doubt haunted her at night as well as stalked her during the daylight hours at her job. She had not healed over the last fourteen years; she was stewing in tragedy.

Although could anyone really heal from something like that?

With a push against his pecs, she moved away from him. “Will you excuse me for a minute?”

She was steady on her feet as she walked over to the utility bathroom, and when she closed the door, he rubbed his face with his hands.

There was the sound of water rushing—for a while. Then a toilet flushing. Then more with the water. When she emerged, she carried a pleasant scent with her as she wiped her hands on a paper towel, which she pushed into her robe’s pocket.

He expected her to make a pronouncement that that was done. She wasn’t talking about it ever again. But she didn’t.

She came directly over to him, standing tall and much more composed, even though her face was red and her eyes bloodshot.

Her hands were steady as she went to the tie around her waist, and when she removed the robe from her shoulders, she just let it drop to the floor. The t-shirt underneath was a fresh one of the same kind she’d had on throughout the night, plain, white and loose, the creases from it having been folded while warm from the laundry making a pattern down the front.

She lifted it slowly, the hem going up over her belly, her ribs…

Her breasts were beautiful to him, her nipples peaked from the chill—

And there were the scars.

He closed his eyes briefly. Then focused on the healed wounds.

She had been stabbed repeatedly by a right-handed assailant, the wrinkled and knobby pattern located under her left collarbone. He was well familiar with those kinds of injuries and he knew she had to have been penetrated by a blade at least ten times, because there were satellite punctures around the main impact zone.

Her hand lifted, and as she ran her fingertips over the uneven texture, he had a feeling she did that a lot.

“I can’t fix it, you know,” she said in an absent way. “I mean, plastic surgery won’t really make it go away.”

“Why would you?” When she recoiled, as if he’d shocked her, he shook his head. “The scars are not ugly. They don’t detract from how beautiful you are. And what happened is always on your mind anyway. Besides, you probably needed surgery afterward. A couple of times. You’re done with operations, aren’t you.”

She nodded, as if in a daze. “I can’t make it go away just by… you know, trying to get rid of this.”

“We can’t run from our pasts. We shouldn’t even try.”

There was a long silence, and he worried that he’d said the wrong thing. Maybe he needed to—

“Thank you,” she said softly.

Now it was his time to be surprised. “For what?”

“You’re so… accepting.”

I love you, he thought to himself.

“But you’ve been in war, haven’t you,” she said. “This is… what you’ve seen before.”

“It’s true. It’s a part of life. I don’t want you to have gone through what you did. I hate it. I fucking hate it—and if that asshole weren’t under the ground already, I would hunt him down and bring him back to you in pieces. I would ahvenge you and your dead to honor you and your parents. I would see that it was done in the proper way, in the painful way. I would have him suffer under my bare hands and breathe in the smell of his blood and the stink of his cowardly fear.”

He had to stop himself before he got too far into all that. And then he bowed to her from his sitting position on her blue couch.

“Verily, it would be my honor to ahvenge you and your bloodline.”

When he looked back up, she had put both her hands over her mouth and her eyes were shining.

He couldn’t tell whether he had offended her or scared her or—

Erika came forward, came to him. And as she dropped her hands, she whispered, “No one’s ever said that to me before.”