The Darkness in Dreams (Enforcer's Legacy, #1)(50)

“I was wrong last night. I shouldn’t have done what I did and I have no excuse.”

Lexi was trying hard to be resilient. She looked vulnerable, defensive. Christan dragged his thumb along the memory line that curved around her forefinger. If she was aware of what he was doing, connecting through the line, she didn’t pull her hand away.

“Will you tell me about the dreams?” Christan hadn’t asked about the dreams before, wasn’t sure he wanted to know. Now it seemed important.

After a moment, Lexi said, “Dreams like the Gabrielle dream feel real, where I’m experiencing and not dreaming. They’re long, or at least the experience has a distinct element of time passing.” She glanced at the memory line he was still stroking. Hesitated. “I dreamed about a girl named Gaia, too.”

His hand tightened around her fingers. “Do you dream anything else?”

“The ones Marge calls night terrors, violent beyond description.”

“Try.”

Christan heard the steel in his voice. The pulse began to beat in her throat like a wild bird, and he wanted to pull her into his arms. Didn’t understand the complex demands that pressed in on him. Finally, she sucked in a shuddering breath.

“It’s a dirty, icy city. I’m holding the hand of a little boy. We’ve reached the corner where there’s so much snow we can’t walk side by side. I tell him to step into the street ahead of me. He’s dancing the way kids do, with a snowball in his hand. I’m thinking how much I love him when the truck comes around a corner. It doesn’t stop. Doesn’t swerve. Just runs over him while I watch. His arms and legs jerk up. It looks like he’s hugging the tire and it feels like my heart is being ripped out.”

Christan was staring at a point on the wall. Lexi pulled her hands away and said, “I’ve learned not to think about those dreams.”

Her body was tense and trembling. He saw it in her hands, and the way she still wouldn’t look at him. Christan stood abruptly, prowled toward the window, staring out.

“The dream about the boy,” he said without looking at her. “It wasn’t real.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know your entire existence, in every lifetime.” He twisted around. “Even in the Void, I knew where you were, what you did.”

Her face paled. “In how much detail?”

“You were never in a place that was cold. There was never a little boy who danced in the snow. It did not happen,” he enunciated with deadly calm, the immortal Enforcer who was both judge and executioner.

“Then why would I dream it?”

“To terrify you.” Torture you.

Christan rolled his shoulders and tried to explain. Marge had suggested it first. The rest came from Ethan’s reports, after the San Francisco warrior had analyzed the meditation app on Lexi’s phone. There was a subliminal suggestion that worked like hacking techniques. Probe for weak points. Apply pressure. Find the vulnerability and then exploit it. The purpose became obvious. Night terrors—through the sheer fear they generated—weakened the thin wall in the human mind. They broke through the natural defenses separating the past from the present, allowing the memories to bleed through.

But Christan wasn’t finished. Marge’s theory came next, and she’d described her own night terrors as short and sharp. They were knives, Marge had said, stabbing in the dark, preventing sleep until pure exhaustion took its toll. Then the past life dreams would start. They were different, unfolding with languorous detail so rich the dreamer tasted the food on her tongue, warmed to the sun on her face. Ached with desire.

“And once the memory lines appear,” Christan said, “the girls remember fragments, until...” The rest remained unfinished. Lexi rubbed a finger across her wrist.

“Were you around for Gabrielle?”

“She lived in France. I wasn’t there.”

“But Gaia?”

Christan felt the memory like a stone on his heart. “Our first life.”

“We were happy?” Lexi asked after a strained moment.

“We were.”

“But you left.”

“I did.”

The pain in her eyes was a fading sun that drew him, and gently, he walked toward her, urged her to her feet and enclosed her within the warmth of his arms. Lexi shuddered when he dragged his broad palm over her hair. After a moment, he pushed his fingers through the strands, untangling and smoothing them around her shoulders.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“I need you to tell me why,” she whispered.

“I know you do. But… I can’t.”

His moods were razor-sharp since he’d come back from the Void. But he couldn’t tell her how, in his selfishness, he had condemned her to lifetimes filled with pain. Not yet. Not when she didn’t understand enough to forgive him. Once, he thought this woman understood the man he was, but now he overwhelmed her even when he wasn’t trying; it was a loss of something he could never recover. He stepped back, withdrew to a place where he knew she couldn’t reach him, felt the visceral loss of connection.

She stepped back, too; the air in the room seemed to diminish. “Where does that leave us?”

“I don’t want you in Florence,” he said.

“I don’t need your permission.”