The Darkness in Dreams (Enforcer's Legacy, #1)(94)

Three’s expression was impassive. “Your description lacks a certain flair.”

“And your actions reveal your total lack of understanding when it comes to human love.”

“Christan has always made his own decisions. He follows a code of honor, and you do him a disservice if you think I can manipulate him to such an extent. He wanted those lifetimes with you and I gave them to him. I manipulated the circumstances, but I also gave him options. He makes his own choices. But you, Gaia, you have surpassed my expectations.”

“In what way?” Lexi asked, oddly detached now that the shock had passed.

“You would do anything to protect him now.”

Lexi shifted her gaze slightly, caught by the sparkle of light reflecting through the windows. The bay had taken on the look of dented metal, and Lexi imagined her heart was as bruised as the water. It hurt, so damn much to realize every painful turn in every repeating lifetime was based upon options to achieve Three’s desired end. The enormity of that realization was crippling.

What had Renata said? “You are a used thing, not even in control of your own choices.”

And Katerina believed her entire life was a lie.

Perhaps that was Christan’s hidden truth, the secret he kept from himself, the sentiment he had tried to put into words when he told her not to hope for happy endings with someone as far from her as he was.

They stood on opposite sides of a moon-shot road with no way to reach across. He’d been tortured because Three needed him bound to a bond in blood he didn’t want. Lexi had taken away his choice as he had taken hers all those centuries ago. Not through love, or need, or even desire, but because human emotions had been exploited by an immortal who needed a weapon to fight a war.

Lexi could see how it played out, lifetime after lifetime. How she and Christan were irrevocably changed. There was nothing she could do to alter that, other than take away the leverage. Most of her life had been spent learning how to take away the leverage that other people had to hurt her. Her mother. Men who were not Christan. This was no different. She could put an end to this cycle that was slowly destroying their lives. Using her. To force Christan. Because Three had wars to fight.

Lexi stared through the windows, saw the boat dock beyond the deck, rising gently on the incoming tide. The clouds that danced like angels on the horizon. The stars she knew were hidden in that deep recess and would only be visible at midnight. She counted them, tears leaking from her heart.

Love, he had said, was for the angels, and he had never been allowed in heaven.

Time thinned out, buried in pain. But perhaps, in the end, the immortal had been right. Lexi would to anything to protect Christan.

“I would like to go home.”

“Back to Florence?”

“To Rock Cove.”

“He will find you there.”

Lexi refocused, directly meeting those strange silver eyes. “Not if you mask my presence.”

“I can certainly mask your energy, if that’s what you want—although you can do that for yourself, now. There were benefits to you, too, with the blood bond.”

“I don’t want them.”

“Unfortunately, they’re irrevocable.” Three folded her slim hands and rested them in her lap. “But I would ask first why you want me to do this.”

“If you must ask,” Lexi said quietly, “then you don’t understand anything.”

Three tapped an elegant finger against her silk-clad knee.

“Two said something to me before she went away. She said that it began with Gaia, and it would end with Gaia. What do you think that meant?”

“I have no idea.”

“You do surprise me,” Three murmured again. “I don’t think this will be the end between you and me.”





CHAPTER 39




Rock Cove, Oregon




Lexi cried for the first two weeks. She hid in her cottage at Rock Cove, tucked high above the churning sea. Arsen had been true to his word. The entire interior had been replaced, and her possessions—those with the most meaning—had been put back into place. But she couldn’t sleep in a new bed that sat against a new wall without thinking about the cat that was still a kitten and had trusted too much. She dragged a blanket and pillow into the empty guest bedroom and curled on the floor.

Eventually her body protested, and Lexi pulled the mattress from the bed. But she remained on the floor because the cottage no longer felt like home. She slept in the dark, ate in the dark, never ventured outside during the rain-filled days. Her entire world alternated between the mattress, where she dreamed, and the couch, where she stared sightlessly through the windows and watched the gray fog as it swallowed the setting sun.

When a month passed and winter began to settle in, someone knocked gently on the door. Lexi refused to answer, but Marge came back every afternoon and quietly knocked, often leaving a bag of groceries, or a container of soup. By the end of week six, Lexi answered the door. Her face was pale. The deep smudges beneath her eyes gave her a haunted look. Marge just held her, wrapped her arms around a waist too thin, shoulders too broken, finally urging her onto the couch where Marge rocked her like a child.

They renewed their cautious relationship of therapist and friend. Lexi regained some weight but not enough. Marge told her to eat more protein, sit outside in the fresh air despite the constant winter storms. Lexi was drawn to the rain, to the wind swirling with electric energy. Her favorite place became the deck, where she wrapped herself in a thick quilt and thought of her childhood, of her mother’s flight to freedom. She thought about her grandmother, how when Lexi was ten they had gone high into the Cascades, spread blankets in a green meadow and stared up at the summer sky.