Kept (26 page)

Nick looked toward the tree, then his gaze shifted to his hands. “I was wondering when you’d figure everything out.”

“Did you plan to ever tell me?” There was no anger in my voice—only concern that things had progressed to this point. I should be used to Nick hiding things from me. But the whole life-force-draining thing was something else entirely. It was on the level of hey-I-should-tell-you-I-used-you-and-you-almost-died kind of thing.

Here we were, having a quiet dinner between friends, but after what had happened in Maine, could we move on to a
real
relationship? One where we walked hand in hand down the street, among other wary shape-shifters who avoided wizards? One where I took him home to meet my parents? And finally, could I ever trust him again?

Nick spoke first. “To be honest, I’d hoped I’d never need to tell you, since I didn’t want to lose you. I don’t want to. I am sincerely sorry.”

My heart dropped, and my voice quivered when I said, “Would you do it again? If we were in the same situation?”

“To save the life of the woman I care deeply for, I’d do it even if she’d never want to see me again.”

I didn’t look at him, but I knew he gazed at me with an expression in his eyes I couldn’t run away from.

“Things would be difficult for us,” I managed to say. “Especially with the way things are between our people.”

Nick offered a bitter snort. “Not all wizards and warlocks are bad, Nat. A few rotten apples on the tree shouldn’t spoil the whole bunch. Has what people said about you stopped you from doing what you wanted? I never took you for a person who only saw someone’s race, instead of who they truly are.”

“You know I’m not that way.”

“Then stop giving me excuses. If you don’t want to be with me, then cool, but don’t tell me we can’t be together because you’re a werewolf and I’m a wizard. You and I know very well what’s between us right now.”

I was quiet for a while, then finally replied. My fingers ran back and forth over the ornament while I tried to find the word he’d pushed me to say. “Thorn.”

He smiled briefly, and then his shoulders sagged a bit. “I’m not blind. I know you still think about him. But the way I see it, if he’s marrying someone else, then all you need is time to forgive me for what happened back in Maine. And I’m the kind of man who has all the time in the world. Whether you need me as a friend—or something more.”

Damn
. I thought he’d say more to press the matter—maybe even fight me a little, like a wolf would, but he simply sat next to me on his couch, humming lightly under his breath while Miles Davis’s jazz trumpet played a lonely song on the radio. Miles’s music had been a part of my past with Thorn. A past I’d never recapture. Every haunting note was pure torture.

I set the crystal wolf on the coffee table. My hands were far too shaky. My heart tore. Ripped over potentially hurting Nick, angry I couldn’t let Thorn go.

Five days. I just needed to make it five more days. Then I’d stop holding out the hope that Thorn could be mine.

Chapter 21

A
fter
such a rough evening with Nick, I hadn’t expected to come home to find Thorn waiting for me.

“I thought you’d be home.” He sat on the bench on my back porch.

“I was out for the evening.”

“I know. I can smell the wizard all over you.”

I didn’t have any other seats on the porch except for the single bench so I had to sit next to him. On the farthest side anyway. As much as I wanted to be next to him, I didn’t feel strong enough to be seated beside him. The words I said next surprised even me. “What I do with Nick is none of your business. Whether he rubbed himself all over me or I rubbed his shirts all over my face is my affair.”

We’d done
none
of that, but why not let Thorn feel a bit jealous?

He didn’t respond for some time. Long enough for the cold to seep into my coat. What made things even worse was I didn’t detect anger or any other emotions. Just his stone face staring at mine.

“You’re right. I don’t have a say in whether you see him or not. But you can’t stop me from wanting to protect you.”

“That’s another thing. I’m rather happy right now that your fiancée hasn’t stalked me since we don’t see
each other anymore. Especially since she threatened to knock me on my ass a few months ago. You’re pretty much handing me an Erica-should-kick-my-ass card with your little visit tonight.”

Thorn leaned forward and sighed. “When will you get it through your head that I don’t care about what she thinks about us?”

“You’re here. We’re alone. Her imagination could go nuts coming up with the array of sexual positions we’re plotting on this porch.”

Thorn grunted and stood to lean against the wall. “Is that better?”

It didn’t make a damn difference. I could practically smell his skin—enough to feed my imagination. Feed it with thoughts of running my nose from his neck down to his chest. My tongue wanted to take the same path.
Good Lord. How the hell did my mind go there so fast?

“It doesn’t matter.” I looked away from him to focus on the forest behind my house. “The point is that I’m moving on with my life. You
left
five years ago, and now that you’re back, I can’t assume anymore that we’d have a chance.”

“Just because we can’t be together doesn’t mean I can stop caring about you.”

I harrumphed. “After you left I didn’t expect as much.”

“I’ve only given what I have to give.”

Which should’ve been everything, but couldn’t be.

He sighed. “Right now it feels like you’ve already left me behind to start something new.”

“I’ve left? You left me a long time ago when you ran away in the
first
place. Better yet, you seem to have easily forgotten that I’m not the one who left this town. You ran away from
me
. Not the other way around.”

His face tightened, but he waited for me to finish.

“You could’ve come back, but you didn’t. You had a
chance to be with me, but you chose another life. Which was rather shitty of you, by the way.”

“I already apologized for that. I can’t say sorry enough.”

“No, you can’t.”

“You also don’t know the whole story.” He sat beside me. Close enough for me to feel uncomfortable.

“I don’t need to know, since the memory pretty much stabs me repeatedly in the brain stem every time I think about how a guy—who I thought loved me—could just leave, and then stay away for five years.”

“I did run away, but—”

“After you left, I had to pick up the pieces of my life, which I still think are pretty much scattered up and down the Parkway.”

He blurted out, “Can I speak for a minute?”

Blathering helped me focus on anything except for having to deal with what I faced right now. Everything between us had fallen apart way too quickly.

“When I left, I had every intention of leaving New Jersey and not coming back,” Thorn said. “My dad had made plans for me for years. And I’m not just talking about marriage. He wanted me to be the pack leader after him. That maybe I’d build up the pack to become bigger and stronger than it was now. While we were in college, my father had accrued monetary debts for the sake of the pack. And only the Holdens could save us from losing valuable pack land.

“When I graduated, I thought he’d consider another successor. Maybe one of his right-hand men. My brother wasn’t ready, but there were plenty of prospects. I at least expected Rex to be one of them, but he’d chosen me instead.” He frowned bitterly from the memory.

“Most men would step up to the challenge and do what they had to do. For a while there, I was ready to give my all. Wasn’t I the son of the alpha? But then I
learned I had another obligation. I also had to marry a woman I didn’t love. Through Erica I had to sire the son her father had always wanted.” His voice grew more and more quiet. “At first I flat-out told him no. Especially since I’d have to break your heart. Here I was—with my family honor and the Code on one side, and on the other was you. My father told me that perhaps he should make you disappear if I couldn’t make the
right
choice—”

“So you left,” I interjected.

“To protect you, I left.”

“Why didn’t you tell me all of this a few months ago when you came back?”

“Would it have taken away the pain you felt?”

I shook my head.

“I tried to
immediately
come back. I
knew
I was wrong, so I packed up my things and I prepared to return … but I ran into trouble.”

I turned away from the view that had held me steady to look at his profile. How many times had I wished I could be sitting next to him like this?

“Trouble for five years?” I whispered.

“The kind of trouble where I moved every mountain to get back home—but someone else didn’t see things the way I did.”

“What happened to you?”

“Do you remember the night of the battle? The night when Luther stabbed me?”

I nodded. Who the hell could forget when a madman stabs someone else three times in the chest?

“I’d used old magic that night. Old magic I’d learned from another werewolf.”

“But—”

“Let me finish.” He sighed. “For the longest time, I’d always been fascinated with it. Studied it. But because of the Code, I kept the knowledge to myself. Not long after
I’d arrived in San Diego, I learned of a woman who was willing to teach old magic. I saw it as an opportunity to satisfy my curiosity. It was a big mistake. Mira taught me a bunch of dime-store tricks, but never told me about the consequences for werewolves practicing magic. Even worse, she’d only used me to get her former warlock lover jealous.”

I licked my lips. I had a question bubbling in my mind and if I thought about it too much, I’d never get up the nerve to ask. “Did you sleep with her?”

He touched my knee briefly. Only rubbed his fingertips along the curve. “No. I’d never do something like that willingly. Although she offered, I still belonged to you.

“In the meantime, her former boyfriend got jealous. When he caught sight of me, his only plans were to use me for his own magic.” Thorn’s voice roughened. “I almost got away. It was the fight of a lifetime, but I was no match for him. And he knew it. For five fucking years he held me captive. When he wasn’t gloating, he used me for his best spells.”

I took his hand. When I tightened my grip, he didn’t respond.

“But I had the upper hand. I wasn’t some dumb rogue who circled its cage waiting for a split-second opportunity to attack. I learned from him to figure out his weaknesses. Wizards and warlocks might not play with the same kind of magic, but they sure as hell both draw their energy from the same source: me. If I waited for the right opportunity, I could use myself and apply what Mira had taught me.

“By the time I’d entered my fourth year, I was plenty ready to play. You’d be surprised how easy it is to go stir-crazy in a cage. When all you have are your memories and time to recite the old magic spells. Spellcasters believe that since werewolves follow the Code, they
have an advantage over us. But we’re the ones with the power. We
are
a source. When I killed him, I showed him just how powerful that source could be.”

“But at what price?” I whispered.

“Everything has a price, Nat. But to escape servitude, I thought the price was worth it.”

The cold crept deeper into me, and I clutched his hand tight enough to hurt him. What had he done? “What are you saying?”

With his other hand he brushed his fingers through a few strands of my hair. “There are some spells you shouldn’t whisper in the wind. Very black ones. On that day, I invoked a death spell, and its poison entered my system.”

I sucked in a breath and then couldn’t breathe anymore. Everything in me clenched. He kept going. I wanted him to stop. I didn’t want to hear what he had to say next.

“Black magic doesn’t affect warlocks like it does werewolves. They play with it differently since they aren’t the source, merely a conduit of its power. I learned from Mira that once a wand or staff is blackened, it’s tainted. Once its magic is used again, it won’t be of use anymore.”

The pain in my chest expanded further. Driving a knife of agony into my brain as it begged for air. The wolf in me whined, and then forced me to suck in air. But the inhalation resulted in an exhale of anguish. Anguish in knowing that to save my life, Thorn had sealed his own doom by using old magic to win his fight with Luther.

I saw the scene again and again. The knife in Thorn’s chest. The chanting. The rising blade. The sealing flesh. All of it was a mistake.
For me
.

“You shouldn’t have saved me,” I managed.

Thorn picked me up and cradled me in his arms. The
heat of his skin warmed me. Not from magic, from his body. “After what I’ve done to you, it was worth it.”

For a while I sat there. For how long, I wasn’t sure. All I knew was sitting here with him felt
right
.

“What’s going to happen to you?” I finally asked.

“I’m not sure. All I do know is that I’m not as strong as I used to be. And not as fast. Maybe in five years I’ll be dead. Maybe less.” He shrugged. “But we all can’t live forever, can we?”

I detected his smile. Nevertheless, my heart broke.

He shifted me slightly. Enough for his face to look down on mine. He stared at me, but I couldn’t look at him. I couldn’t face him when I felt like everything was collapsing all around me. When I didn’t glance at him, he leaned forward to rub his lips against mine. Not a real kiss, but a touch, one that made my belly quiver in anticipation of something I’d
never
have again. Something I wasn’t worthy of having.

A few agonizing seconds later, he turned to look at the woods again. We settled into the silence and didn’t speak anymore.

What was there to say? Things could’ve played out differently. He could’ve asked me to leave with him. But would I have left my dream job in New York City for him? My hearts says yes now, but what about five years ago—when I’d been more confident and happy? The scenarios rolled through my mind, but none of them brought me comfort.