Lover Mine (46 page)

Shit. What a mess.

As the sound of the treadmill got cut off abruptly, she was willing to bet Blaylock had pulled the cord out of the wall, and good for him if he had. She’d tried to get John to stop pulling a death-by-Nike, but when reasoning with him had gotten her absolutely nowhere, she’d taken up sentry duty out here.

No way she could watch him run himself into the ground. Listening to the punishment was bad enough.

Down the hall, the glass door to the office swung open and the Brother Tohrment appeared. Given the glow that emanated from behind him, Lassiter had come into the training center as well, but the fallen angel hung back.

“How is John?” As the Brother he walked over, his concern was in his hard face and his tired eyes, and also in his grid, which was lit up in the regret sectors.

Made sense on a lot of levels.

Xhex glanced at the weight room door. “Appears to have rethought a career change to marathoner. Either that or he just killed another treadmill.”

Tohr’s towering height forced her to tilt her head up, and it was a surprise to see what was behind his blue eyes: There was knowledge in his stare, deep knowledge that made her own emotional circuits fire with suspicion. In her experience, strangers who looked at you like that were dangerous.

“How are you?” he asked softly.

It was strange; she hadn’t had a lot of contact with the Brother, but whenever their paths had crossed, he’d always been particularly . . . well, kind. Which was why she always avoided him. She dealt much better with toughness than she did with anything tender.

Frankly he made her jumpy.

As she stayed quiet, his face tightened as if she’d disappointed him but he didn’t blame her for the shortfall. “Okay,” he said. “I won’t pry.”

Jesus, she was a bitch. “No, it’s all right. You just really don’t want me to answer that right now.”

“Fair enough.” His eyes narrowed on the weight room door and she got the distinct impression he was trapped outside of it as much as she was, shut down by the male who was suffering on the other side. “So you called up to the kitchen to get me?”

She took out the key John had used to let them into the guy’s former house. “Just wanted to give this back to you and tell you there was a problem.”

The Brother’s emotional grid went black and vacant, everything lights-out. “What kind of problem?”

“One of your sliding glass doors is broken. It’s going to need a couple of sheets of plywood to cover it up. We were able to reengage the security alarm so the motion detectors inside are on, but you’ve got a hell of a draft. I’ll be happy to fix it today.”

Assuming John either finished off the rest of the exercise machines, ran out of running shoes, or fell over in a dead heap.

“Which . . .” Tohr cleared his throat. “Which door?”

“The one in John Matthew’s room.”

The Brother frowned. “Was it broken when you got there?”

“No . . . it just spontaneously busted.”

“Glass doesn’t do that without a good reason.”

And hadn’t she given John Matthew one. “True enough.”

Tohr stared at her and she looked right back at him and the silence grew thick as mud. The thing was, though, as nice a guy and as good a soldier as the Brother was, she had nothing to share with him.

“Who do I talk to about getting some plywood,” she prompted.

“Don’t worry about it. And thanks for letting me know.”

As the Brother turned and walked back into the office, she felt like hell—which she supposed was yet another connection she had with John Matthew. Except instead of setting a land/speed record, she just wanted to take a knife and cut her inner forearms to release the pressure.

God, she was such a crybaby emo sometimes, she truly was. But those cilices of hers not only kept her
symphath
side in check, they helped her dim down the things she didn’t want to feel.

Which was abooooooout ninety-nine percent of emotion, thank you very much.

Ten minutes later, Blaylock ducked his head out of the door. His eyes were locked on the floor and his emotions were in an upheaval, which made sense. No one liked to see a buddy self-destruct, and having to conversate with the person who’d sent the poor bastard into a free fall wasn’t exactly a happy-happy.

“Listen, John’s gone into the locker room to take a shower. I got him to quit the
Running Man
impression, but he’s . . . He needs a little more time, I think.”

“Okay. I’ll keep waiting for him here in the hall.”

Blaylock nodded and then there was this awkward pause. “I’m going to go work out now.”

After the door eased shut, she picked her jacket and her weapons up and wandered down toward the locker room. The office was empty, which meant Tohr had gone along his merry way, no doubt to set up some Tim the Tool Man Taylor time with a
doggen
.

And the resonant quiet told her there was no one in any of the classrooms, gym, or clinic.

Sliding down the wall, she let her ass bottom out on the floor and hung her arms off her knees. Letting her head fall back, she closed her eyes.

God, she was exhausted. . . .

“John’s still in there?”

Xhex snapped awake, her gun pointed right up at Blaylock’s chest. As the guy leaped back, she immediately flipped on the safety and lowered the muzzle.

“Sorry, old habits die hard.”

“Ah, yeah.” The guy motioned his white towel toward the locker room. “Is John still in there? It’s been over an hour.”

She flipped her wrist up and looked at the watch she’d snagged. “Christ.”

Xhex got to her feet and cracked the door. The sound of the shower running wasn’t much of a relief. “Is there any other way out?”

“Just through the weight room—which opens only into this hall.”

“Okay, I’m going to go talk to him,” she said, praying it was the right thing to do.

“Good. I’ll finish my workout. Call me if you need me.”

She pushed through the door, and inside, the place was standard-issue, all banks of beige metal lockers separated by wooden benches. Following the sound of falling water to the right, she passed by a bay of urinals, stalls, and sinks that seemed lonely without a bunch of sweaty, naked, towel-snapping males putting them to use.

She found John in an open area with dozens of showerheads and tile on every square inch of the floors, walls, and ceiling. He was in his T-shirt and running shorts and was sitting against the wall, his arms hanging off his knees, his head down, the water rushing over his huge shoulders and torso.

Her first thought was that she had been outside in exactly the same position.

Her second was that she was surprised he could stand being so still. His emotional grid was not the only thing lit up; that shadow behind it was likewise afire with anguish. It was as if the two parts of him were both in a kind of mourning no doubt because he’d suffered or been witness to too many cruel losses in this life . . . and perhaps another. And where all that put him emotionally terrified her. The dense black void created in him was so powerful, it warped the superstructure of his psyche . . . taking him where she had been in that fucking OR.

Taking him to the pinpoint of madness.

Stepping over the tiled lip in the floor, her skin goose bumped at the chill in the air that came from his feelings . . . and the reality that she’d done it again. This was Murhder, only worse.

Jesus Christ, she was a fucking black widow when it came to males of worth.

“John?”

He didn’t look up, although she wasn’t sure whether he was even aware she was in front of him. He was back in the past, sucked in and held in the vise of memory. . . .

Frowning, she found her eyes following the path of the water that rivered its way out from under him and traveled across the tilted tile plane . . . to the drain.

The drain.

Something with that drain. Something to do with . . . Lash?

Within the embrace of the solitude and against the backdrop of the quiet sound of the water’s spray, she unleashed her bad side for a good purpose: In a great rush, her
symphath
instincts dove into John, penetrating through his physical territory and going deep into his mind and his recollections.

As he lifted his head and looked up at her in shock, everything went red and two-dimensional, the tile becoming a blush pink, John’s dark, damp hair changing to the color of blood, the water twinkling like rose champagne.

The images she got were drawn with a quill of terror and shame: a dark stairway in an apartment building not unlike the one he’d taken her to; him a small pretrans being forced by a fetid human male . . .

Oh. God.

Xhex’s knees gave out and she wobbled—then just let herself go to the ground, landing on the slick tile so hard her bones rattled and her teeth clapped together.

No . . . not John, she thought. Not when he was defenseless and innocent and so very alone. Not when he was lost in the human world, scrounging to survive.

Not him. Not like that.

With her
symphath
side out and her eyes undoubtedly glowing red, they sat there staring at each other. He knew she’d read him and he hated her knowledge with such a fury she wisely kept any sorrow or commiseration to herself. He didn’t appear to resent that she’d invaded him, though. It was more like he wished like fuck he didn’t have that to share with anybody.

“What does Lash have to do with it,” she said roughly. “Because he’s all over your mind.”

John’s eyes shifted to the drain in the center and she got the impression he was seeing blood pooling around the stainless-steel cap. Lash’s.

Xhex narrowed her eyes, the backstory becoming pretty damned guess-able: Lash had found out about John’s secret. Somehow. And she didn’t need her
symphath
side to tell her what the fucker would have done with information like that.

A baseball announcer would seek less of an audience.

As John’s stare came back to her, she felt a shattering communion with him. No barriers, no worries about being vulnerable. Even though they were both fully clothed, each was naked before the other.

She knew damn well she was never going to find this with any other male. Or any other person. He knew without words all she had been through and everything that those kind of experiences spawned when they were triggered. And she knew the same for him.

And maybe that shadow on his emotional grid was a kind of bifurcation of his psyche caused by the trauma he’d been through. Maybe his mind and his soul had gotten together and agreed to cut the past out and put it toward the back of his mental and emotional attic. Maybe that was why these two parts of him were so vividly animated.

Made sense. And so did the vengeance he was feeling. After all, Lash had been intimately involved in both sets of wrongs, his and hers.

Information like John’s in the wrong hands? Almost as bad as the horror that had actually happened because you relived that shit every time someone else learned of the story. Which was why she never talked about her time up in the colony with her father, or that shit in the human medical clinic . . . or . . . yeah . . .

John raised his forefinger and tapped beside his eye.

“Mine are red?” she murmured. When he nodded, she rubbed her face. “Sorry. I’m probably going to need to get another pair of cilices.”

As he shut the water off, she dropped her hands. “Who else knows. About you.”

John frowned. Then mouthed,
Blay, Qhuinn. Zsadist. Havers
.
A therapist.
When he shook his head, she took that to mean it was the end of the list.

“I’m not going to say anything to anyone.”

Her eyes went over his huge body from those shoulders to his powerful biceps and his tremendous thighs—and she found herself wishing he’d been this size back in that grungy stairwell. At least he wasn’t as he’d been when he’d been hurt anymore—although that was true only on the outside. Inside, he was all the ages he’d ever lived through, the infant who’d been abandoned, the child who’d been unwanted, the pretrans who’d been out in the world on his own . . . and now the grown male.

Who was an ass-kicker in the field and a loyal friend and, going by what he’d done to that
lesser
in the brownstone and what he undoubtedly wanted to do to Lash, a very nasty enemy.

And didn’t this add up to a problem: As far as she was concerned, the son of the Omega was
hers
to murder.

Not that they needed to cover that right now.

As the dampness from the tile sneaked into the seat of her scrubs, and water dripped off of John, she was surprised by what she wanted to do.

On a lot of levels, it didn’t make sense and it certainly wasn’t a hot idea. But logic wasn’t a big player in this moment between them.

Xhex shifted forward and put her palms on the slick shower floor. Moving slowly, going hand, knee, hand, knee, she went toward him.

She knew when he caught her scent.

Because under the sopping wet running shorts his cock twitched and hardened.

When she was face-to-face with him, she locked her eyes on his mouth. “Our minds are already together. I want the flesh to follow.”

With that, she leaned in and tilted her head. Just before she kissed him, she paused, but not because she was worried he was going to turn away—she knew by the dark bonding spice he was throwing out that John was not interested in pulling back.

“No, you’ve got it all wrong, John.” Reading his emotions, she shook her head. “You’re not half the male you could be because of what was done to you. You’re twice what anyone else is because you survived.”

 

 

You know, life put you in places you never expected.

Under no circumstances, not even in the worst nightmares his subconscious had burped up, had John ever thought he would be able to handle Xhex knowing about how he’d been hurt when he was young.