Soul Bound (21 page)

If a person could visibly wither, then David Cutler did just that. “So she was right,” he rasped. “You’ve gone and turned, like she said you would.” Failure whittled away whatever light the man had left. The sadness that rolled in to submerge him was thick enough to be palpable. At least to Jace.

“Who?”

“That heathen.” David allowed his broken gaze to meet his son’s. “Your mother.”

Chapter Nineteen

Lia couldn’t find her voice. It was buried beneath a heavy mountain of emotion. Seeing this man who had terrorized her in her dreams, recognizing him on a guttural level if not on a conscious one, left her shaken and angry. Every feeling he’d ever inspired in Jace rose to the surface to smother her.

“You knew,” she said. “You knew and you never told him. You could’ve helped him.”

David Cutler looked at her as if she were the one who belonged in a padded cell. “Who the hell are
you
?”

Jace placed his hand on her lower back, urged her silently to calm down. “A friend,” he said.

Anxiety rippled along her nerves. In her mind’s eye, she saw this shriveled old man when he was young and vital, towering over her. She felt the intimidation, the worthlessness, that tight knot of helplessness in her stomach. And so did Jace. Through her, he remained connected to the boy he’d once been.

Jace walked farther into the room, sat on the unoccupied bed and propped his elbow on his bent knee. His body language revealed only tempered calm, but she knew a turbulent storm raged within.

Still waters ran deep.

One corner of Jace’s mouth quirked. He’d probably read her mind again.

“What, exactly, did my mother tell you?” he asked.

David Cutler’s expression remained set in a determined scowl. Still, there was something in his eyes, a silent ache she could almost grasp. “So beautiful,” he whispered, more to himself than to them. “I should’ve known she wasn’t real. Should’ve known it wouldn’t last.”

Jace and Lia exchanged puzzled looks.

“Who wasn’t real?” Jace probed, his gaze riveted on the other man’s face.

“Her. Everything.” A haze swept across David’s features as the memories took shape in his ravaged brain. “Regan. That’s all she remembered. Wasn’t even sure if it was her first or last name. I was driving down the 101 when I saw someone throw her out of a speeding car, so I stopped. A man just doesn’t walk away from something like that.”

He inhaled a deep, shuddering breath. “Now I wish I had. I ran up to her, felt for a pulse. There was nothing.” David’s face crumpled. “She was a mess. So much blood. The road shone from it. Looked like the asshole beat her with a sledgehammer before he decided to dump her on the side of the highway.”

David released a bitter snort. “When the ambulance finally showed up, she didn’t have a scratch on her. The medics thought I was nuts. For a while, so did I.”

He went silent, lost in thought. Then he found his voice again. “I should’ve left her with them and never looked back. But I couldn’t. She was so lost, completely alone in the world, with nothing but a name to anchor her. So I brought her home with me.”

His expression grew distant and misty. “I knew she was dangerous. The second I met her, something inside me changed. She made me angry, depressed, even violent, but I didn’t care. I had to be near her.”

Lia thought of Cassie, of her unhealthy obsession with Jace, and understood.

“We only made love once, but one time was all it took. She got pregnant.” His voice dropped a notch as he angled a condemning look at Jace. “I wasn’t particularly interested in becoming a father, but I was willing to do it, for her.”

If Jace was affected by his father’s shameless rejection, he hid it well. Lia went to sit beside him, but when she reached for his hand, he yanked it away. Something told her he didn’t want her tapping into his thoughts right now. His eyes never strayed from his father’s.

“I was going to ask her to marry me the night she disappeared. Came home from work with a bottle of champagne and a two-karat diamond in my pocket, but she was gone. She left with nothing but the clothes on her back and my unborn child growing in her belly.”

Lia frowned. “I don’t understand. You’re the one who raised him.” The dreams flashed through her head, angry images that made her pulse pound. She thought of the pigeon, of the way he’d snapped its neck without mercy, of the desperate, hollow feeling she’d experienced afterward. “Quite badly, I may add.”

For a second David looked confused, as if he’d just awakened from a nightmare. Then he directed a sharp glare her way that cut her off at the knees. She felt like a child again, weak, at his mercy. She reminded herself that it was Jace he’d hazed and debased, not her, but that did little to comfort her.

“What do you know?” he spat.

She met his unflinching gaze. “Enough to conclude you were a poor excuse for a father.”

Fury had David Cutler slapping his palms against the wooden arms of his chair. “I tried to save him.”

Lia opened her mouth to offer a retort, but Jace silenced her by squeezing her arm. “
Trust me
,” his mind whispered to hers.

“How?” Jace focused that penetrating stare on his father again. “How did you find me? How did you know what I’d become?”

“She brought you to me,” he replied without hesitation. “Right after you were born. Seeing her again after all those months—” David shook his head. “It wrecked me.”

“What did she say?” Jace persisted.

David swallowed as if to wash down something sour. “She told me she was some kind of half-breed and so were you. That there was this darkness inside you that would take you over someday. She begged me to keep you safe, no matter how crazy you made me. ‘Whatever you do,’ she said, ‘don’t let him die.’” David paused, seized the sides of his chair in a metal grip. “I thought she was crazy. But then she showed me things, things no human could do, and I knew she was telling the truth.”

Sadness rearranged the old man’s features. “I wanted her to stay, to marry me just like I’d always planned, but she refused. Said she was poison to me and that I was lucky she hadn’t killed me by making love to me.”

Silence swelled to fill the small, sterile room. Lia stole a glance at Jace, and her stomach bucked. A fierce glitter burned in his eyes, and the note of quiet resignation she caught on his face made her heart ache.

He understands. He knows how it feels to want something you can never have.

“What happened to her?” Jace asked. “Regan. My mother.”

“I don’t know. She disappeared again.” A sob rattled in David’s chest. “Never saw her again…until today.”

The shock that rippled through Jace echoed her own. “How long ago did she leave?”

David Cutler slumped in his chair, spent. His eyes glazed over. “Hasn’t aged a day.” Tears glistened in his eyes. “Still so beautiful, so perfect, so…empty.”

“What did she want?” Jace pushed, but David had retreated inside himself.

“She was right. She is poison, a cancer that’s eaten away at my sanity for over thirty years. She ruined me. Ruined my life. I should’ve let her rot by the side of that road.”

Jace expelled a long string of air. “I’ve lost him. He’s shut me out.”

Lia didn’t understand what he meant.

“I’m tired.” David began to sob openly. “So tired. I just want it all to end.” With unexpected speed, he rocketed to his feet and overturned the chair he’d been sitting on. An agonized howl tore from his throat as he proceeded to trash the entire room. Drawers and their contents clattered to the floor, a plastic plate flew across the room, followed by several paperbacks.

Ducking to avoid getting hit, Jace wrestled the older man to the ground to halt his tantrum.

“Let me go,” David raved. “Let me go, you son of a bitch.”

Two orderlies and a nurse suddenly poured into the room. The orderlies peeled Jace off his father, dragging him out into the hall.

“What in heaven’s name just happened in here?” the nurse asked Lia, not attempting to hide the condemnation in her tone.

“He lost it and started throwing things,” Lia explained. “Jace stopped him.”

Still sobbing, David Cutler lay curled in a fetal position on the floor.

The nurse fell to her knees and injected him with a sedative. “Get out of here,” she ordered. “Both of you. This man’s had enough visitors for one day.”

Tension hung thick and heavy between them as they drove back to the mansion on Siletz Bay. Jace refused to take her back to her townhouse, and his childhood home was the only place that offered the isolation he craved. Today Lia had seen firsthand what kind of impact he could have on people, and she’d be lying if she said it hadn’t unsettled her.

“It’s not your fault,” she consoled.

His only reply was a caustic snort.

“Your father’s in that place because he’s mentally unstable.”

“Because he was stupid enough to love my mother, to raise me.”

The road curled ahead, a gray ribbon dappled by sunlight. Tall, green-capped trees shivered in the wind, scattering shadows along their path.

“I exist for one reason and one reason only.” His mouth was set in a firm, unflinching line. “To spread corruption and despair. To destroy humanity.” Self-loathing twitched in his jaw. “You better run while you can, Lia. That could be you in a few years.”

She refused to believe that. “I’m different. Incorruptible. Cal said—”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass what Cal said. If I wasn’t convinced those soul-thieving bastards are coming after you, I’d be out of your life in a flash.”

Disappointment made her breath hitch. “You don’t mean that. We have a connection—”

“We’ll always have a connection. Whether I’m around or not. Maybe I should’ve joined the Watchers, let Cal shield you or whatever it was he said he could do.”

“No.” Determination coursed through her veins, hot and insistent. “We were brought together for a reason. There’s something we’re meant to accomplish.”

“Don’t go all prophetic on me. Life is what we make of it. Fate’s nothing but a series of choices.” For one thunderous heartbeat, his gaze brushed hers. “I’m choosing to keep you alive, any way I can.”

“And I’m choosing to see this through.”

He tightened his grip on the steering wheel. The fight drained from his face, exposing a shattering defeat. “But at what cost?”

“I can’t believe you just let him walk away.” Marcus towered over Cal, who sat in his office, staring out the window as if he didn’t have a care in the world. “We had him exactly where we wanted him—”

“We can’t force him to fight, Marcus. That’s not the Watchers’ way.”

Every instinct Marcus possessed screamed they’d made a huge mistake. “If Cutler really is the one fated to destroy Athanatos, then he has to join us, one way or another. Otherwise, the prophecy means shit.”

“If he is the one, every choice he makes will lead him to the same destiny. That which has been written by the angels will always come to pass.” Cal was versed in Enochian script, the language of the angels. Every so often, he intercepted a message from them, which was how the Watchers had learned of the prophecy.

“You’re forgetting there are two conditions to the prophecy.” With the fluid grace of a bird, Cal rose from his desk and approached him. “‘A Hybrid shall be reborn, and he shall join the Golden One. His energy will be strong, almost as pure as that of the Nephilim that spawned him. In the wake of a great sacrifice, he will reclaim what was once his and what he lost, whereupon the wrath of Heaven shall be unleashed. Lightning will slash the sky and Heaven’s light will rain upon the soulless, and he who is immortal shall fall.’”

Listening to Cal recite the angels’ prediction verbatim triggered something within Marcus, and understanding dawned. “You wanted him to leave. With her.”

“They need time to bond. The prophecy cannot be fulfilled without sacrifice. And there cannot be sacrifice without love.”

If Cal’s interpretation of the prophecy was accurate, not only did Jace Cutler need to join the ranks of the Watchers to defeat Athanatos, he had to take back his lost soul. “If he is the one, and if he fulfills his destiny, what happens to Lia Benson?”

Cal shook his head. “Once the two souls in her breast have fused, one cannot be taken without the other.”

“So she’ll die.”

“That is the most likely outcome. Yes.”

Marcus wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He’d taken an oath to protect human lives, and now Cal was asking him to sit back and watch while one was destroyed. “If you want Cutler to take her life-force, why did you tell him his kiss could kill her?”

Cal absently twirled his ancient silver band. His gaze grew soft and distant. “Because nothing proves more enticing than the forbidden.”

Seeing people manipulated this way, even for the cause, made him extremely uncomfortable. “What about her immunity? You said her soul couldn’t be taken.”

“I said it couldn’t be taken by force. Not in its current form.” Cal reclaimed his position at his antique, scuffed desk. “Her spirit must first be broken or—” He paused.

Marcus hated when Cal did that—start a sentence he had no intention of finishing. “Or what?”

“She must willingly hand it over.”

“What person in her right mind would purposely give up her soul?”

Beyond the window at Cal’s back, dusk made the sky bleed. “You’d be surprised how far humans are willing to go for love.”

True, Marcus didn’t know much about love. The human heart was as much a mystery to him as existence itself. Despite their innumerable weaknesses, mortals possessed an inner strength that defied comprehension or reason. “What about Athanatos? Until Cutler agrees to join us, he remains vulnerable.”

“I have taken measures to protect him and Lia Benson. Athanatos will not be able to track them.”

“You’ve cloaked them?”

“For the time being. All that’s left for us to do now is wait. Wait for the future to unfold.”

“If you’re wrong, inaction on our part could destroy them both.”

“And if I’m right, a major threat to humanity will be eliminated, and Jace Cutler will receive a rare and precious gift.” A determined gleam came into Cal’s steel-colored eyes. “He will get his soul back.”