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“Dona, stop. ”
He couldn’t turn his head from observing the stage to look at her, couldn’t move at all. The darkness in the theater was absolute. He wouldn’t have been so sure she was still there, except that whenever she was absent, like when she’d gone to see “Him”, it felt different. Almost like they were two magnets.
Magnets. His thought resounded in Dona’s head as she watched him through the darkness. Like Lucifer had said. They couldn’t help but believe in one another. The way he’d kissed her just now, when he’d never reached out to a woman without calculated intent. It made her want to crawl over the seat into his lap, be held in those strong arms.
She could sleep there, cradled against him, his heartbeat steady beneath her ear.
The voices on the stage drew her attention away, making her remember why such musings were dangerous.
“Dona…” Alex displayed the expected deer-in-the-headlights look. His gaze darted between the two women. Pamela was frozen on the top of the table. “You’re…home early. ”
“Earlier than you think. ” Dona’s voice was high, thin, but Nathan heard the hint of steel in it that he’d recognized from the first moment when she ordered him into her car. He also felt her pain like a full cannon blast in the chest. Blowing everything to pieces, an agony of disintegration of everything she was or knew.
He knew what that felt like. He’d experienced it before he’d even had a solid sense of self to call his own. For the first time in h
is life he thought that maybe it had been easier to be shattered early, rather than like this, when enough time had passed to allow a person to spin dreams so strong that they became a part of her, like a vital organ or limb.
He was seeing too much. More than she had seen or felt in herself when what was happening on the stage had actually occurred. Dona didn’t understand how this involuntary one-sided telepathy would help. If Nathan’s soul was as poisoned as Lucifer thought, all He was doing was arming Jonathan, because by letting her see what her charge was feeling, it was stripping her emotionally, making her feel vulnerable.
Why was Lucifer doing this?
“I’ve been here long enough to see you eat more of that pizza than you should. You know your cholesterol numbers aren’t what they should be. ” The Dona on stage glanced at Pamela, who looked as if she wished to be anywhere else in the world. “I guess worrying about that was a waste of time, though, wasn’t it? A person has to have a heart to get heart disease. ”
A titter of audience laughter. It was so obscene against the frozen paleness of Dona’s features on stage and the wooden quality of her voice that Nathan felt nauseous.
“Cut it out, Dona. ”
Suddenly, he was able to look toward his current Dona. See her silhouette. Her eyes met his, glittered in the darkness. “That’s a very appropriate comment,” she said.
Pamela screamed and his attention jerked back to the stage. Dona had taken two steps forward and wrapped one hand in Alex’s shoulder-length hair to pull his head back. In a fluid motion, she shoved a kitchen knife into his left pectoral. When Pamela’s knees went out from under her, she landed on the plates, breaking one. The wineglasses fell over, rolled to the floor and shattered, spreading wet burgundy across the table linen. As she scrambled backward, blood sprayed out from Alex’s chest over her, over all of it.
“So, let’s see…” Dona grunted, jerking on the knife as her husband convulsed in death throes, his hands batting ineffectively at her. “There it is. You do have one, don’t you? Lucky I’m a surgeon. Otherwise I wouldn’t have known where to find such a small thing. ”
Nathan swallowed, unable to look away but wanting to do so with all his will when Dona pulled the man’s heart out of his chest, severing the attached arteries as matter-of-factly as she would have cut strings of cheese to free one of those slices of pizza from the main pie. Her blood-spattered face was an indifferent mask, her blouse soaked with his life fluids. When she turned on her practical black heel and advanced on Pamela, her husband’s lover fell off the table, trying to get away. Dona backed her into a corner where the woman remained on her knees, arms up to protect herself as she babbled, sobbed, her gaze latched on that terrible thing in Dona’s blood-soaked fingers.
“It’s a large house, Pamela. I’ve been here since last night, a ghost flitting from room to room, staying just outside your notice. ” Dona’s face was pale as a departed spirit, her dark eyes like a vampire’s. Flat, emotionless. It clicked in Nathan’s head. She shut down when she was feeling too much. He suspected that would have figured into her ability to be a surgeon, a successful one, for the opulence of the home strongly suggested she’d been important in her field.
“For thirteen hours I’ve been watching the man who made an oath to me proclaim his love for another. Fuck her, share thoughts about me with her. You knew he was married, but you were more than willing to help him break that oath. My soul died, Pamela, watching the two of you. ” The Dona on stage cocked her head, considering the knife in her opposite hand. Pamela curled back into herself, arms clasped over her legs as she became a ball, rocking, keening hysterically.
“It’s okay if they kill me for this,” Dona continued in a reassuring tone. “Why would I want to live in a world where the person who promised to love me above all others…forever…would do something like this?”
As if sensing imminent danger, Pamela uncurled abruptly and made an attempt to scramble past her. Dona thwarted it easily, putting her foot in the middle of the woman’s chest and slamming her back on her ass in the confining corner. Then she squatted, bringing herself eye to eye with the redhead and holding the tumescent mass of blood and muscle before her horrified face.
“I’m going to call the police, Pamela. But before I let them come rescue you, you’re going to eat this. Every bite. If you vomit, you’ll eat it again, until it stays down. Then we’ll call. Okay?” Her lips drew back from her teeth in a smile that was a death threat.
Pamela’s wide eyes registered it. “You wanted his heart? You’re going to have it, every faithless bite. ”
The theater dimmed, blessedly, but Nathan wished he could block his ears. For the next fifteen minutes he heard the sounds of Pamela pleading, gagging, choking, pleading more, then finally her broken whimpers as she obeyed Dona’s will and did the unthinkable. The theater was completely dark when he heard the sound of a phone being dialed and Dona’s voice.
“Yes. I’ve killed my husband and his pathetic whore is in shock. Please come right away to…”
The voice faded, Dona giving details as calmly as if she was prescribing blood pressure medicine to a patient.
When the stage lights rose, it was just a velvet curtain. The two of them sat in an empty theater.
Nathan turned his head, studied Dona’s profile. She did not move. Her attention was on the stage, her dark hair elegant and upswept, her neck pale and almost fragile beneath the clasp of the amber necklace.
“You were known as the Scorned Wife,” he said. “That case was…”
