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Fearless was.
I’d had nothing to lose. No mom. No home. No friends. No life. It’s easy to be fearless in those circumstances.
Now I had everything to lose, and a destructive, raging part of me wanted to go ahead and lose it right away, get it over with because limbo unravels me. Once you lose everything, you can take action: You either die or cope. But before, while you’re watching it all go to hell, there’s no action you can take. You’re helpless, caught in a killing undertow. My mom was my entire world and, trapped in a cage, I was forced to watch her slip away bit by bit, unable to do anything to prevent it. I might have stolen food for us. With my super skills, I could have stolen money, we’d have been rich. I could have taken care of us.
But I’d had to sit there, watching, while everything fell apart.
“Close your eyes,” Ryodan said softly.
I didn’t argue, just let my lids flutter closed, then he was there, standing next to me. I could see him, us, as clearly as if it was actually happening. I shivered with emotion, with desire. I could smell the scent of his skin, feel the omnipresent erotic current of his body as his powerful arms slipped around me.
I dropped my head to his chest and melted into him like a second skin, savoring his strength, his heat, his big, hard body. This man was the one thing in my universe that made me feel safe.
He rubbed his jaw against my hair, his hands spanning my back, and as he began to work at my tight muscles, my tears stopped, my body stilled, my breathing deepened. Even an illusion of him could take me down to ground zero. I wondered how he’d survived his childhood and come out so bloody strong.
Careful, he said in my mind. We’re linked right now. You might see things you’d rather not.
“You know my pain. Show me yours. I want to know.”
It wasn’t pretty.
“As if my life has been.”
Exhaling gustily, he dropped his forehead to mine in our illusory embrace, raised his hands to my temples.
We’d been standing in his office at Chester’s, years ago, when he’d shown me that, like me, he’d been caged as a child, horribly abused, kept in a pit in the ground that was dark and damp and cold.
Suddenly, I was there. Trapped. The smell of damp soil and my own waste. Never let out.
Unless he hurt me so bad he had to take me out for his “doctors” to heal me so he could do it again. It was the only time I saw the sun. I lived for the times he almost killed me. I began to pray for them. I wanted to see sunshine that badly. To feel it on my battered skin, to soak it into my broken bones, to walk “up there” with the others. Sunshine became synonymous with life.
He wasn’t just giving me words in my head, he was somehow translating every nuance of the child’s desperation, the hope, the hate, the pain. I was in that horrid, smelly, small pit with that horrid steel door above me, fitted so tightly not one ounce of light trickled in. I was cold. I was lost. I was an animal. Everyone else got to live. But not me.
I shuddered from the intensity of it. I was…oh! Like me, he’d gone into his brain. There’d been no place else to go. The boy had created lavish worlds in his head, lived in them. Had replayed every detail of the wonderful loving life he’d once had, milking it for what he needed to continue trying to survive.
Why doesn’t she come for me? Why doesn’t she save me? An anguished scream. The crack of breaking bone.
He’d not had the blessing of my TV, my infrequent mother, my glimpses beyond tightly drawn curtains when she’d walked out and slammed the door, gusting the drapes from the wall, of the world beyond, of OUTSIDE. Just endless, eternal darkness. No stimulation. Incessant solitary confinement.
How the bloody hell had he not gone mad?
I held onto my family in my mind. My mother was a beautiful woman, coveted far and wide. Barrons was her first husband’s son. When he died, two wealthy, powerful suitors vied for her hand. She chose my father and was quickly pregnant with me. I had an incredible childhood. My parents adored us. No harm touched me. If it had tried, my older brother would have beaten it senseless. But it was a lawless, barbaric time and my father was killed in battle. Her other suitor came again, determined to possess her this time. She’d never liked him, always feared him, called in friends to stand her ground with her, begging for time. He agreed to leave only if she permitted him to take her youngest son until she joined him. He said it was to foster me. We all knew I was his hostage.
I saw the man then, dark and savage, from long ago, and realized Ryodan was translating things into words I could understand because people had been so much more primitive then. Wealth didn’t mean a fine home. It meant a vast tribe, furs, and fire.
She never came for me because she died. Barrons says she passed peacefully in her sleep of a broken heart, that losing both her husband and son was more than she could bear. I know better. A woman unprotected by a man back then was prey. I suspect those same friends that stood with her that day descended later and killed her, seizing our lands, and Barrons barely escaped alive. He swore he would get me back. And he did. But that’s a tale for another time, Dani. Our time may be short.
I drifted for a moment, linked to him, feeling him with all my senses. I’d never experienced intimacy like this before, so much more than our bodies touching, our minds mingling. I could taste the flavor of him: Danger, ruthlessness, savagery, fearlessness. And ferocious, unwavering commitment and loyalty. He was an animal first, pure, loyal, and territorial as a wolf.
Family was everything to Ryodan. He’d followed Barrons around his entire existence, determined to stay together. The Nine had become his family, too. He’d patiently reclaimed them each time they wandered off, moved them all over the globe for eons, following Barrons as he searched for a way to free the son I hadn’t known he’d had.
He showed me Barrons’s son then, the cage in which he (and Ryodan!) had been imprisoned. He shared the final scene with me as well: the way the tormented child had finally been laid to rest.
My eyes flew open in shock, shattering the illusion of our embrace, and I glared at him across the distance that separated us, which now seemed far too near for my comfort. I backpedaled hastily away. “Are you kidding me?” I cried. “I’m turning into the one thing that can kill you?”
He shrugged, a faint smile playing at his lips. “I always said I wanted an equal, Dani. Looks like I got one.”
I stared at him in horror. “If my bare skin touches you and I blow you up, will you die permanently?”
