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“You think I won’t put it baldly on the table?”
I said with acid sweetness, “I rather thought you’d try to put it on a desk. Isn’t that where you usually put it?”
He flinched imperceptibly and I regretted the words instantly.
Jo.
As if summoned from a grave, her ghost was there, standing between us. I could almost see her shaking her head with sorrow, telling me Ryodan was a good man and I wasn’t seeing him clearly. Her gravestone loomed in the air, a solid concrete wall separating me from him. The heat of innuendo died and his gaze shuttered.
“Mac carried that one hard,” he said. “I suppose I carry it, too.”
I gaped again, it seemed like all I was doing tonight. “Mac ate Jo?” I practically shouted.
“When she was possessed by the Sinsar Dubh.”
I ached for her, understanding too well the pain she carried. Bridget, all the others, my ghosts for the rest of my life. “Why the bloody hell did no one tell me? Why am I always the last to know things?”
“I’m doing everything in my power to make sure you’re not,” he clipped, driving his point home.
Ryodan wanted me. And he wasn’t going to conceal that fact. What did he think? That he could just stroll back when I was grown up, have sex with me, then one day saunter up and tell me he was leaving again?
“When you fuck a man,” I said with quiet venom, “you’re giving him a motherfucking gift.”
He went motionless, waiting. When I didn’t continue, he goaded, eyes glittering, “Come on, Dani, say it. You know you want to. You’re dying to. Fling that fucking gauntlet at me.”
“You. Don’t. Deserve. Me,” I said with icy satisfaction.
He smiled with some unfathomable, feral light in his eyes. The bastard actually smiled. Who does that when you insult them? Then he completely changed the subject.
“No one told you because you had a great deal on your plate at the time.” He didn’t say a word about Dancer but he didn’t have to because instantly, another ghost popped into filmy existence between us.
Dancer. Jo. Fog tendrils curling about their transparent, forever-lost-to-us bodies.
So much loss.
I wasn’t in the mood for any more.
I’m all about the things that stay.
My city. My people who need me. Shazam. Kat. Enyo. The ones who don’t go tearing off on lengthy walkabouts without you, without a word of explanation.
I pulled a Ryodan a
nd completely changed the subject. “Have you heard from Barrons?”
He didn’t say anything for a long moment and I was perversely pleased to see him having as hard a time shifting gears as I’d been having. Then, “Not a word in two bloody years. I have no fucking idea where he is.”
I looked at him, stunned. He’d been as cut off from news of them as me? He didn’t know where Barrons was? I’d imagined Ryodan sitting somewhere, receiving constant updates from everyone. In control as always, monitoring the world. Where the hell had he been?
“What else, Dani?”
“The old gods are back. No idea how many or who. Humans are abducting adults, paralyzing them and taking them through mirrors to an unknown location for reasons unknown.” He’d said “nutshell” version so I was keeping it brief.
“While you save the children left behind,” he murmured. “Getting them settled into new homes. Lor told me that part.”
“Where was Lor watching me from when AOZ and Jayne tried to take my sword?”
“Across the street. He couldn’t hear a bloody word of the conversation. Fill me in.”
