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Julian cocked his head to the side and shrugged. “I know nothing of him other than his name, Bill.”
“Bill,” she repeated. He had to be joking. Yet why did the name tug at something inside her? What was she missing?
There was no time to figure it out at the moment. She filed it away.
“Bill,” he said again, though she got the impression he was worlds away from her.
“So, this Bill released you from . . . where?”
He closed his eyes. “A place of darkness, despair, and constant pain.”
“Why?” she asked as she watched him closely. She hated the sliver of compassion that she felt. The man was all kinds of wrong for her. He’d used her even though she apparently meant nothing to him.
You used him, too.
She banished her inner voice and focused on the reality. She had every reason on earth to hate the very sight of him, but . . . there was something that called to her, and it was more than just the fact she’d claimed him as a mate three years earlier.
Something pulled at the strings inside her until she was turned inside out with a need to touch him. To comfort him.
Julian’s eyes flew open, and her heart turned over at the savage look that hung in them. He growled, low and deep, from his belly, and stepped away from her.
Her eyes fell to his hands. He clenched and unclenched them, and she knew he was close to the edge.
“Why?” He laughed harshly. “Simple, really. Declan and I have the motivation needed to do whatever it takes to get the job done.”
“And I don’t?” she asked incredulously. “I’ve given up the last several years of my life in order to find the fucking thing and make sure it’s sealed forever.”
Julian’s eyes darkened until the gold was gone completely. The dangerous edge she’d sensed earlier rose to the fore and draped his powerful shoulders in a caress of darkness.
He smiled, a cold, calculated grin that did nothing to warm the lethal look in his eyes. “Lady, if we’re not successful in finding the portal, I’m screwed for eternity. The pain, the darkness that eats at me every second of every day will win. It will never stop.”
Her gaze fell once more to the scars on his chest, and he thumped them with the palm of his hand. She winced as he did so but couldn’t look away.
“Pretty, aren’t they? They’re a constant reminder of what I’ve lost.”
“And what’s that?” she asked hesitantly, not sure that she really wanted to know.
“Half of my soul was ripped from me, taken in pieces. Tiny fucking pieces.” His eyes bored into hers, and she swallowed thickly at the intensity of his gaze. “Every minute that I’m in the human realm, a l
ittle more of my soul dies. If we can’t get to the portal and destroy it within seven days, we’ll be lost forever. Hell on earth will be living inside me, and I’ll never recover.”
He would be like one of them. The shades that had wandered aimlessly in the underworld, feeding off the bottom like rabid dogs.
His fingers rubbed the raw edges of his scars. “Even now I can feel it, eating at me, destroying anything that is good and honorable.” He drew in a long breath, his dark eyes steady on hers, his teeth bared. “I told you I was nothing like before. If you were smart, you’d stay far away. Who knows what the hell I’ll be in a few days, or even tomorrow?”
Jaden was silent, and even if she wanted to say something, her vocal cords were frozen.
His mouth twisted into a feral grin. “I’ll be neither human, nor shifter . . . I’ll be nothing more than a vessel of empty space and doomed to live that way for eternity.”
He turned from her and moved toward the passage, leaving her to stare after him.
“So yeah, pretty damn good motivation, don’t you think?”
Chapter 19
Jaden watched Julian disappear through the small passage, his tall frame barely able to clear the ceiling. A shiver rolled across her skin, and she hugged herself tightly. There was just way too much to process, and none of it was good.
Her mind was tired; hell, her body was pretty much done, yet there was still so far to go. Her fingers ran along her forearms, and an image of Julian’s dark skin against hers planted itself in her brain.
