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She didn’t have time. Easterday didn’t have time.
—
In the copter, she closed her eyes. If she could clear her mind, she thought, maybe something would slide in, something she’d missed or overlooked.
The next thing she knew, Roarke was unhooking her harness.
“Dropped off a minute.”
“Because however much you want to keep at this, your system needs sleep. So will they,” he reminded her as he slipped an arm around her waist.
“They can take shifts. But yeah, they need sleep, food, conversation.”
It felt like walking through water, getting to the door, moving into the warm.
“They won’t kill him tonight. I should’ve gotten to that. You were right. Fast would mean they’d have done it and left him. They’ve got him where they want him, and they need to sleep, to talk, to make him pay. The killing’s the easy part. Making him pay takes time.”
He led her to the elevator rather than the stairs, and went straight to the bedroom.
“Will you take a soother to ease my mind?”
“I haven’t had coffee in hours. I’m soothed enough. I get I need sleep or I’d have to take a booster, and I don’t want a booster. I’ll go down until five hundred hours. Where’s the cat?”
“I suspect with Summerset, as we were among the missing. Do you want him?”
She did, foolishly, but not enough to send Roarke to get him.
“Just wondered.”
She undressed, still in that underwater state. How long had she been up? She couldn’t figure it—didn’t matter. She’d go down now and start again before dawn. It was all she could do.
She slid into bed, ready, willing to go under, but the minute she closed her eyes, even with Roarke’s arm around her, the recording of the gang rape began to play in her head.
“Stevenson—Billy—couldn’t live with it, so he killed himself.”
“Hush now. Put it away.”
“I keep seeing her eyes, the terror in them.” She turned over, pressed her face to his shoulder. “And that moment when the terror’s too big, so you have to go away. Go inside, go somewhere else. I know what it is when it’s too big to stand. When the pain and the fear and the knowing you can’t stop it is too much to stand. And they just . . . devoured that terror. They wanted it. They wanted it so they kept at it, and found others, so they could revisit their fucking youth. It’s like that, isn’t it? Like going to a reunion and remembering when you were the hotshot on the field or the king of the goddamn campus.”
“There’s no logic or reason to it, darling. There’s no humanity in it.”
He was so warm, so solid, his hand stroking her back as if to soothe the dark thoughts away. She could feel her insides begin to shake, sense the wild tears that solved nothing burn closer.
God. God. She didn’t want to break again.
So she lifted her face. “Show me, will you? Remind me what it’s meant to be. How it always should be.”
“You’re so tired,” he murmured.
“Be my soother.” She tipped her face up again, touched his lips with hers. “I’ll be yours.”
21
She was his, and the miracle of belonging never failed to bring some light into the dark.
She knew what this physical act could mean when driven by violence, by a quest for power, when it was driven by need, by passion and lust. And she knew, from him, what it meant when driven by love.
That had saved her.
