“Want to talk about it?” Kris said, but when I turned to look at him, I only saw his profile. He was staring at the targets—evidence of the new me. That she was all I had left.
“Talk about what?”
“About the cooler. Whatever happened.”
“No. Thanks, though.” I circled the bed and started straightening the sheets and blankets, just to have something to do with my hands.
“Are you okay?” His voice was deep. Gruff. As if he was holding back more than he was actually saying.
I fluffed a pillow and propped it against the headboard. “Are any of us?”
He shrugged, and the gesture looked tired. “Valid point.” Kris was quiet then, watching me while I picked up clothes from the floor. When I bent to pull a dirty sock from beneath the bed, he stepped forward and took my hand, tugging gently until I stood, very aware of how close he was. Of how our hands were still touching. “I want to ask you for something.” Now he was whispering, and his gaze kept volleying between my eyes and my lips, as if he wanted something from them both. “And you’re going to say no, and that’s okay. But I have to ask. I need to know.”
“Ask,” I said, and there was something in his eyes. Something I almost didn’t recognize, coming from him. Some fragile kind of vulnerability.
“Can I see it? Please?”
“What?” My heart thumped.
“Your scar.”
For a second, I couldn’t breathe. “Why?” I whispered, when I could speak again. That wasn’t what I’d expected. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected.
“So I can understand.” He was serious. There wasn’t a hint of a smile anywhere on his face, but that vulnerability was as raw as I’d ever seen it. “I want to know who you are, and I can’t, until I know what you’ve been through.”
“You already know.” Yet knowing wasn’t the same as truly understanding. And he’d already shown me his scars—an entire notebook filled with them.
I headed for the door, and he thought I was kicking him out—I could see that in the slump of his shoulders and the regret behind his eyes. But then I closed the door and leaned against it, and he exhaled.
Kris’s brows rose in silent question. I nodded, and he crossed the room slowly. His gaze didn’t leave mine until he knelt on the floor in front of me and my heart pounded so hard I was sure he could hear it. For one long moment, he stared at the material covering my stomach, and the pervasive anger and underlying sense of loss I’d been living with for months warred with something new inside me. Something fragile and...hopeful.
Then he put his hands on my hips and looked up at me, and I held my breath. Kris looked so different from this angle. From above, his shoulders bunched with tension, his jaw tight. He looked strong, but sad.
He lifted the hem of my borrowed T-shirt slowly and his thumb trailed over my skin beneath the cotton. I held my breath. He was very careful, like my wound might still be open and bleeding literally, as it bled still in my heart.
He inhaled when he saw it, dark pink and smooth to the touch, and when he looked up at me, I saw my own horror reflected on his face.
Tears filled my eyes again when his hand covered my scar, low on the right side of my abdomen, trailing beneath the waist of my shorts. His hand was warm, and I felt it all around the wound, but not in the scar itself. The scar had no feeling, which was odd, because it seemed directly connected to my heart, which hurt all the time.
“I’m so sorry.” His hand shifted to cradle my hip, and when his fingers left my stomach, his lips found it. “He will pay,” Kris murmured, his breath warm against my skin, the stubble on his chin rough, yet comforting in the way only something so tangibly masculine can be. “No one should touch you out of anything other than adoration, ever again.”
My breath caught in my throat, and my hands caught in his hair, and when Kris stood, he was all I could see. “I adore you, Sera. Will you let me touch you?”
“Yes. Please.”
The words carried almost no sound, but he heard them.
Kris blinked at me in surprise, but that was gone in an instant, replaced by desire burning bright in his eyes, tinged with something stronger. Something I desperately wanted to believe in.
I could have this. I could have Kris, and if what I saw in his eyes could be trusted, I wouldn’t be getting him just for the night. And I wouldn’t be getting him alone. Kris was a package deal. He came with sisters, and friends, and a grandmother. A ready-made family with tempers, and hugs, and dementia, and chili, and arguments, and laughter, even in the worst of times, and a shared mission I already believed in.
They couldn’t replace the family I’d lost. But they didn’t have to, and they wouldn’t try to. They would just be there.
Kris would be there. If I let him.
Kris kissed me, and I kissed him back. I let everything go, and it was easier than I’d expected, because he wanted the burden. He didn’t just want to touch me, he wanted to know me. He wanted to know what had made me who I was. So I showed him.
I poured all my grief into that kiss. All my hunger for vengeance. And I fed from the same in him, astonished by the translation of heat from remembered violence to carnal appetite. We kissed until I forgot about the house around us and the people in it. Until I no longer felt the door at my back or the floor beneath my feet. I couldn’t feel anything but him, and I couldn’t touch enough of him to satisfy hands that had gone empty for too long. A mouth that had tasted only bitterness and pain for months on end.
But I could sure as hell try.
When kissing was no longer enough, I tugged on the end of his shirt, wordlessly commanding its removal as my mouth demanded even more from his lips. His tongue. Kris pulled away just long enough to tug his shirt over his head, and suddenly I could touch him unhindered by useless cotton.
I tasted him then, clean from a recent shower. His earlobes felt good between my teeth and his hair smelled like guy-shampoo. His neck was rough with stubble, and just a little salty. His chin was strong, and the back of his jawbone fit in the gap between my lips like I was always meant to kiss him there.
My hands found smooth skin over taut muscle. Hard planes and all the right masculine bumps and ridges. He let me play, tasting, testing, learning his body as thoroughly as I could, because I wouldn’t get another chance. His hands stayed anchored at my waist, fingers splayed around the curve of my ribs. He was more patient than I.
Until he wasn’t.
His eager tug at my shirt demanded reciprocation, so I lifted my arms and let him take it off. I didn’t see where it fell, and I didn’t give a damn, because then he was touching me, and his touch felt hungry, yet restrained. He took his time, as if every inch of me deserved to be explored with equal attention, and when he dropped to his knees in front of me again, his lips trailing from my navel toward the low waist of my borrowed pj shorts, my head fell back against the door and my hands tangled in his pale hair.
Kris blazed hotter than anything I’d ever felt. His lips were like sparks against my skin, his hands practically on fire, and I burned everywhere he touched me. When his mouth found my scar again, those flames almost overwhelmed me, and I felt my body go still on its own. But then I pushed the memories away. I let him burn them back until I could hardly see them anymore, and when he hesitated at the waist of my shorts, I pulled him up to eye level.
“Is this what you want?” I was suddenly sure I’d misread some signal, or read more into what he was saying than he’d actually meant. Was that why he’d stopped?
“So much,” he said, his voice scratchy with desire, and I almost melted with relief. “But if you don’t, we don’t have to...”
“I do.” I wanted to touch all of him. I wanted him to touch all of me. I wanted to forget everything in the world that wasn’t relevant to him, and to me, and to the two of us together,
for as long as I could have him.
It’s sheer luck that we made it to the bed, when the floor was so much closer, but when I felt the mattress touch the backs of my thighs, I sat. Kris joined me seconds later, nude and unspeakably beautiful, and I closed my eyes, afraid to look too long at the miracle I’d found, for fear that it would disappear.
I exhaled at his next touch, then held my breath altogether when his mouth followed a moment later, working its way down from my neck. I kept my eyes squeezed shut and let my hands see for me, sliding over his arms and chest, feeling the curve of his biceps, then traveling over the planes of his back. His mouth trailed down from my breast, over my stomach, and I arched into his touch, drawing another groan from him as he slid the borrowed shorts over my hips. Then came the soft exhalation of surprise when he realized I wore nothing beneath them—I don’t borrow underwear.
And that was all the waiting I could take.
I kicked the shorts off and pulled him back up, opening for him, as he settled between my thighs. I slid the arches of my feet up his calves and he leaned closer to whisper into my ear.
“Look at me, Sera. Please,” he added.
So finally I opened my eyes, and when I met his gaze, he slid into me, slowly, smoothly, and I couldn’t breathe again until I had all of him. And I was terrified by how much I didn’t want to let him go.
He lingered there, my legs locked around him, staring into my eyes, and I discovered that now that I was looking, I couldn’t turn away from him. Not even when he began to move inside me, and my hips rose to meet him over and over. I couldn’t look away until he leaned close to whisper in my ear.
“I promise he will pay, Sera. He will pay with every drop of his blood, and with his very last breath.”
I clung to him, as fresh tears rolled down my cheeks and soaked into his pillow. Then I pushed it all away again—the despair, the anger—and lived in that moment with Kris. Our moment, in which nothing else existed. Nothing but him, and me, and the delicious friction building between us, burning hotter with each second, until I couldn’t breathe, and couldn’t think, and couldn’t hold back for another second.
I gasped as that heat spilled over in wave after wave of pleasure, and Kris groaned when his release caught up with mine. And for a moment afterward, neither of us moved. I didn’t want to let him go, and he seemed in no hurry to be freed.
Then he kissed the corner of my jaw and his weight and warmth disappeared. I sat up, suddenly sure I’d see him pulling on his clothes to leave the room, but instead he settled onto the mattress next to me. “Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere.” Kris pulled the sheet up to cover us both, then slid his arm beneath my pillow, and we lay there listening to each other breathe, while the rest of the world carried on without us.
It was the most peaceful moment I could remember since the night my family died. And I never wanted it to end.
Nineteen
Kris
She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever touched, and the saddest person I’d ever met, and I didn’t want to let her go. I couldn’t.
Afterward, I lay on my side next to her, one hand splayed across her stomach, trying not to think about her scar and what it meant. What he’d taken from her. What no one would ever be able to give her again.
I hated how helpless—how useless—that scar made me feel. I was supposed to prevent that. I was meant to save Sera’s baby. Her future. I was meant to spare her the grief she was still mired in, and maybe, if I’d actually done that, we would have come together in a moment of triumph, instead of shared grief.
“Can I ask you a personal question?” I stared down at her profile, no more able to look away from her than I was able to stop touching her.
She turned to look at me, and her eyes were damp. “Only if I get to ask one in return.”
“You can ask, even if you don’t want to answer my question. And that’s okay, if you don’t want to. I don’t have any right to ask.”
“Just say it.” A hint of a smile rode the corners of her mouth, but it was forced. It didn’t match the sadness in her eyes. “You’re making it worse, with the buildup.”
I shouldn’t ask. It was none of my business. But I had to know, for purely selfish reasons.
“Who is he?” My thumb twitched over her scar on the last word, surely an unconscious, nervous movement.
Sera frowned, and I saw the moment her confusion cleared. She’d thought I was asking about the killer. Or maybe about the child he’d taken from her. “My baby’s father?” she whispered, and all hints of that earlier smile were gone.
“Yeah. But you don’t have to...”
“His name is Ben. But he doesn’t matter. Really,” she said when I started to object. Of course he mattered. He’d lost a child, too. “He didn’t want the baby. He didn’t want me. We weren’t involved, beyond that one time. I don’t even know how to get in touch with him anymore, so maybe this was meant to be.”
“No,” I said, and she looked so relieved I wanted to kiss her. “This wasn’t meant to be.” I was meant to stop it. I’d failed Sera before I’d even met her.
“My turn,” she said, and I let her change the subject because we both needed it. “What was it like, being with Noelle? With a Seer?”
“You really want to know?”
She nodded. “Okay. Um... Going out with Noelle was like going out with Cassandra. The Cassandra.”
“From Greek mythology?”
“Yeah. The one who could see the future, but couldn’t change it.” Only what Noelle and I did together couldn’t really be called dating. There were no true meals, no movies and no Valentines. We stole moments from the real world, and we stole them shamelessly. We tried to pause time and live in a single second forever. In a heartbeat. In a glance. In that quick breath between desperate kisses. And every single one of those stolen moments happened between one o’clock and three o’clock in the morning. In my bed.
“But it wasn’t all sex,” I said, and Sera almost looked relieved. “Kori thinks it was, but Elle and I also talked.” More accurately, we’d whispered. We’d laughed. We’d teased. And one time, Noelle had cried. “Then, eventually, inevitably, she fell asleep. And that’s when things got weird. Every single time.”
“She started talking in her sleep?”
“Yeah. And now that I can look back on it with a little perspective—I’m wiser now, in case you didn’t know—I think that may have been the point for her all along.”
“But it wasn’t for you?”
I shook my head. The prophesies weren’t the point for me. Not then. Not until after Elle died, and I started wondering why I’d felt compelled to write down everything she said. “For me, she was the point. Being with her. I know she didn’t love me, but when she came home, she would let me pretend.”
“Home from where?”
I shrugged. “Wherever. She always left. But then she always came back, eventually.” I’d never talked to anyone else about Elle. Not like this. Not even Kori. Sera was the last person I’d expected to confide in—telling one girlfriend about a previous girlfriend rarely goes well. Not that either of them had officially accepted the title.
But that was the thing about talking to Sera—I always wound up saying more than I’d meant to. She charmed it out of me, as if I was a snake in her basket.
Which sounded kind of dirty, in retrospect.
“Did she ever say what it was like?” Sera still watched me, from inches away. “Seeing the future?”
“I only asked her once. She said it was like sitting in this old tire swing in Gran’s backyard. Did you ever swing in one?” I asked, and she nodded. “Remember how you could twist, and twist, and twist, then grab on tight and let the rope unwind? The world would spin around you, and you could only catch glimpses of things flying by? Elle said seeing th
e future was like that. Scary, and breathless, and never quite enough, but more than anyone could ever truly make sense of.”
Sera tried to hide a yawn. “Sounds...disorienting.”
“I’m sure it was.”
We were quiet after that, and I was starting to think she’d fallen asleep, until she snuggled closer. “Tell me a secret, Kris. You know all of mine.”
“What do you want to know?” I would tell her anything.
“I want to know about Micah.”
I exhaled slowly, breathing through an ache I could never really ease. “Who told you?”
“Kori told me about the kids. Why didn’t you? Don’t you trust me?”
“Now? With my life.” I squeezed her hand, trying to demonstrate the truth through touch. “But I couldn’t afford to trust you at first, and since then, there just hasn’t been time, between stealing back your pictures, and looking for Kenley, and getting shot at, and hiding from Julia Tower.”
“There’s time now,” she whispered. “Tell me about Micah.”
Another slow breath. Then I launched into a retelling of my biggest shame. “I was nineteen. Gran was getting too old to work, and I thought I was doing the right thing. Helping pay the bills. I took whatever jobs I could find, and I didn’t ask questions. It was easier to pocket an envelope full of cash if I didn’t ask why the jobs were off the record.
“Micah was the last of those jobs. A thirteen-year-old caught in the middle of a divorce battle. His mother had custody. His dad wanted him back. They told me the mother was abusive. That he’d be better off with his dad, but that Micah couldn’t see that yet, so I had to take him while he was sleeping.
“I did.” I swallowed a lump the size of a baseball in my throat. “Three days later, I heard Gran cussing at the television. Micah’s picture was on the screen. There was a picture of his parents, too. They weren’t divorced. The dad wasn’t the man who’d hired me.