Noah (27 page)

“No.”

She whimpered the word, her pain causing Noah instant agony. He saw the track of Gideon’s fingertips and struggled with blinding impulses. The touch was too intimate. Jealousy. It was hurting Kestra. Protectiveness. It released the memory of trauma and that connection to evil that blanketed their joined minds in blackness so thick it was suffocating. Resentment. Fury. The blinding necessity to lash back, to fight, to destroy the source for all time.

“No.”

This time it was Gideon who said the word.

It fell hard and harsh, a warning to the King and his whirlwind of uncontrolled emotions, and a rejection of the hand that reached out and clamped around Gideon’s wrist. In his rush of emotion, Noah would crush Gideon’s bones to dust if that was what it would take to make him cease hurting his mate.

“What manner of accident caused this?” Gideon directed the question to Kestra, who was already shaking her head in refusal. “This trauma is very old. You must have been quite young. They repaired your uterus, but you lost an ovary. Just the same, this level of scarring makes it impossible for you to carry a child.”

Kestra sobbed as Gideon aired out her dirtiest laundry. Noah’s death grip on Gideon’s wrist fell away like dust in the wind. Kestra was keening, a terrible sound of grief and hurt unlike anything he had ever heard. It tore into him like thousands of blades, scorching him with agony, as if he were standing on the surface of the sun. He clasped her even tighter, sealing her to his pounding heart as he cradled her head in his hand. He felt her hot tears touch his skin at his collar. She then laughed a slightly wild laugh against Noah’s neck.

“Are you ready for forever now?” she asked in a hot whisper. “Are you ready to be a King without an heir? A man with no hope of a child? Will you see me with all that beautiful, mindless passion now? Or will you look at me like all the rest—broken and defective?”

“Kestra,” he said with soft, scolding pain. “I am ready for only one thing, and that is you. You are perfect for me. You are perfect
to
me.” Noah raised hard eyes to the medic, but Gideon was moving to make his retreat. Legna was already in his mind and she snatched him out of the room with a teleporting pop.

“Look into my mind, baby, and understand me,” Noah urged Kestra gently. “I have always thought to have a child one day, but I have lived over six centuries without one and felt no great loss, because my house literally runs over with fosterlings and
very
short kin who leave too many toys around. There is only one thing I have ever craved with all of my heart and soul. From the first time I saw my parents kiss and look at each other with the boundless love that only comes with the perfection of mated souls, I have hungered for my soul mate. She who would be Imprinted on me for all time. I have aspired to nothing as much as I have yearned for this one thing. Not my throne, not my power, not my scholarship. None of these has mattered to me with the intensity with which I have wanted the one who would look into my eyes with that level of love and devotion I saw in my parents’ locked gazes, who would long for the same from me. The one. The only one.

“I have finally found you, baby, and nothing but Destiny herself can take you from me. Nothing you say will drive me from you. Nothing. Do you understand? You will be my love. I pray that I will be yours. I pray that I am worthy enough to earn it.”

“Why me?” she asked, huge tears refracting the crystal blue of her eyes as she bored her gaze into his. “Why waste this on a woman who has never known love? Who can’t even be sure she can feel it? A barren woman. A woman who is afraid of nothing except this one thing you’re asking of me. You offer devotion, obsession, centuries where you believe you won’t tire of me? I’m not that naïve, Noah.”

“Why do you use that word? Obsession? You keep using it, like a talisman to ward me off. I feel and know that scarred place within you, and it has nothing to do with your womb, Kestra. Tell me of this one who haunts you,” he demanded fiercely. “This one who makes you so afraid to be loved and adored by me. The one who blackened those words for you forever, making them a curse instead of the blessing they truly are.”

“The one who loved me so much that he would kill me rather than let anyone else have me?” She shuddered. “The one who couldn’t accept that I never loved him and never would. He did everything so sweetly at first. His words were like poetry, and he was just as charming as you are, but jealousy and possessiveness reared up and he became ugly. Then the ugliness would fade back to charm as he begged for forgiveness. I forgave once, but never again after that. I turned away from the pretty words and the cajoling and he screamed for me. Day and night, walking in my every step, my every move interpreted as an invitation, my every rejection everyone else’s fault except mine and his. Two years he haunted me. Stalked me. He hunted me like an animal and I lived in fear. I was fifteen when I met him, and I was seventeen when all that love and obsession finally turned to hatred and rage. I was seventeen when I came home from school and found my mother stabbed to death in the bathroom, my father slaughtered in the garage…”

Here she sobbed once, hard, the memories flooding her, flooding Noah, and he struggled to keep the violence of his reaction down. He knew what was coming. Like a tidal wave, it was an inevitability.

“Tell me,” he managed to choke out, his arms tightening around her, his kiss in her hair.

“It never occurred to me he would still be there. I…I couldn’t leave even if it had. Leave my mother? My father? What if they were still alive?” Her memory of being covered in her parents’ blood washed into him, her vain attempts to stem the flow from fatal stab wounds in her mother’s neck and throat. Blood on her hands. Blood on her cheerleading uniform.

And then hands in her hair.

Noah saw it without her recitation, and she knew he could see it. Hands in her hair, dragging her to a fresh point of slaughter. Fists against her face and body, endless pain as a rage she didn’t deserve was loosed upon her. Now her blood, broken teeth, broken ribs, broken arms and hands as she tried to fend off the blows. An offensive hit that threw him off her body. Rolling over, crawling.

Screaming, fiery pain as the knife slammed through the back of her thigh, tearing through her flesh, the tip breaking off against her thighbone.

And then he was on her, beating her again, but refusing her the bliss of darkness so she would be awake for the rape that went on endlessly. The police arrived while he was still inside her, trying to spend himself again on the pleasure of her pain. In his final fury, he plunged the blunted knife low in her belly, a purposeful attempt to make himself the last to ever use her as a complete woman.

Even as she lay in shock, begging God for mercy, death, or at least unconsciousness, she watched them shoot her assailant in her own living room. It was the end of evil, but it didn’t matter. He would never die now. He would always be there. Buried deep within her like the knife.

Yet she never shed a tear. She couldn’t.
He
would win every time she did. And she swore from that day she never would. She would never be a victim again, and she would never love anyone for fear…

For fear.

And she never had. Until Noah. He had touched her. He brought with him urges that she found she couldn’t resist. He resurrected wants and needs that had died with the plunge of a knife when she was only seventeen. She used sex as a control, a tool. Men who got too close were used and discarded coldly, assuring an end to friendship and caring. The very thing she had tried with him.

Except none had touched her like he had. None had made her burn, lit forbidden fires and desires. None but Noah had given her pleasure. She had thought pleasurable sex a lie or fairy tale; she had thought lovemaking an impossibility. Noah had come along and had changed everything, crawled under her defenses, and terror gripped her until she felt as though she were once more lying in helpless shock, waiting to see what horror would happen next.

She could fight anything; she could detonate the entire globe, sabotage the most powerful men in the world and bring them to their knees with both bombs and femininity. She was lethal, every step she took a danger to others.

Yet Noah had stripped her of her power, just as surely as he was setting off the changes to give her new ones. The Demon who claimed to be her Imprinted mate, claimed dependence on her for all time, promised the poetic possibilities of a depth of love unlike any she had known.

But one
he
had known.

Kestra suddenly raced into his memories, desperately needing to see what he knew. There was no stopping her as she rushed through them like a microfilm scanner, zipping to the one thing she wanted.

Sarah and Ariel.

His parents. Imprinted. The love, the touches, the need. Endless, beautiful need. Not obsession, but uniformity of living. Ariel had been so different from Sarah. He had passed on his position of Enforcer to his brother in order to marry her. He had become a warrior instead, just to please her. Still a fighter for his people, only different now. He was athletic in build, as dark as Sarah was light. Eyes of ice and blue like Kestra’s, only far darker. Hair as black as night. Sarah was blond and light, delicate in frame and petite against the height of her mate. He was aggressive and spoke his opinion like law; she was more temperate, willing to see all sides, and lovingly willing to coax her husband into seeing them as well. She mediated when he stormed. She railed and he teased her to frustration. She enjoyed riding through the night, so he bought and bred her beautiful animals on which to do so. He worried she missed her life of royalty, knowing he was too intemperate to ever become King. She worried she couldn’t give him the son he wanted so badly. But through it all they had loved. Rhythm, movement, and thought, all the harmonious symphony of two separate souls joined to make one. One in love. One in understanding. One in allowing those things that needed to be separate about them to maintain individual identity.

Ariel and Sarah. Hannah, Noah, and Magdelegna, the treasures of a wonderful union that had lasted for centuries. Sarah had given Ariel a son. Ariel had given Sarah a future King. Kestra saw them both within Noah. Aggression and excessiveness of desires and emotions, restricted by temperance and diplomacy. A scholar like his mother; a warrior like his father. The dark good looks of Ariel; the gentle, loving heart of Sarah.

Then she saw the tragedy of their deaths, as little dealt with as her own pain, as horrific as what she had suffered.

“Oh God…” she gasped, reaching to wrap her arms around his head, holding him tight and close. “Oh, Noah…”

The King fought back pain as she slid into his memories of that day, the day he and Gideon had found Sarah flayed apart, raped and eviscerated by one of their own. The very same horror as Kestra had suffered. Only, it had been a random act out of the blue instead of a purposeful torture, instead of a bomb ticking away waiting to explode. The child Magdelegna, only a few years old, looking for her mother and finding her before they could protect the scene. How to live with that child’s expression? What choices to make? To suddenly be the head of the household as Sarah’s mate fell into despair? How could Ariel exist without Sarah? He had felt every thought, every moment of torment and pain before she had died. Too far…too far from her to stop it. Failing her. Failing his children. Failing his heart and soul as halves of both were ripped away. Too far to stop his son from finding her. Too far to stop Legna from seeing what no toddler should ever see.

They had lost both parents that night. Ariel’s devastation couldn’t be assuaged. No Imprinted mate could survive the grief of such loss. They knew he would be gone within a year, one way or another, and there was nothing they could do about it. They didn’t want to do anything about it. They wanted him to have mercy, to go and be with their mother beyond this lifetime. But even the dignity of his own death was denied Ariel. He was Summoned shortly after, taken by black magic and Transformed into a horrific monster. And Noah, having been made King by then and the pride of his parents, had to send his Enforcer out, ringing the death knell that would save the world from his ruined father. Jacob. Jacob, who had never known how much gratitude and love Noah had felt toward him for doing that service, for freeing his father from torture and torment.

And so ended a fairy tale. A love incorruptible.

“No…” Noah whispered against her ear as he heard the bitter ring of that thought. “You have to understand that the end of the story is unimportant, Kestra. All stories end. All life ends. Nature makes it so. And you know that it can be peaceful or it can be violent and cruel, but it is not the end that matters. It is everything that happens right up until that very last minute that matters most.” He stroked fingers through her hair, knowing she listened as she held him tightly and breathed against his neck. “I know you understand this concept more than anyone I am likely to know. You had two paths before you when that terrible thing happened to you.” They closed their arms tighter around each other in impulsive support. “Be forever a victim, or be anything and everything that savage thought he could take away from you. Oh, you make so much more sense to me now,” he breathed, making her laugh, the tone low with spent tears.

“Don’t get cocky. You don’t know half the things about me you think you do,” she taunted weakly.

“I am living in your mind,” he reminded her in an intimate whisper. “I see the fire. I know Fire, Kestra. Come see mine, see the things I have done, justly and unjustly, all a part of learning my way through life. I see the fury you try to express with explosives. I feel the craving for deeply burning passion that you try to fill with danger. You are notorious? A mercenary? This is supposed to shock me or impress me? I wish to please you, so do let me know.”

“You’re mad as a hatter, you do know that, don’t you?” She sighed the phrase, but there was no rancor to it, no power, and she was relaxed completely in his embrace. Her fingers slid into his loose hair, the curls still damp from his shower. She stroked through them slowly, the sensation singing through Noah as if a tuning fork had been struck to him. The vibration traveled from her fingertips and straight to his toes with some interesting pauses in between. “Nightwalkers, hmm?”