It had been quiet for a while.
Pushing onto her feet, Niamh hesitated a second before she opened the bathroom door.
She feared what she’d find in the bedroom.
Forcing herself to be brave, she stepped out into the room.
Bedside lamps laid broken and damaged. The bedspread and mattress had been torn to shreds and the headboard was cracked in half.
None of that mattered.
What mattered was Kiyo curled up in a ball on his side, on the floor next to the bed. He was now covered head to toe in silvery veins. Even his face.
His breathing was slow and raspy.
He hadn’t healed.
“Kiyo.”
His eyes flew open. Something warm glittered in them. “I knew you were there. I smelled you.”
She’d known he’d probably know. All he’d cared about was that she wasn’t close enough for him to snap his teeth at her.
Niamh threw her hand out and the room repaired itself. Including the bed.
Without a word, she reached for Kiyo and leaned down to help him to his feet. He held on to her, needing her strength. Resolve moved through her as she helped him onto the bed.
“The change didn’t work.” She pressed her hands to the mattress to lean over him.
He gave a slight shake of his head. He looked so strange with the silver veins spreading up his throat into his cheeks. Niamh wanted to kiss each one away. “The pain is better, though. I know I look bad, but I think my body is healing. I can’t die, remember.”
Niamh reached for the sheets and pulled them up to cover his nakedness. He didn’t look like he was healing at all, and there was a fevered flush to his skin.
“Think it might just take a day or two.” He reached for her hand. Trying not to jerk in surprise, Niamh let him thread his fingers through hers. “You changed your hair back.”
She gave a startled laugh. Were men supposed to notice these things? Especially when they were … Her smile died. “I’m me again.”
He squeezed her hand. “You were always you. Hair color doesn’t change that.” Worry darkened his eyes. “You need to eat.”
“I’m not hungry. And you should be the one who’s eating after …” She squeezed her eyes closed. “Kiyo, I’m so sorry about Astra. What you experienced last night …”
“Wasn’t your fault.” He tugged on her hand. “Order some food. I’ll try to eat some too.”
She knew he said the last part because it was the only thing that would motivate her to order room service.
Not long later, she placed the delivered meal tray onto the bed between them. Kiyo let her spoon chicken noodle soup into his mouth before shaking his head against any more.
She supposed it was something. Nibbling on a pork dumpling, she studied him. “So we just have to wait this out?”
His breath rattled. “I think so.”
“The silver stopped you from changing, didn’t it?”
“Yeah.” Kiyo didn’t hide the torment in his eyes. He let her see what the pain had been like. Her eyes stung as he spoke. “The moon tried to force the change while the silver prevented it.”
For the rest of her long eternity, she’d never forget the sound of his agony.
“I’m okay now.” He slid a hand along the mattress to tap her arm. “Kind of deserved it for treating you like that.”
“Don’t even joke about it.” Niamh glared at him.
“I’m not joking.”
“Kiyo, you might have been an insensitive bastard to me, but I would never want you to go through what you did last night.”
“Hey, hey, okay, don’t get upset,” he replied hoarsely, his brows puckering.
Wiping impatiently at the tears scoring hotly down her cheeks, Niamh couldn’t meet his gaze. He already knew by now that she cared too much about him.
“What I should have said … what I was actually thinking … was that I wasn’t worthy to be your first, Niamh. If you’ve waited this long, then you must be waiting for the right guy. You deserve better than me for your first time.” He rolled his head back on his pillow, glaring at the ceiling.
Though the subject made her feel vulnerable, she found herself flicking her fingers at the food tray so it disappeared to outside their hotel room door. Then she laid down beside Kiyo. She felt him looking at her as she stared at the paneled ceiling. “I didn’t mean to wait,” she admitted.
“For sex?”
“Yeah.” She smiled, feeling stupidly shy.
“Tell me about it.”
Niamh turned her head to look at him.
Kiyo smirked. “I’ve got some time on my hands. And I want to know about you.”
Tenderness flooded her and she realized with some discomfort that the wolf could probably talk her into doing anything.
“It was difficult to make connections,” Niamh told him. “Being what I was and always on the run. But it was more than that.” She looked back at the ceiling as she finally admitted, “My brother was a bit suffocating. While he gallivanted all over the place, screwing gorgeous strangers, men and women he picked up in bars and bistros and museums … I wasn’t allowed to have that.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Ronan used to say it was for my own protection. I let myself believe him. The truth was, he was afraid. Not just of me being found out, but that the life he’d come to love—no matter how much he complained about it—would be taken from him if I met someone. Ultimately, however, I think he was just afraid to lose me. He loved me. I was the only family he had. And he didn’t want me to love anyone but him.”
“That’s messed up.”
Niamh looked at Kiyo and saw his indignation on her behalf. “I know. But in the end, he did die trying to protect me.”
Kiyo’s expression softened. “Yeah.”
Silence fell between them.
Then he asked, “So there was no one? Ever?”
Blood warmed her cheeks as she remembered Matteo. “There was an Italian.” She grinned. “We stayed in Lake Como for a month. And there was this boy from Rome staying at his family’s vacation home in the hills. He took a liking to me and wasn’t at all put off by Ronan.”
“What age were you?”
“Nineteen. He was a few years older, in his last year at uni.” Niamh looked at Kiyo and found him patiently waiting for her to continue. “Ronan liked women and men who were already in a relationship. He didn’t have to worry about them getting clingy. Well, most of the time. He’d started sleeping around with a man who had a wife and kids. We argued about it a lot. But I was always too afraid to push him because I felt I owed him.”
“Messed up,” Kiyo repeated.
Niamh exhaled slowly. “So he was off with this married man, and I snuck out to see Matteo. Thinking Ronan wouldn’t be back for hours, I took Matteo to the hotel room. I wanted to know,” she whispered, feeling her body heat at the memory, not of Matteo’s touch but of Kiyo’s. “I wanted to know what it was like. I let him undress me and touch—”
“I don’t need the details.”
Trying not to be delighted by the jealousy Kiyo couldn’t hide, Niamh smothered her smile. “No details. Other than to say he was just about to make home base when Ronan burst into the hotel room. They got into a massive fight and Ronan and I had to leave.”
Melancholy fell over her at the memory.
She didn’t want to remember her brother like that.
“He stopped you from living.”
“He kept me on mission,” she argued.
Cool fingers curled around her hand and Niamh turned back to Kiyo. His look was one of compassion mingled with frustration. “He kept you from living.”
Niamh shrugged, her lips trembling with grief. “But he helped me survive.”
Kiyo squeezed his eyes closed as if he felt her pain. His hand gripped hers. “There’s more to life than just surviving. You reminded me of that.”
Emotion swelled hot and thick between them, and hope glimmered in the depths of Niamh’s heart.
“Tell me something good about him. A good memory?” Kiyo asked, as if he knew she needed the balance from remembrance.
She searched her memories. “There are so many. How he’d hold me when I had a vision, even though the older and stronger I got, it was really difficult for him to contain me. Sometimes I left bruises,” she remembered in remorse. “I told him not to hold me through it, but he said he couldn’t see me like that. That he needed to be there to comfort me.
“I think that’s one of the things about him I miss most.” She struggled against her grief. “Knowing he was there to shield me when I was vulnerable.” She chuckled at a thought. “And his sense of humor. Ronan had the most wicked sense of humor. Completely politically incorrect but in a world gone PC mad, he was refreshing. He’d crack me up in the most inappropriate places.
“We visited Vatican City a few years back and he was bored from the get-go, and frankly being annoying. He kept making loud comments about the disproportionate distribution of wealth, the hypocrisy and disgusting display of money when there were people begging for food on the streets of Rome. Whether or not you agree with him, it was pretty bloody embarrassing when you’re crammed into the place with thousands of other people, trying to pretend like you don’t know the cheeky bastard.” She laughed now, remembering his “couldn’t give a feck” attitude and how much she’d loved him for it.
“When we got to St. Peter’s Basilica, I’d gotten away from him and was standing with a crowd in front of the Pietà. Have you seen it in real life?” She turned her head on the pillow to ask him. The Pietà was a sculpture by Michelangelo of the Virgin Mary holding the dead body of Jesus.
Kiyo nodded. “I’ve seen it.”
“There’s something about it, isn’t there? You don’t have to believe in God or Jesus Christ to feel it.”
“I know what you’re talking about.”
“I was lost in the moment. Perhaps it was the Catholics around me crying over the sculpture or maybe it was just the sorrow Michelangelo captured in a grieving mother’s face. I don’t know what it was about it, protected behind its glass wall … I just knew I felt a deep spiritual sadness.” Niamh sighed heavily. “And then my bloody brother appeared and cracked the most blasphemous, terrible, awful joke as loudly as he bloody possibly could.” Niamh shook with laughter. “It wasn’t even funny, but the moment was so badly ruined that I started to laugh. It was awful. I couldn’t stop laughing, and the more I laughed, the more he laughed and the guiltier I felt.”
Kiyo grinned as she peeked at him through the hands covering her face. Her cheeks were still hot remembering the moment.
“Oh, it was equal parts horrifying and hilarious. I thought the tourists and guards were going to lynch us. He was such an arsehole,” she said affectionately. “He made light of things because everything was always so heavy for me. I didn’t really see how much he did that until he was gone.”
Niamh turned onto her side, hands to her cheeks. Kiyo’s chest rose and fell with shallow breaths as he held her gaze. “I feel like someone stole a piece of me that I’ll never get back. Like there’s always going to be this emptiness inside me because he’s gone. It was different when Mam died. A different kind of aloneness. I loved her, but we weren’t close. I know that sounds strange, but we just never bonded the way she and Ronan did. You were close to your mam … did you feel that way when she died? That emptiness?”
“Yeah,” he answered without hesitation, voice hoarse. “It had always been us two against the world. She never blamed me for any of it. She always told me she’d never change what happened because in the end, she had me. My mother was a dreamer.” He smiled softly. “She believed in magic and romance even after my father left her. Despite his betrayal, despite her family’s betrayal and the way they and everyone else treated us, she still saw the good in people. There was an innocence about her. A light. I see the same thing in you.”
Emotion thickened Niamh’s throat.
“She used to tell me I was special and that I’d do something special with my life. They weren’t just words—she dreamed big for me. Her belief was almost enough to make me feel a part of the world. Almost.” He sighed wearily, turning to stare up at the ceiling. “I was angry at her when she killed herself. I didn’t understand how she could leave me alone.
“When I got older, I understood that what was done to her broke her. Those men took away her dreams and violated her into darkness. I stopped being angry and started to feel guilty. I kept thinking, what if I had talked with her … reminded her who she was and tried to pull her back into the light.” Kiyo turned toward Niamh, and her eyes filled with tears in answer to the ones she saw in his. “I couldn’t do that for her. But I will fight to my last breath to do that for you. Astra can’t have you.”
Niamh didn’t know what part of the high-octane events of the last twenty-four hours had spurred the lowering of Kiyo’s defenses. She didn’t care.
That hope she felt earlier was rising.
Sliding her hand along the mattress, she took hold of his again. His pulse fluttered weakly beneath her thumb as it rested on his wrist.
Determination filled her as they stared into each other’s eyes, lost in the undeniable connection that bound them together.
They laid like that in the quiet for a while.
Just holding on to it. Just holding on to each other.