A Taste of Ice (40 page)

The two men stared at each other. Xavier had four inches on Griffin, but Griffin looked every bit the born leader.

Griffin’s phone rang. He answered it without breaking eye contact with Xavier. He grunted into it, shut it, then turned to
Cat. “David will take you to meet Heath in the conference room. I’ll meet you there in a few minutes. Gwen needs me.” He jogged off, leaving Cat to wonder and worry about how things were going between Gwen and Lea.

With a tight smile, David gestured her and Xavier out of the cell block and toward a
T
intersection. David was blond, too, but in a muddier fashion than Xavier. There was a casual air to his personality and posture, but he wore that same intense focus that all Ofarians seemed to have. Like they were forever trying to shift the weight of their worries around on their shoulders. That worry never went away; they just had to figure out how to bear it. She wondered if she’d ever get to be like that, and the prospect frightened her.

The panic returned without warning. That awful feeling of being engulfed by the flow of something she couldn’t stop or manage.

When they came to the
T
intersection, Xavier stopped walking. He stared off to the left, where the carpeted hallway curved around in a gentle arc and disappeared into complete darkness.

David slid his hands into his pockets and nudged his chin in the direction of Xavier’s glassy-eyed stare. “It’s storage now. Nobody wanted anything to do with the Circle. And did you see? We bricked over the old draining rooms.”

Xavier swiveled around, ignoring David to find Cat’s eyes. “Let’s go,” he barked. “We’re not here for me.”

David brought them to a part of the Plant devoted to offices, the space utilitarian and plain, but clean. He opened a door between two fake ficus trees, flipped on the light inside, and gestured them into a conference room. A round table occupied the center of the room, with six cushioned rolling chairs positioned around it. Another door stood on the opposite end of the room. David pointed to it.

“They’ll bring him in through there. I’ll wait for Griffin out in the hall.”

David stepped out, leaving the door open a crack. She and Xavier turned to each other.

“Are you—” she began.

A blaze of passion rolled over his gunmetal eyes and he was on her in an instant, pressing her back against the wall, his mouth hot and wet over hers. She gave in to him, because he
was Xavier and he ignited something fierce in her. She was the match, forever waiting for him to strike her into flame. And, like a match, that flame happened instantly and with a brilliant, intense burst of color and heat.

His kiss was hungry and hard, as only he was capable of. The crush of his body against hers, the strong length of his thigh pushed between her legs…it had been ages since they’d touched like this. The improperness of the situation and location and timing just barely registered. It was there, faintly poking at the back of her mind, but she skillfully ignored it. Ever since the morning after they’d first had sex, when she’d twirled the water, she’d felt Xavier slipping away. Now he was here, against her, kissing her like he wanted to regain every inch lost.

“I want you out of these clothes.” He was against her mouth, in her brain, in her bloodstream.

Yes
. She wanted that, too. Just the two of them and their skin. And he’d loom over her, chest to chest, and slide into her. He’d…Wait.

She was wearing a black Ofarian uniform. When she’d emerged from the bathroom at the house in Colorado wearing it, Xavier had turned away, but not before she saw how much the clothing bothered him. Did he want to sleep with her again? Or did he just want her, literally, out of Ofarian clothing? Was this an angry kiss? One of those he didn’t
want
to want?

And hadn’t he once told her that just the walk from his cell to the Circle had automatically switched on his libido? He’d been conditioned to want sex just by being here. What exactly was he reacting to? Her, or something entirely out of her control?

Xavier reached around her neck and pulled her hair away from her skin.
There
. He found that spot just below her ear that made her knees crumple. She whimpered, tilted her head more to give him better access.

“I miss that sound.” He swirled his tongue, the words seeping into her. “I’ve missed
you
, Cat.”

The best possible thing he could say.

She clutched at the waistband of his jeans. He’d accepted a shirt from Reed and a coat from David, but had refused to put on anything Ofarian black. At her touch, his stomach muscles clenched and she traced the hard ridges with her fingertips. Just
below, his erection nudged hard against her belly and it was all she could do not to reach for it right there.

“I’ve missed you, too,” she said, and he groaned.

Suddenly Xavier stopped. His lips left her skin and he turned his head away from her. “Go away, you bastard,” he snarled, even as he ground himself between her legs. “You don’t belong here anymore.”

“What?” Cat managed to whisper. She could barely stand, barely think.

A strange man’s voice rumbled through the conference room. It sounded like a wild animal had clawed out the man’s voice box and he’d tucked it back in, tatters and all.

“And where exactly do I belong then, 267X?”

Cat froze. Xavier froze.

He pushed off but kept her caged within his arms. He squeezed his eyes shut and his breath hissed in and out of his nose. “Cat,” he whispered. “Tell me you don’t see him. Please tell me you don’t see him.”

But Cat did. Across the table, she saw the paunchy Ofarian prisoner dressed in a gray jumpsuit, half his face melted from fire, and eyes she recognized as her own.

Heath Colfax, her father.

Heath Colfax, the Burned Man.

Xavier spun away from her and flew out of the conference room
so fast that by the time Cat dragged herself out from under the shock and ran after him, he’d already reached the end of the hall.

“Xavier!”

He didn’t turn around.

From the opposite direction, Griffin called her name. She half turned toward the Ofarian leader, now stalking toward her. “Not now,” she told him, so afraid to lose track of Xavier.

“Yes. Now.”

Griffin’s severe tone cemented her boots to the floor. He jogged up, his thick eyebrows drawn tightly together. “Keko has made it back to her people. She’s rallied them against us. The Chimeran chief has called the Senatus together for immediate war council. I need the fire elementals’ location. I need it
now
.”

She whirled around, but Xavier had disappeared from sight.

“Shit!” The curse came out surprisingly easy. “Shit! Fuck!” She wrapped her arms around her head, spun in a circle.

She couldn’t let him just run off like that, not after all that he’d told her that night in Shed.

“Just wait,” Cat told Griffin, then sped off down the corridor after Xavier.

The place was a maze. On the way in she’d paid more attention to him than to the pattern of lefts and rights. She called his name again and again. No answer, just the sharp, jangling echo of the cinder block walls throwing her own voice right back at her.

She sprinted down one hall that dead-ended in a large room divided by floor to ceiling windows. Reminded her of a hospital nursery. Only this place was empty and spooky and filled with ghosts. Spinning around, she backtracked and came face-to-face with the curved corridor leading into the Circle. She remembered now. They’d turned right coming through that door there, so that meant she had to go left to get out.

And there, at the
T
intersection, yawned the entrance to the first cell block they’d walked through. That meant it was close to the Plant exit, which was where Xavier was undoubtedly headed.

She burst through the double doors and let them swing wide behind her. He’d almost reached the end. When the squeak of the door hinges filled the block, he stopped. Turned around. His face burned red, his silver eyes swirling and tormented. His lips pulled back from his teeth, like she was about to attack him.

These past weeks together? All the progress he’d made? Gone. The connection they’d tenuously formed and then cemented that night in Shed? Severed. To him, she was his enemy again, and now he had the blood connection to prove it.

She stopped but he slowly started to move backward, toe-heel, toe-heel, toward the exit. She held up her hands. “We’ve gotten through this once. We can do it again.”

He jabbed a finger deeper into the Plant, his face twisted with unspeakable pain. “Before it was just in my head. A hallucination, a fucking nightmare. But that man is real. He’s
real
. And he’s your
father.
” He opened his arms, so long, so full of strength. “Ask me how I’m supposed to get over that. After all I told you that he did to me, and everything that I didn’t.”

Those words sliced and stung and bled like one of those fancy knives he kept in his kitchen.

“I am not him. And I’m just as shocked and horrified as you.”

“I need to get out of here.”

“Cat.” Griffin again, coming through the double doors and sounding a little out of breath.

“I have to talk to Heath Colfax,” she told Xavier. “He has information we need.”

We.

Xavier winced and turned his face away.

“I am Ofarian,” she said. “There’s no changing that.”

At length, he finally nodded, but it didn’t mean, “I accept you.” It meant, “I understand what you just said…and I don’t like it.”

“Can you just wait here for a bit? Until I’m done?” She was pleading with him now, her hands even pressed together in prayer. “Please. Don’t go anywhere yet. Not until you and I have talked more.”

Though he raised his eyes to her, his face was still pointed away and down, his hair grazing his cheek.

“Please.” She whispered now. “Just wait.”

There were other things she probably should have said. One thing in particular. But she hadn’t even fully worked it out in her mind, so how could she voice it? Her entire life had been thick and cloudy as a river bottom, and then suddenly Xavier came along and everything he’d told her about her heritage had washed her away in a flood. Her body and emotions and life had spun so furiously she had no idea which way was up, which way lay the sun and the air.

One problem at a time. What she and Xavier had created couldn’t disappear overnight. She would be there for him, always, but the Ofarians needed her help
right now
. She couldn’t let an entire race—her race—be a victim of war if she had the means to stop it.

Griffin said her name again, his impatience widening the cracks between her and her Tedran.

“It’s just talking, Xavier,” she said. “I can help innocents. You of all people should understand that.”

He didn’t move—not forward, not backward—and she allowed herself to be fueled by it.

She’d done all she could at this point. Telling him she loved him wouldn’t change a thing, because it wasn’t
her
he feared. It was what ran through her veins.

It was the man who’d given her life. The same man who’d stolen Xavier’s away.

“I can’t go back in there,” he said, his voice the lowest she’d ever heard it. “I won’t go any farther than this spot.”

“All right. Good.” Small victory, and she ran with it. “I’ll go talk to Colfax, then come back for you.”

She left the cell block with Griffin.

“What the hell’s going on?” he asked as they hurried back through the halls.

Maybe it would have been easier for her to say if Griffin was a hard-nosed, stoic leader who barked orders and wasn’t so good at sounding like he cared. Except that she was pretty sure he did care. He cared greatly for his people, and she was one of them now.

“Heath Colfax…my father…was Xavier’s guard in here. Xavier didn’t tell me everything, but what I know, it was bad.”

“
Shit
,” Griffin swore under his breath. “Does Colfax remember?”

They reached the door to the conference room again. Her hand shook as she touched it, and all that rattled around in her brain was the awful way Colfax had slurred Xavier’s prisoner number.

“He remembers,” she murmured.

She opened the door and stepped back inside.

That morning in the coffee shop, Cat had told Xavier:
I feel like
I’ve been treading water my whole life. Just sort of lost…out there. To me? Finding out about my parents would be sort of like a raft floating along. I could grab on, rest a bit, get to safety. But I always thought that knowing them would be a new beginning, not an end
.

She’d gotten both: an end to any hope of family, and the beginning of a whole new chapter filled with deceit and hate.

Heath and Jessica had been in love, had created Cat out of that love, but weren’t allowed to keep her. She expected to see evidence of that on Heath Colfax’s face as she looked at him from across the conference table. She expected to see some measure of love or yearning, that burst of emotion that came with bittersweetness. Maybe a smile. Maybe a flash of regret.

There wasn’t any of that. And yet Gwen had said he’d cried when she told him Cat had been found.

Colfax rested his forearms on the table, his wrist shackles jingling. His frown was made even more considerable by the smeared half of his mouth. He watched her, but it was only with disappointment.

She was here for a purpose. A very specific purpose. She had to remember that.

Behind her, the door clicked shut. Griffin stood just inside, his back against the door.

“They said your name is Cat.” Colfax’s voice was choppy and rough, like he was speaking around a bag filled with jagged marbles.

“It is.” Though she didn’t really want to, she pulled out a chair and sat.

“That wasn’t what Jessica was going to name you.”

She wasn’t going to cry. She wasn’t.

“She wanted Josephine or Jennifer…something that started with
J
. She told me that…after.” A little bit of emotion crept into the light brown eyes that were the exact same shape and shade as hers, then he shook it away with a jerk of his chin. He kept running his good fingers over the pattern of scars on his bad hand.