Soulbound: A Lone Star Witch Novel (30 page)

Making a mental note to ask Lily about it in the morning, I prop the text on the coffee table before heading straight for my room. Though I have to admit I’m a little freaked out after what happened yesterday, I’m too tired to let it keep me up one more night. If I don’t get some serious sleep soon, I’m going to be talking in tongues. Besides, Donovan and Lily are right down the hall if I need them.

I start stripping the second I hit my doorway. After everything that happened tonight I feel dirty—inside and out. I want to take the world’s longest shower, to scrub away the grime I feel all over me. Too bad the dirt on the inside isn’t as easy to get rid of.

Without bothering to hit the lights, I head for the bathroom. I’m not sure I want to look at myself in the mirror right now anyway.

“While I’m sure I’ll appreciate the view once the lights are on, I figure I should warn you I’m here before you take anything else off.” Declan’s voice drifts through the darkness.

A strangled little cry emerges from my throat as I dive for the lights—just to ensure it really is Declan standing by the window in the front corner of my room. Too late I remember all I’m wearing from the waist up is the fuck-me red bra I put on when I got dressed this morning.

I clutch my turtleneck in front of me, but the damage is already done. The temperature in my room plummets toward frigid as the amusement on Declan’s face turns to fury.

He’s across the room in a second, his rage a malevolent force that presses in on me a little more with every breath he takes. “What the hell happened to you?” He bites the words out from between clenched teeth.

“I’m fine,” I tell him as I start to jerk the turtleneck over my head.

He’s faster than I am, and he rips it away from me, sends it flying across the room to land on my lamp. The light in the room grows a little dimmer, which I figure can only be a good thing. But he doesn’t even notice.

Instead, he places a gentle finger on my chin, presses upward so that he can get a better look at my neck. I’m not sure what the bruises are like there, but judging from how I felt when I relived the killer slitting that girl’s throat, I’m guessing it’s not good.

“This is a long way from fine. Who hurt you?”

I don’t know what to say to that. “No one.”

“I don’t believe you.” He traces a finger over my neck to my collarbone, stopping just short of the upper swell of my breast. I look down, realize he’s tracing one of a dozen or so bruises, just on my chest area. Between the bruises from two days ago and the ones from tonight, I’m a Technicolor mess. Red, black, blue, purple, green, yellow. Throw in some orange and I could pass for a rainbow.

I don’t make that observation, though. Declan already looks more dangerous than I have ever seen him.

He steps back, starts to walk around me, and I try to plaster my back to the wall. I don’t know what I’m more ashamed of—the bruises or the Sebas that so obviously reveal the tie I feel to him, even after all this time.

He wraps a hand around my shoulder, and though his grip is gentle—tender even—it is also inexorable. I know he won’t be denied, not in this.

He curses when he sees my back, low and long and furious. “These are whip marks.” He traces one with a
soothing finger. I flinch anyway and he jerks his hand back. “Did I hurt you?”

I shake my head no, though it’s not exactly the truth.

“Is it just your upper body? Or is there more?”

I flinch. His tone is so icy it feels almost like a blade sliding along my flesh. I scramble away from him, but there’s nowhere to go.

He notices, pulls himself back. “I’m sorry,” he tells me. “You have to know I’d never hurt you.”

I do. At least, I think I do. “This isn’t what you think.”

“Tell me what it is then.” He’s prowling the room now, pacing the length of the back wall like a tiger in a cage.

I don’t know what to say. To tell him that I’m connected to the victims this way makes me vulnerable and I can’t stand to be that way—not to him. Not again.

Plus, though he might have viewed Lina’s body yesterday, I doubt they shared with him the extent of the damage. If he doesn’t already know everything that was done to her, I don’t want him to see the evidence of it on my body. I have no problem fighting with him, but explaining this—showing him this—seems cruel.

“It’s nothing,” I repeat. “No big deal.”

The temperature drops so fast and far that my teeth actually start chattering from the cold. He must hear them because he closes his eyes, takes a deep breath and after long moments, the room warms back up to its normal temperature.

“Thank you,” I say when I can talk again.

“Tell me.”

“I don’t know. It’s some weird psychic thing.” Please, let him leave it at that.

“
Tell me.”
He looks calm and controlled, but his eyes are wild. Dark. Bottomless. Seething.

“They just showed up—”

“Goddamn it, Xandra! Don’t bullshit me. Who the fuck did this to you?” he roars, as the final, tenuous ribbons
on his control snap free. Power surges through the room, shattering the lightbulb in one of my lamps and making the others flicker.

“I’m trying to tell you!” I snarl back, even as I wrack my brain for something that will make this whole thing sound less terrible than it is. But in the end, I’ve got nothing. After three days of hell, my brain is fuzzy and I’m coming up blank.

Besides, there’s a little voice inside me whispering that if I can keep Declan from seeing the extent of the damage, maybe it won’t be so bad to have him know. He’s lived a long time, is more powerful than I can wrap my mind around. Maybe he’ll have some idea of what’s going on here.

I glance up at him, hoping for some reassurance that I’m doing the right thing, but one look into his face tells me I’m doing the
only
thing. There’s no way he’s letting this go, no way this is going to go any other direction than how Declan wants it. That chafes a little, but in the end, I know when I’m beat.

I cross the room, sink onto the bed. Gesture for Declan to do the same. He’s seething with rage, but he does what I ask without a word of dissent. And then he just waits, immovable and impatient.

“I don’t know how to explain,” I finally start, holding up a hand when it looks like he’s going to say something else. “But the first of these bruises showed up after I found Lina down by the lake. More showed up tonight.”

“They just showed up?” He sounds skeptical. “For no reason?”

“Not exactly.” I go on to tell him what happens to me when I find a body—and what Lily and I surmised the other night. I try to skim over the worst parts, not wanting him to figure out all the awful things that happened to Lina, but I can tell by the look on his face that Declan reads between the lines quite well.

When I’m done, silence reigns. He doesn’t move, doesn’t speak, barely breathes for long seconds, until I’m all but squirming in my seat, waiting for the other shoe to drop. He doesn’t look angry anymore—doesn’t look anything, really—but I can sense a volatile fury simmering just under the surface. Instead of calming him down, my explanation has made only him angrier.

Minutes pass and I’m just about to chalk this whole open communication thing down as a really bad idea when Declan finally speaks. “He’s connected to you.”

“That’s what I think—”

“That wasn’t a question. I was telling you what’s going on. Somehow this bastard has figured out a way to link with you.” His eyes skim over my body. “Are you marked?”

My hand flies to my collarbone, and the circlet of Isis that has been with me forever.

He sees the action, shakes his head impatiently. “By him. Have you been marked by him.”

I nod reluctantly, knowing as I do that he’s going to insist on seeing the brand on my thigh.

Sure enough, his eyes go to my lower half, the only part of my body he can’t currently see. “Show me.”

“It’s on my thigh—” I start. Before I can finish my sentence, he’s fumbling with my jeans. For one, brief second I flash back to that moment at the Capitol, when I felt
him
inside of me, and I freak out. I claw at Declan, shove him away.

He lets out a low hiss and at first it seems like he’s going to force the issue—which I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to forgive him for. I’m not thinking now as I push away from him, pressing myself into the corner in an effort to protect myself.

He gets it right away, which only makes things worse—for both of us. Though his entire face closes down so that I can’t read any emotion in it, I can feel it
seething in him. An overwhelming force he has only the most tenuous control over.

He swallows convulsively a time or two, so that when he speaks his voice is gentle. “Why don’t you go take a shower, get cleaned up? Then you can put some shorts on and show me. Does that sound okay?”

I don’t even bother to nod. I just grab a pair of pajamas and run for the bathroom. Which makes me feel like a coward and an idiot, but I can’t do anything about either right now. I need some space, a chance to regain some perspective. And I need to be clean. I can’t do any of those things in my bedroom, with Declan watching me.

I turn on the shower and strip out of my jeans and underwear. Then, as soon as the water is viciously hot, I step under it. Let it wash away all the filthy things inside me. Except it isn’t working—I can still feel all the obscene and terrible things he did to those women.

I’m furious, horrified—at both him and myself. It didn’t happen to me, he didn’t actually touch me, and yet here I am whimpering in the shower. It’s a disgrace, to me and to those women who suffered so wretchedly at his hands.

I’ve been in here long enough, too long really, and I tell myself to woman up. To get out of the shower and go face Declan—who is even now calling my name from the other side of the door. And yet I don’t make any move to turn the shower off. I can’t.

Instead, I reach for my puff and shower gel and I wash myself from head to toe, again and again. I pay no attention to the bruises, scrubbing so hard that they all begin to ache and twinge even when I’m not touching them. It doesn’t matter. I want to be clean.

I’m okay—I hold it together—until I get to the bruises on my upper thigh. The ones where he held that poor girl while he—

That’s when I break. I slide down to the shower floor and start to cry, harsh, wracking sobs that hurt my whole body. I want to stop, but I can’t. I keep feeling him on top of me, ramming himself inside of me. Inside of her, I remind myself viciously. Not me. Her. She’s the one who had to live through the violence—not me. All I experienced are the residual memories and I’m falling apart. It’s ridiculous, demeaning, infuriating, and yet I can’t get off the shower floor.

I don’t know how long I sit there, arms wrapped around my knees as I fight against the memories and emotions bombarding me from all sides. Lina’s experiences blend with this other girl’s until I can’t tell one apart from the other. Which is somehow worse, like who they are and what they suffered doesn’t matter. And it does. It really does.

The water goes from hot to cold and still I sit there, rocking back and forth. In a corner of my mind, I hear Declan on the other side of the door, demanding to know if I’m okay. But his words don’t register—nothing does but the pain and the filth. I reach for the shower gel.

Except Declan is suddenly there, opening the glass shower door and turning off the water. His face is white, his eyes livid with more emotions than I can hope to name. But his hands are tender as he squats next to me in the shower, shoes and all, and wraps a towel around me.

He murmurs to me as he dries me, soft nonsense words that make no sense but that somehow fill up that empty, aching space inside of me. When he’s dried all the parts of me he can reach, he picks me up and carries me to my bed.

I tense when he lays me on it, but he just walks back into the bathroom for my pajamas. Then he turn his back and gazes out the bedroom window as I pull them on.

“Can you show me the mark now?” he asks hoarsely, and I nod before I realize he can’t see me.

“Yes.”

He nods and turns slowly, his hands hanging loosely at his side where I can see them. Part of me is horrified that he thinks I’m this fragile little flower, but another part is thankful for the treatment. Which just goes to show how messed up I really am right now.

I stand up and turn around, legs spread so that he can see the mark that curls from the back of my thigh to my inner thigh.

His breath hisses out at his first sight of it, and he sinks to his knees behind me. “Can I touch it?” he asks after studying the brand for long seconds.

I nod, bracing myself for the same excruciating pain I felt when Donovan touched me.

E
xcept with Declan, there is no pain. Just the soft brush of his fingertips over my skin as touches the mark for the first time, and the softer sound of him murmuring ancient words of safekeeping.

He says the spell again and again, and I can feel heat blooming on my thigh wherever he touches. Not sexual heat, just a healing warmth that takes away pain from the mark that I barely even know I was feeling.

When he finally pulls away, I start to turn toward the mirror, to see what he has done. He stops me with a hand on my leg.

“I can take the bruises from you and the pain.”

It’s a question from a man used to doing exactly what he wants, and I know it’s a concession based on my fragile state of mind. It makes me angry—not at him, but at myself for being so weak. For needing someone to take care of me.

And yet, at the same time, I want to take him up on the offer. I hate these bruises, hate what they stand for and what they remind me of every time I glimpse or think about one of them. If I could look in the mirror tomorrow morning and see again, maybe I could forget that there’s a part of me that will never be the same again—no matter if I get rid of one bruise or all of them.

“Xandra?” he asks from where he’s kneeling between my thighs.

I nod. “Please. I would appreciate it.”

“Okay.” He stands in one effortless movement, ushers me over to the bed. “Lie down. It’s going to take a few minutes.”