Total pages in book: 120
Estimated words: 113936 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 570(@200wpm)___ 456(@250wpm)___ 380(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 113936 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 570(@200wpm)___ 456(@250wpm)___ 380(@300wpm)
She nodded. “You told the story over and over again. It was as if your mind was churning over the events, trying to create another outcome from the fact pattern. I’ve done this myself so I know what it’s like, the obsessive rethinking, reimagining. It changes nothing, and yet you do it—”
“I didn’t kill her.”
“Oh, I know that.” Her eyes were direct. “Unprovoked violence is not in your nature, not even with a stranger, and much less someone you love as much as you love her. That’s why I need to go my own way, you see.”
Kane shook his head. “No, I don’t see. At all.”
Nadya took a deep breath. Then she smiled in a stiff way, the false expression the kind of thing somebody does when they’re attempting to camouflage a vulnerability with nonchalance. “I can’t watch you ahvenge another, even though it is not only your right, but a sign of how much your shellan meant to you.”
“You don’t have to worry about my safety. I’m going to be careful.”
“That’s not the deepest why, I’m afraid.”
As her hand went to her eyes once again, he caught the scent of more tears, fresh as an ocean breeze. He wanted to reach out for her, to ease her in some way, in any way, but he knew she would move out of his reach.
“Nadya—”
She straightened herself and folded her hands in her lap, like she was gathering some kind of physical strength from the composure. “I have come to care for you—and not just as a patient or a friend. I suppose it doesn’t reflect well on my character, professional or otherwise, but we cannot change our emotions. We can only endure them.” Her hand brushed her cheeks with impatience. “So yes, that’s the truth of why I must go. I find being reminded of your love for another an intolerable pain, and how stupid is that.”
Kane just sat there for a moment, his mind replaying her words and trying to make sure he’d heard them right.
“I didn’t imagine it,” he whispered.
“Imagine?”
“I felt the warmth of you. All along. I used to anticipate it. After you would work around the clinic—cleaning and moving things—you’d come sit with me and I focused on you to try to get out of the pain. You were my lighthouse in the darkness. I used to get so impatient for you to finish what you were doing and come back to me.”
“I didn’t know you were so aware.”
“Of you, I was aware of everything.”
Abruptly, he thought of Cordelhia, picturing what he remembered of the way she looked and scented, dressed and spoke. The memories of his blond, waifish betrothed were not as sharp as they had been back in the beginning of his incarceration, the details of her dulled as if his recollections had been worn down by too much examination.
And then he remembered the choice he had made the night before: To stay alive and help Nadya, rather than go unto the Fade to be reunited with his mate.
“You ask me how I can bear to look at you.” He shook his head. “I became attached to you when I couldn’t see. Those feelings don’t go away. Your scent, your voice, your care for me were what saw me through, and what defines you for me.”
As she seemed surprised, he fell silent—until words left his mouth without any forethought, a truth shared because it had bubbled up within him and had to be expressed: “I had to come back to you for the same reason you feel the need to go now.”
He could sense her shock as a charge in the air.
But then she composed herself. “It’s not uncommon to think you have feelings for someone you see as your healer.”
“And maybe it’s just you. Maybe it’s not about the nursing… and all about you.”
When she just looked away, as if she wasn’t going to argue with him because the truth was too obvious, he had no idea what to say or do about any of it.
So he extended his wrist.
“Take my vein for any reason you want to justify to yourself,” he said. “I don’t care about the why. If we’re going our separate ways, I want you to be as strong as you can be. It will help me construct a future for you that I can be at peace with.”
In the silence that followed, the details of the living quarters they were in, from the blues and grays of the rug, to the plain walls and the comfortable furniture, became super-sharp in the periphery, as if his mind were recording everything about Nadya with such intensity, even the background around her was drawn into the intense focus.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“For what,” he prompted, when she stopped there.
“Your vein.”
With that, she lowered herself, and he felt the brush of the blanket’s fringe on his forearm first. Then came her small, cool hands, so gentle, so soft. Closing his eyes, he let his head fall back. As his breath began to pump, a tingling went through his body from the anticipation of the sharp points scoring his—