Chapter Sixteen

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

G od knows how many hours after Callum turned down Blade’s invitation to eat, the sound of the front entrance of the sanatorium opening woke him up. As he lifted his chin off his collarbone and opened his eyes, he was momentarily confused as to what time it was. But he knew where he was, even though the hallway outside of the private quarters was cast in shadows.

And his sore ass and stiff shoulders suggested that, yes, he had fallen asleep sitting up against the wall.

Maybe it was Blade coming back.

Sometime after the scent of scallops and asparagus had wafted through the door’s jambs, the other male had stepped out and said he was leaving for a while, but that any wolven on the property, especially ones who were—in his words—tense, wall-eyed, and twitchy, were welcome to stay as long as they liked.

Evidently, the male had bought the place from the Brotherhood after years of roaming—and was willing to be hospitable.

“I’m not wall-eyed,” Callum muttered into the dark.

Out in the waiting area, the motion-activated lights came on and the glow rounded the corner. Bending his legs up, one of his knee joints popped and he winced as his butt repositioned itself on the hard floor.

It was time for him to go, anyway.

As he went to get to this feet, he had to lock his molars. Funny, how you could turn into a board just by sitting on them—

Apex stepped into the hallway. “How’s your ankle.”

Callum froze.

Blink. Blink. Blink —“You came all this way to check on my leg?” he muttered.

“It’s not that far. As the crow flies.”

“How did you”—Callum grunted as he got all the way to vertical with the help of the wall—“know I was here?”

The vampire took that tube of Polysporin out of his leather jacket. “It wasn’t that hard.”

“You figured it out from an antibacterial lotion?”

Apex eyed the stuff. “It’s an ointment, not a lotion. And the tube was not in the same place I’d left it on the newel post, so I knew you’d seen it. And I figured if you took the plow off the front of the truck you were going on the highway.”

“But how did you know I was coming . . . here.”

“Where else would you go? I show up unannounced on your doorstep—”

“That is not my doorstep—”

“—and I bring baggage.” Apex shrugged. “There have been a lot of things in my own life that are with me whether I want them to be or not. Sometimes you need to go back, if only to know whether it was all real.”

“Of course I know it happened,” Callum snapped.

The vampire looked away. Looked back. “But memories become dreams after a while. We live with them in our minds, and the edges get blurred until you’re not as sure as you once were exactly what happened versus what your brain made up just to torture yourself more.” Apex cursed and crossed his arms over his chest. “And like . . . the shit really cripples you, traps you, sinks you, and you think, am I doing this to myself? Or . . . was it done to me. For real.”

Callum was dimly aware of his heart stopping.

“That’s why you came back here,” Apex concluded. “And that’s how I knew where you were.”

As a heavy silence stretched out, Callum went for a little walkabout, pacing back and forth.

“I don’t know what to say to that.”

Apex shrugged again. “You don’t need to say anything. The truth is what it is, whether we comment on it or not—”

Before Callum knew what he was doing, he was right in front of the other male. And as he looked into those glittering black eyes, they flared so big, it was a wonder they didn’t pop out and hit the floor.

Don’t do it , he told himself. Don’t —

His hand reached up and hovered beside the vampire’s face. And when his palm closed the distance of its own volition, and he felt the warmth and the subtle friction of beard growth, he thought about the division between memories and dreams.

“Have you ever come back here?” he whispered. “To see if things were real.”

Apex shook his head, and in doing so, caused a brushing touch to flare between the pair of them. “No, I haven’t.”

Callum dropped his hand. “Oh. Well, good for you. Glad you moved along—”

As he went to turn away, Apex grabbed his arm. “I think about you. Always.”

The words were spoken with such urgency, there was no pretending to have misheard them or misunderstood.

And then there was the pain on that hard face. A special kind of agony radiated out of those eyes and flattened that mouth, and as Callum regarded the emotion, he felt the strangest unlocking in the center of his chest.

He was not alone.

He hadn’t . . . been alone. In the suffering.

Callum swallowed through a tight throat. “You remember.”

The vampire nodded and answered hoarsely, “Everything.”

It had been the touch Apex had craved for so long, and the sensations did not disappoint. Though that palm had rested on his cheek for just a moment, he had felt it all through his body.

And now he knew a different kind of heat, as Callum lowered his head in shame and retreated internally. Even though the distance between them did not change, the male seemed to shrink where he stood—and that made Apex want to kill that fucking female all over again.

“It happened to me, too,” he heard himself rasp. “Every time I pushed that food between your lips . . . with every towel I passed over your skin . . . for every hour I sat beside you and worried you were dying, what was done to you happened to me . . . too.”

Apex’s vision got blurry and he wiped his tears harder than he had to. And then with him being able to see, he had to look away from the wolven, from those icy blue eyes.

“I’m sorry I left like I did.” Callum shook his head. “That night, thirty years ago. I couldn’t—I just didn’t have it in me to . . . say goodbye to you.”

“I understand.”

Even though he didn’t, even though he hadn’t. But now that he thought more about it, he supposed that was just because it had hurt so badly.

“You had to take care of yourself.”

Their eyes held—and the sexual undercurrent surged. As it once had, all those years ago.

And it was too fucking weird. After all this time, he’d played this scene out in his head in so many different ways: There had been reunions of chance, like on the streets of downtown Caldwell some night, or in a restaurant, or in a supermarket. There had been the unexpected phone call, the out-of-the-blue contact that opened a random door. And then there had been his favorite, where Callum came and found him at his little bullshit house on the outskirts of town.

Maybe with a white rose in his hand because all those stupid fucking flowers he’d brought the guy had been remembered as the heartfelt gifts they had been.

There had been other fantasies, too. Like Lucan bringing the male over. Or maybe Kane doing the connecting. Both of those former prisoners knew where he lived, after all.

The last scenario he’d fantasized about had been the most impossible . . . and the one that had, on occasion, led him to have to do something to relieve himself: He had pictured himself going up to the summit of Deer Mountain, and walking into that cave, the one where the wolven had lived, the one with the hot spring. He always arrived just as Callum was emerging from the water, naked and dripping, as beautiful and haunting as he had been when he’d been naked in that road.

In that moment the two of them had first met.

“Never here,” he said softly.

“What?”

“When I imagined seeing you again, alone . . . it was never here, in this hellhole.” He glanced around. “I hate this fucking place. I’d burn it to the ground if I could.”

“It’s not a hellhole anymore.” Callum smiled in a flat way. “They’ve got Thermopane windows and lights now.”

“I don’t give a shit if every inch of paint is new and the roof is retiled with gold bars.” Apex shook his head. “It’s always going to be a fucking mausoleum to me.”

As Callum just stared at him, he shifted his weight back and forth on his boots. “What.”

“I didn’t know that . . . it lingered for you.”

“Not it.” Apex’s voice cracked, and he reached out for the male’s hand. Placing that broad palm in the center of his own chest, he said, “You. You were with me.”