Chapter Twenty-Four

??ran?: same night

Faith lifted her fist toAmsterdam and knocked on the mural of pink and yellow tulips, flexing her toes against the inside of her shoes while she waited. Maybe she should just barge in. Nyko shouldn't be back in his room after being shot several hours ago, anyway. Her anxiety grew. He was probably unconscious on the bathroom floor!

The door opened and Nyko appeared.

"There you are," she gasped out. "Are you all right?"

He stared at her. His right cheek was speckled with about half a dozen small, spotted scars, like albino freckles, and a thick white bandage wrapped the upper portion of his right arm. His face was pale and blank as marble. The doctors were insane to have released him already. Thomal was still in the hospital, wasn't he? Although he'd been shot on the side of his abdomen, which was a more serious injury, but still…Nyko was clearly in pain.

She set her hands on her hips. "Hey, didn't I tell you to be careful?"

He just kept staring at her, his eyes as expressionless as his face.

Oh, this was bad. "I'm taking you back to the hospital."

"I'm fine."

"You don't look fine."

"Dr. Jess took the bullet out of my arm and sewed me up." He shrugged. "Why wouldn't I be fine after that?"

Because any normal person wouldn't be. But Nyko wasn't normal, was he? He was a Varcolac, and, honestly, she didn't fully understand that breed's healing capabilities yet. "At the very least this calls for one of my famous sundaes."

"Your what?"

She smiled brightly at him. "I make the best hot fudge sundae in the world." Since she only allowed herself one per month, it had to be great.

"I don't—"

"Listen," she plowed over him. "I know you're not feeling well, Nyko, despite your efforts to pretend you're fine. So I'll make you a sundae and bring it here and we can watch a movie together or something." She widened her smile. "We never had dessert after our lunch date, remember?"

Nyko muttered something under his breath, then stepped out into the hallway.

She frowned as he pulled his door almost-closed behind him. That certainly wasn't very…welcoming.

"I can't," he said.

She searched his face. "Nyko, if you're in pain, you should go back to the hospital."

"I'm not in pain."

"That's a lie. I can see it in your eyes." Beneath a thick layer of distance.

He turned his head aside, the bones of his jaw set rigidly. "I'd like you to go."

"I…" Then she sighed. Why did men hate for women to see them when they were hurt? "Okay. I'll come back tomorrow, and—"

"No," he cut her off. "I mean for good." His throat moved. "Go for good."

Her lips parted and all of the blood washed out of her head. "What's going on?"

If possible, his expression flattened out even more.

"Would you please tell me?" she pressed in a hoarse tone.

He muttered again, then said in a tight voice, "Do you remember the story I told you about my mom stealing maps to get us three Brun boys out of O??rat?"

"Yes."

"Well, I didn't tell you why she took such a risk to do that." His looked at her with those weird blank eyes of his. "It was because of me. I was twenty years old at the time, which meant the next year I'd be maturing into my blood-need. Mom knew I'd be in serious trouble if I was in O??rat when I had to start feeding. There weren't any donors there, and unmarked females were obtained only through near-death fighting. She had to get me out to save me."

Nyko paced a few strides away from her and gazed down the hallway, his focus faraway. "We Varcolac have only been living in these caves for about a hundred years, did you know that? Not long at all. But when we first came, the Om R?u had already been here for several centuries, and they were less than thrilled by our intrusion, even though there was plenty of room for everyone. They tried to drive us out. A lot of battling went on over the years, and in the chaos of one of those fights, my mother got dragged into O??rat."

Faith studied the lines of tension in Nyko's back, a sinking feeling growing inside her stomach.

"Lorke, my father, had no reason to keep her. Om R?u and Varcolac generally can't interbreed. But he wanted to use Urzella as his toy, and, uh…" Nyko flinched. "To make the things Lorke wanted to do to my mom possible without her enduring excruciating pain, she had to bite and bond with him." Lines grew at the sides of his eyes. "By escaping into ??ran?, she consigned herself to death by removing herself from her blood source. Going back wasn't an option. She said she'd rather die than live under Lorke in O??rat, a sentiment I could totally understand, but still…" A muscle in his face twitched. "Watching her waste away into a blood-coma was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. Worse knowing it was for me she'd sacrificed her life."

Faith swallowed. A sick knot pushed into the center of her chest. She knew the visceral agony of losing a parent, how it felt like a soul could scream forever and it would still never be long enough to make the pain go away. But sitting bedside as a parent slowly died had to be debilitating on a level she couldn't fully understand.

"My mom died because of me." Nyko swung around, his gaze coming alive now, both haunted and fierce. "And now I've lost my little brother, Shon, and again it's. All."—he pounded his thick chest to emphasize each word—"My. Fault. I look around me, Faith, and I see my other brother, Jacken, half-crazed with worry over Toni. Will Raymond get hold of her and hurt her? Will everything be okay when it's time for the baby to come? Dev almost turned himself inside out when Raymond kidnapped Marissa, and two months ago, Arc lost his noodle when his wife went into labor while the whole community was shut down. I can't do it, Faith. I don't want a family anymore, not a wife or kids or any of it to worry over. I can't deal with knowing that, when it gets right down to it, there's not a single thing I could do to save them if they needed saving. Just the opposite, I seem to be the reason people get hurt. Bad things happen to good people, Faith, you said so yourself. It happens all the freaking time, but I'm sick and tired of being the one caught up in the middle of all that, feeling nothing but helpless."

Faith lost her breath as her heart reached out to this man. She'd never thought to see someone of his size and strength laid so low by pain and vulnerability and self-loathing. It nearly tore her in half. "I wanted to give up, too, when my parents died. I still want to curl into a ball because of my injured knee, but I don't. And you can't give up, either."

Shaking his head, Nyko walked back over to his bedroom. "I'm out of the hero business, Faith. Everyone's going to have to save themselves from here on out." He pushed his bedroom door open. "I'm sorry, but I can't see you anymore."

She grabbed his arm to stop him, tears stinging her nose. He was setting her aside, and…it shouldn't feel so awful and desperate—she barely knew this man—but it did. How in the world had she grown so attached to Nyko in only one date? Since he loved watching you dance. Since he understood what it's like to lose a childhood to responsibility and hardship. Was her heart already heading into this? She stared at his face. He looked handsome to her now: his messy hair, boyish, the solid block of his face, masculine, his off-center nose, charming, his black eyes, deep and mysterious. Even his lethal bulk no longer disconcerted her. A woman could depend on shoulders as broad as Nyko's, lean on them if she had to and know they'd hold up under just about any burden. Which all meant, yes. Her heart was heading into this.

"You're hurt right now," she said in a shaky voice. "And if anyone can understand that pain, I can. So when you're feeling better, I'll be waiting for you. We'll pick up where we left off today. Like you said we would."

Something moved across Nyko's expression. She could've sworn he'd momentarily wavered, but the emotion was gone too quickly for her to be sure. "There are tons of single men in this town: Jeddin, Breen, and Kasson from the Warrior Class are all great. Oh, wait, Kasson's dating Rachel. But there's Mekhel over in the lab, and Balc, who's an electrician and a cool guy." His tone was strangely blasé, too offhand for there not to be agony behind the names of all these future husband possibilities. "I'll talk to them, let them know I've no longer got a claim on you."

"No." She let go of his arm and stepped back, dragging her knuckles across her nose. "I don't want anyone else."

He didn't say more. Just bowed his head and closed the door.