Page 52 of Blue Embers
“See?” Malice interrupted my train of thought, pointing at my face and raising his brows. “You don’t want to lose her. That’s why you saved her and that, my friend, is the part of yourself you need to hang on to.”
I looked at Malice, who already seemed to be drifting off into another thought pattern completely unrelated. His eyes wandered toward the woman at the front desk, who was an older female with brunette curls and a face aged prematurely with stress. He approached, leaning forward on the counter with a charming tilt to his head that drew her gaze from her computer screen.
“Good morning, lasse,” he spoke in his devilish, Scottish accent, making the woman’s mouth twitch with pleasure. “I was wondering if I could find out the status of our friend. She was brought in a couple hours ago. Skinny lasse with cherry-blonde hair? She was bleeding all over.”
“Oh,” the woman nodded, typing a few things into her computer. “She was just moved to room 217 for rest. She has a fever and she’s weak, but she should be ok to leave tonight. Maybe tomorrow. Is she…” She paused, bobbing her shoulders in what I could only imagine was a flirtatious gesture. “Is she yours?”
“Mine?” Malice said, raising a brow. “No.” He looked over his shoulder at me with a smirk. “She’s his.”
There it was. Suddenly the whole idea was real. Persephone was mine, whether she wanted it or not. Did I have a choice? Yes. I had a choice to risk losing her on the way to the hospital or to heal her on the spot and bind her to me. I chose the latter and I wasn’t sure how to proceed. After a hundred years of avoidance, I had an Ashling now. A mate. A woman who would feel me even if I wasn’t touching her. Who I would feel even if she wasn’t in the same room. Knowing that she could have died twisted my gut. Whether or not she might be upset when she awoke to find a mark on her waist, I knew my objective now, along with many others, was to protect her.
“Well?” Malice said, making his way back to me. “She can be out of here tonight. So what’s the plan?”
I pulled my phone out of my pocket, poising my thumb over Malisa’s name on my contact list.
“My place isn’t safe,” I said. “And Draven and Saxon need to know what’s happening. I felt someone poking around in my head at the museum. If it was Haera, she could know a number of things from searching my thoughts. We have to assume she knows about Talia Price. She would have found out that Saxon is on his way to Draven’s estate with all the information. They should leave, too.”
“So she really is after the kid.”
“There’s no other explanation. The child is the only one that would know anything.”
“You call that feisty French feline of yours. Tell her not to come into work. I’ll get Saxon on,” he said, grabbing his phone from his pocket and pacing across the waiting room to make the call.
I dialed Malisa and to my relief, she answered, bellowing French insults at me like a worried mother to her teenage son who’d been out all night. I hushed her, trying not to get into a multilingual argument with the woman so I could warn her to stay away from the house.
“Listen, love,” I finally squeezed in between shouts. “Take a vacation. There are some things I need to deal with right now and I’m not sure when I’ll be home.”
“What do you mean, vacation? How long?”
“Until I contact you, but,” I paused, taking a deep breath. “Perhaps take a trip, alright? Maybe visit your daughter in Orel.”
“Mr. Valentyne? What is this really about?”
“I’ll tell you everything when I can.”
I hung up on the woman before she could interrogate me and glanced at Malice, who’d just finished his call as well.
“Saxon put me on with Draven,” he explained. “The two want us to meet at a cabin somewhere in the mountains. Says it’ll be a safe place to find our bearings for a few days.”
“Mountains where?”
Malice shrugged. “They’re sending me coordinates. As for all that tech in your house. That’s a lot of information that someone could use against us.”
I sighed, sifting through my phone again until I found a little program I’d installed years ago on the off chance that I’d get into some kind of trouble. Entering my fingerprint and a five digit code, I hit a little red button and killed the entire office in my house remotely.
“Dealt with,” I said, sliding my phone into my back pocket.
“Wow,” Malice said. “Just like that?”
“I designed the program,” I explained. “I sent everything to a hard drive off site and fried everything in the house.”
“Great. Then as soon as your woman is awake, I say we head out.”
I nodded, stepping away from the wall. Looking down the passage toward the rooms, I reached out briefly for Persephone, aware now that our connection would be deep and perhaps even overwhelming for the first couple days. I could sense her some small distance away, sleeping. Her heart was a little rapid and her blood was rushing, no doubt because of the fever. Her breathing was quiet, though. Her body was still and as much as I wanted to feel her wake, I knew that rest was the best thing for her. I’d have a lot of explaining to do when she opened her eyes and I was keen on doing that somewhere private.
22
Persephone
