Page 49 of Edge of Darkness (Night Prowler 4)
She groaned, hid her face in her hands. He pried her hands apart and forced her to look at him. “We’ll let that one go for the moment. But tell me this: why didn’t you turn me in to the police? Why didn’t you collect that big reward and end all your money troubles? You know where I live; you could have led them straight to me. But you didn’t. Why?”
His eyes searched hers, searing, haunted. She couldn’t have lied to him even if she’d wanted to. “The money?” she whispered hoarsely, shaking her head. “Christian, how could you think the money would mean anything to me? It’s you. But you didn’t even call me! All this week I had no idea what happened to you—”
“I wanted to call you, I wanted to see you—God you have no idea—but I can’t Shift when I’m injured,” he explained quietly, that finger still making slow tracings across her cheek. “I’ve been stuck in my animal form until today. I can usually heal very quickly, but this gunshot wound was nasty, my entire kneecap—”
“Gunshot!” Ember sat up stiffly, her eyes raking him for signs of injury. “Those bastards shot you?”
Amusement flickered over his face. “In the leg, yes. One of them Shifted and tried to eat me and the other one shot me. Does that make you feel better about it?”
For killing them, he was asking. Perversely, it did, and she nodded to let him know, her teeth sunk into her lower lip.
He seemed relieved at her answer. His eyes closed briefly, and when they opened again, he said, very softly, “What are you in Spain to forget?”
It was a long while before she answered him, and his eyes never wavered from her face. “Everything,” she said truthfully. Then she realized with sudden, swift horror the two of them were more alike than she’d realized.
They were both killers.
The thought made her sick to her stomach.
She staggered to her feet, a hand cupped over her mouth, nausea rising in her throat. This was too much, it was all too much, and she couldn’t think with him so close, with his scent and his dark, molten gaze—she had to get away.
“Ember, wait—stop—”
Now.
She stumbled toward the door, barely seeing anything because her eyes were filling with tears. All those horrible memories she’d been so careful to repress came flooding back and mingled with the Internet images of the massacre on Christmas Day at the Vatican and the two corpses on the street last week, all of them mutilated and covered in blood.
Her footsteps sounded loud as cannon fire in her ears as she ran blindly toward the front door, a sob caught in her throat. Just as she lifted a hand to reach for the massive bronze ring that would u
nlatch the door and release her to freedom, something pulled her up short and had her scrambling back in shock.
Sinuous as smoke, a pale gray plume of mist snaked down in front of her, coiling and ruffling in the air. It gathered and shimmered for a moment, suspended, an odd cloud blocking the door, then coalesced, quickly gathering mass and taking shape as a form she knew all too well. Feet and legs, arms and chest, sculpted body, and breathtaking face, complete with a pair of green eyes so vivid they glowed.
Christian. He materialized in front of her eyes from nothing more than a thin cloud of fog.
He was naked.
The scream that clawed its way out of her throat was equal parts horror and disbelief.
“Wait,” he snapped with a hand outstretched. “Ember, just wait—”
“Let me go, Christian!” she sobbed. “If you care about me at all, just let me go!”
Without waiting for an answer, she ran past him, yanked open the front door, and ran out into the rain swept night.
The pounding on her apartment door was loud and unrelenting. So was the shouting.
“Ember! Open this door right now, honey! September! What the hell!”
It was Asher, roused most likely from a Xanax-induced sleep by the sound of her footsteps pounding up the stairs, the door to her apartment slamming shut and her hysterical sobbing, the last of which hadn’t let up since she’d collapsed back into the waiting taxi outside Christian’s house.
The ride home had been interminable. She kept expecting a cloud of smoke to filter in through the air vents and coalesce in the passenger seat into the naked form of Christian, which would terrify the driver—for so many different reasons—and they’d wind up in a fiery crash.
Ember didn’t think Fate would grant her the luck to survive not one but two fiery crashes in a lifetime.
Still in her soaked clothes and shoes, she’d flung herself face down on the bed as soon as she got home, buried her face into her pillow, and pulled the covers over her head. Then she tried not to think about how a supernatural cloud of mist—ethereal, insubstantial—would not be hindered by silly little human things like doors and locks.
The pounding on the front door ceased. Thinking he’d given up, Ember enjoyed a brief moment of relief until the sound of it being unlocked and swung open intruded through her sobs. When Asher burst through her bedroom door and started shouting up close, she wished with all her heart she’d never given him that extra key.
