Page 27 of Storm Echo

“Good,” she said after a cough, while her cat licked its paw in lieu of licking him. “If I didn’t already know the solution, I wouldn’t have been able to answer that one without a calculator.”

“I appreciate the concern,” he said in a way that was so devoid of emotion it would’ve been easy to dismiss it as meaningless … but she could still feel his eyes on her. Like lasers burning into the side of her face.

“Just doing my job as a healer,” she said, her voice a rasp, then shifted to collapse against the wall next to him, their shoulders separated by a bare few inches. Just close enough that she could breathe in his scent. Sniff him.

And oh he smelled good.

SHEdidn’t know him.

And he hadn’t made a mistake. This was Lei. Ivan would never mistake those clever eyes, the curve of her lips, the shape of her face, but most of all, the gentle way she had when she helped someone who was wounded.

Ivan didn’t need the confirmation, but he could see her scar now, too. She’d covered it up with makeup for reasons of her own, but that makeup had worn off under the stresses of the hours past, revealing the familiar ridged line that marked her skin.

It wasn’t pretense, her lack of memory. No one was that good an actor. This was trauma. Could be either physical or mental. Her injuries had been catastrophic, and it wasn’t unknown for a survivor of such terrible wounds to have no memory of events that had occurred in the weeks leading up to their injury.

Ivan didn’t even exist as a ghost for Lei.

The heart he’d thought he’d cut out and buried when she left him wrenched into a warped shape, twisted and broken. It was all for the good, he told himself. He was no longer the man he’d been when they met, could offer her nothing other than a descent into the darkness.

Yet he couldn’t stop himself from tracing the outline of her profile, drinking in her presence with a voracious need that was oh so dangerous. Scored by exhaustion or not, her shoulders slumped, Lei had an undeniable and marked presence. But her injuries and their aftermath had left a mark—and those marks weren’t only physical.

The Lei he’d known had … sparkled.

This Lei was … curled inward, all her light hidden from the world.

His hand remained unfisted, flat, but inside, the spider flexed outward in a cool, dark anger. There was so much he didn’t know about Lei, so much she’d never told him before she decided that she didn’t want him after all, but one thing he’d learned today as he’d watched her move.

“Ocelot,” he said, because he had to start somewhere on the feline family tree.

Her head snapped toward him so fast that it was inhuman—feline—and her eyes, they weren’t deep brown any longer. Slightly elongated black pupils against pale irises of tawny brown surrounded by a ring of golden light looked into his own, the animal who was her other half rising to the surface. He wanted to believe that the cat knew him, remembered him, but that was magical thinking—and no one had ever called Ivan anything less than harshly practical.

Eyes going wide, her breath catching … then a smile so dazzling it punched him in the gut. A hard shake of her head … before she lifted her hand to his face.

The spider froze.

So did Ivan.

He allowed her to touch her fingertips to his cheek, punch sensation through him with the force of a bullet fired at point-blank range. Despite the chaos within, he stayed motionless, because to react would be to break the chains keeping him in check.

“I know you.” A feline rumble, her claws slicing out to lie against his skin. “Oh, I should’ve listened to my cat!” Dawning realization, the fleeting emergence of the vibrant colors of her. “Stars in the darkness. Silver threads in my mind. It’syou.”

The bruise inside his brain that had never quite healed pulsed anew, but it didn’t hurt. It … ached. For her. He wanted to believe she’d remembered everything, and that she’d always meant to come back to him, but she wouldn’t be looking at him with such innocence if she knew all of him.

It was better this way, he reminded himself. Far better.

Things had changed for the worse since the kiss that had forever altered him. He was no longer the man who’d dared dream those dreams. No, he was now a monster barely leashed, his time as the Ivan his family knew—and the Ivan that Lei had once known—in a sharp countdown to the end.

But he saw no harm in telling Lei one thing. It might lead her to trust him. Then he could help her, look after her. Because it turned out that not even the monstrous spider inside him could bear to see her suffering.

“I found you in the snow,” he said, his voice rough.

What he didn’t say was that he’d then lost her. But she was alive, and that was what mattered. She breathed, she existed. And she’d just smiled at him as if he was the most wonderful thing she’d ever seen.

It was a beautiful lie, formed on the foundation of memories lost, bloodstains forgotten, but Ivan wasn’t about to reject it. Not when he had so little time left as Ivan, as the man Lei had met in a forest well over a thousand miles from this street. Where she was concerned, he’d take the scraps, hold them as close as a miser with his coins.

“Does your leg cause you pain?” he asked. “It was badly shattered.”

“In the cold.” Claws brushing against his skin, her breath soft as she leaned toward him … before she jerked back with a scowl. “Who are you?” A demand.

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