AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She felt Mercury pull away from her. His hand slid from the small of her back, and she heard a growl. An angry sound of pain that she wondered if she might have made herself.
She wanted to smash her fist into that perfect face. She wanted to tear all those perfect hairs from the woman’s head. She wanted to howl in rage, fear and pain.
“Ria, sweetheart.” Dane’s voice was at her ear. She could have sworn it was thick with grief. “Darling. Hold on. You don’t want to break here.”
She shook her head and stepped back, pulling her arm from his grip. She didn’t want him touching her. She couldn’t bear to be touched, not right now. Not while the pain was exploding in her brain, shattering her heart, nearly stopping it.
The slow, sluggish beat reminded her. It had done that the moment she realized her mother was never returning to her. That she would always be alone. She should have remembered, should have known it couldn’t be real.
“If you break here, you’ll never forgive yourself.” Dane’s voice lashed at her, a quiet male hiss of fury as Alaiya tilted her head up to Mercury and spoke.
“I knew when I read the tabloid stories what happened.” She sighed against Mercury. “Mates. That’s what we are, aren’t we? That’s why I never forgot you, Mercury.”
Ria couldn’t breathe. Oh God. It hurt. It was knifing through her chest, shredding flesh and bone, and she was going to scream with the rage and the pain of it.
Don’t touch him!
The words were whipping through her mind as Mercury gripped the other woman’s wrists and pushed her back. Just a little. Just enough to keep Ria from collapsing, from begging him not to hold her.
“Alaiya?” There was a wealth of surprise, shock and perhaps anger.
Of course he would be angry. Eleven years they had been separated and here she was, mere hours after he had pledged himself to another woman. To some stupid human that just couldn’t understand where her place was.
“Ria.” Dane’s arm was around her shoulders.
He was trying to shelter her. He had done that when she was a little girl, every time he saw her. He would wrap his arm around her shoulder and try to shelter her from whatever had hurt her while he was away. There was no way to shelter her from this.
Ragged, gaping wounds tore through her soul. She could feel herself bleeding from the inside out, ripping apart and not a sound was made.
“What the fucking hell is going on here?” Guttural, ragged and filled with fury, Mercury’s voice echoed around her. Sliced into her. She looked into his eyes, and they were nearly blue. They weren’t amber. They weren’t hammered gold. They were blue, the color they had been when he showed the first signs of mating Alaiya in the labs.
Alaiya was back. And, it appeared, so was Mercury’s animal.
“You need to take care of this,” she whispered to him, glancing at Alaiya. “I know it’s been a long time.” She backed away from him. “You’ll need to”—she waved her hand helplessly—“talk.” She couldn’t imagine anything else. If she did, she would die. Right there, she would lose her will to live.
She couldn’t bear it. It hurt. Nothing—no desertion, no vicious words from cold, cutting lips—had ever hurt as this hurt.
“Mercury, could you step into the office please?” Jonas’s voice was like a whip slicing through the tension. “Dane, Ms. Rodriquez might be more comfortable in the receiving room across the hall.”
She stared back at Jonas. His silver eyes seemed alive, an entity separate from the rest of him, swirling and clashing with tempestuous anger as he watched her.
Of course, he would be angry. He would believe this could affect her job. That it would affect Sanctuary’s relationship with the Vanderales.
She shook her head. She was the poor little orphan to the family, not really family at all. She had always known that.
She backed away, feeling Dane’s hand on her arm like a live current, painful, unwanted.
“The hell she will.”
Before the words were out of Mercury’s lips he had hold of her, jerking her to his side, his arm curved around her back, pulling her to him.
“Don’t do this to me.” The sound of her voice shocked her. It was barely passable, so thick and rough it was hardly understandable. “Don’t make me see this.”
His eyes were almost pure blue; now the gold flickered in tiny pinpoints rather than the opposite.
“This isn’t what you think.” He glared into the room before pulling her outside it, out of sight of the others, pressing her against the wall as he stared down at her, his eyes raging.
And the pain was raging inside her. She had to get away from him. Before she begged him. Before she pleaded with him, Please don’t leave me alone.
