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She shook her head. No more jewels. No more pearls. Nothing could compensate for what she had lost tonight.
“Please,” she whispered. “I need to go to the cabin.”
“So you can fucking torture yourself? God’s sake, Ria, I know what you’ll do, baby. I’ve been there. You’re going to curl in that bed and pretend it didn’t happen. That he’s coming back, that he’s not mating that bitch cat that showed up tonight.” He gripped her shoulders. Shook them. “I’ll kill him, Ria. Do you hear me?”
“Take me back.” She stared back at him. “Touch him and the Leo learns everything, Dane. All of it. Can you kill me to silence me?”
He stared back at her in shock. “You don’t mean that, Ria.” He shook his head bitterly. “You wouldn’t do that, even in rage.”
“I’ve never asked you for anything.” Her voice broke. “The bribes were your idea. I had fun with it. Hurting Mercury is off bounds.”
Because he was right. She needed to curl up in the bed that still held Mercury’s scent. She needed to burrow beneath the blankets and oh God. Oh God. She needed to pretend.
She wrapped her arms over her stomach.
“Please,” she finally sobbed. “Oh God, Dane, please take me back to our cabin. Please.”
The first tear fell, and she fought it. She fought it valiantly. She buried her head against the door and shuddered, and another sob tore from her.
“Take her to the cabin, Rye.” Dane’s voice was tortured. “Just for tonight. Let her have tonight.”
She rocked herself because she couldn’t bear to allow Dane to do it. She shook and bit off the sobs. Her face burned, her throat hurt from the ragged need to scream, and as they took her to the place she had begun to think of as home, Ria shattered inside.
She entered the cabin alone, aware of Rule and Lawe driving in behind them, spreading out around the cabin. They didn’t speak. Dane had stayed in the car when she held a restraining hand out to him.
She entered the cabin and felt it. She could smell him on the air. The scent of their passion that day, the feel of him against her, between her thighs as he pressed her into the wall and called her “mate.” And everything she had thought she could hold back came tumbling from her. Tearing from her. It gouged holes into her spirit, and as the door closed, she had to force herself through the house. To the bedroom.
“Mercury.” She whispered his name, a sobbing, agonizing sound as she dropped the cape on the floor and stumbled to the bed and dragged herself to his pillow.
And she howled. The doors holding back the rage and the pain opened and she screamed in agony. Her hands locked in her hair as she curled against herself and the tears poured from her eyes.
“Mercury!” She screamed his name into the darkness and she sobbed, dying inside, so broken she felt as though she could never put herself together again, as though the world had just dissolved around her.
Heaving sobs tore from her, his name was a prayer on her lips, and she lay there, surrounded by his scent, by his memory, by everything she knew could never be hers. She felt herself die inside.
She pulled his pillow to her, smelled him, and her flesh ached. The pain, physical and emotional, ripped at her, left her twisting against the blankets as the tears poured and the pain raged.
He was supposed to love her.
You’re my mate. Heat be damned. You’re my soul, Ria.
He had kissed her as he said it. As the shower washed over them earlier. As the water slickened their flesh and poured over their passion.
My mate. I love you, Ria. My heart.
She screamed his name, buried her head in his pillow and curled into the agony. He wasn’t her mate.
Dane stood against the car, his head down, snow falling around him, aware of Rule and Lawe approaching slowly as Ria’s screams echoed outside. As the sound of her agony, carried on the silent breeze, filled with grief, echoed through the night.
He lifted his head as they neared, silent, their gazes somber.
“Someone should go in there,” Lawe said softly. “She shouldn’t be alone.”
Dane hunched his shoulders. “She needs to be alone now. She needs to accept it.”
Rule snorted at that. “Mercury’s going to kill you, you son of a bitch. You should have never taken her out of there.”
Dane shook his head. “If dying would make Mercury her mate, then I would take my own life.” He looked back at the cabin. “She deserved what she found with him. And she deserved it to last far longer than it did.”
