It seemed to her that his stance became a fraction less aggressive. "They were good to you?"
She nodded, biting down hard on her tongue before she could give in and beg him to go back to the way things had been before the day everything shattered. Orrin had split her lip, broken her ribs, but it was seeing Clay being hauled out the door that had destroyed her. "I was damaged, Clay." No getting around that. "I was damaged even before Orrin died. That just pushed me over some edge in my own mind. But the Larkspurs took me in, didn't judge me, tried to make me a part of the family. I suddenly had two older brothers, one older sister, and one younger sister."
"Sounds like too much to handle."
"For a while, it was." Overwhelmed by the loud, laughing family, she had curled up in corners and hidden. "Then one day, I realized I'd been there for a year and no one had hurt me. By the time you were released, I was twelve and functioning fairly well." Nightmares only once or twice a week, acting out at school less and less.
"So you decided to leave me in the past." A bitter laugh. "Why the hell not?"
"No. It wasn't like that." She reached out to him, dropping her hand in midtouch when he withdrew even deeper into the darkness. "I just - " How could she possibly explain the tortured confusion that had driven her? She'd known she wasn't yet strong enough to stand up to Clay, to face the horrors of the past, but she had worried for him, too.
"I stole four years of your freedom. I was determined not to be a burden on you for the rest of your life." Barely twelve years old and she'd known he would give up everything to keep her safe. "I didn't want to force you into bondage, into caring for me because I was too weak to care for myself. You'd already spent most of your life doing that for Isla." That fact had twisted the relationship between mother and child, turned it into that of caretaker and patient. The thought of Clay putting her into the same category had made Talin distraught. It still did.
"Don't lie to me." It was a lethal warning. "You were scared so you ran."
"I'm telling the truth." She swallowed. "But yes, I was scared, too. You didn't see what I saw, Clay. That day in Orrin's bedroom, you turned into someone I didn't know, someone more vicious than anyone I'd ever known." She waited for him to say that he'd done it for her, but he didn't. Her guilt intensified. "Why don't you blame me? It would make this so much easier. Blame me, yell at me, God damn it!"
"For what, Talin? What did you do? Be my friend. That was your only crime." He remained unmoving, so much a part of the forest that she could hardly tell where he began and the night ended. "These Larkspurs - why aren't you going to them for help?"
"I brought darkness into that family. I can't bring evil."
"They're your pack, they would stand by you."
She was startled at his word usage. "My pack? No, I don't think they are. I-I was a visitor. I made myself a visitor, left the family at sixteen after getting a full board and study scholarship." Even their name, she had borrowed only until adulthood - long enough to blur the waters and dead-end any search Clay might have mounted. "I never let them in."
"Why not?"
"Do you let your pack touch your soul?" she asked, desperate to learn about his new life, his new world, years of hunger coalescing into this single moment.
"DarkRiver cats have a way of adopting you even if you don't particularly want to be adopted." It was a snarl. "If I bleed, they'll come to my aid. They would kill for me."
She shivered at the wild violence of his statement. But there was also a seduction in that kind of loyalty. It made her wonder about bonds of a far different sort. "Do you...do you have someone in your pack?"
He went very still. "I don't scent a mate on you."
"Me?" Her voice came out high, startled. "No. I - No."
He remained silent.
She coughed. "I don't want to get in the way of a relationship by involving you in my problems."