Where Winter Finds You (Black Dagger Brotherhood #18)- J.R Ward Page 0,102
him—slammed the door shut behind them and went farther into the apartment, all the way to the back, to a bathroom. The air was clearer now, and he yanked down the shower curtain with one hand, and laid it out on the tile.
“I’m going to put you down now,” he said.
He was careful as he did so, but she moaned in pain as her body was shifted, and as soon as she was on the hard flooring, a coughing fit curling her onto her side—and she was pretty sure she vomited. She didn’t know. She was just trying to breathe, but all she could seem to draw in was smoke, even though her eyes, unreliable as they were, were telling her that there was none in the cramped room.
Trez turned away. Opened the window. Got out a phone.
Then he was back down beside her, leaning over her as he spoke to someone.
All she could do was study his face.
He was totally familiar to her, she realized in her delirium. But not just because she had met him at the restaurant. Or because she had had sex with him. Or because she had been thinking of him all day and night since their breakup.
It was because she knew him… from before.
And this conviction made her study him all the more closely—although what she saw terrified her. Soot streaked the dark skin of his beautiful face, and part of his short hair was gone, singed off from the heat. The collar of his thin silk shirt was black, but not because the fabric had come in that color. The smoke had seeped into the fibers that had been white, and she had a thought that their lungs were the same, now clogged with particles.
What if he died here, too—
He was talking to her. Urgently.
When he took her hand, she moaned in pain, and he immediately stopped. In the strange, surreal silence between them, he looked as terrified as she felt, and she knew he feared he was too late when it came to having saved her. Just as she was scared she had endangered his life.
She wanted to tell him she loved him. Because she did. In a way she could not understand, the clogging, blinding smoke had brought in its thick, impenetrable folds a clarity that revealed everything: She had been his at an earlier time, and he had been hers, and they had been separated by death. After which she had been placed on the doorstep of her parents’ house and destined to find him here, in Caldwell, some decades down the line, in this specific moment right here.
This was the reunion that he had recognized first and then doubted.
And that she now saw for what it was.
A Christmas miracle.
Desperately, she wanted to tell him all this, but her strength was draining fast, as if, now that they were in relative safety, the adrenaline load that had kept her barely alive was leaving and taking the functioning of her vital organs with it. She was out of time.
Therese thought of her mahmen. Her brother. Her father.
And then she focused on Trez’s face.
With the last vestiges of her energy, she lifted her hand. As it entered her line of sight, she had a momentary horror at the bald anatomy that was showing. But then not even that mattered.
Touching Trez’s cheek, she knew she had come home to him.
“My love…” she whispered roughly. “How I have missed you.”
* * *
Trez couldn’t hear what Therese was saying as he leaned over her. But he wanted her to keep talking. Needed her to. She had been terribly injured, whole sheets of her skin… gone. Parts of her clothes melted onto her. Soot covering her to the point where the whites of her eyes glowed as if backlit in contrast to her smoke-stained skin. He had no idea how she had survived at all.
Reflexively, he went to take her hand again and had to stop himself. It had hurt her too much the first time.
“Stay with me,” he begged. “Help is coming—”
Her eyes locked on his, and the light behind them made the back of his neck tingle. Then she smiled. Even through her pain, she smiled at him and was beautiful.
“My love…,” she whispered. “How I have missed you.”
As she spoke the words, a cold shock went through him—and a vision of his shellan’s face overlaid Therese’s, or maybe it was more that his Chosen’s was revealed through Therese’s. Revealed to be… the same.