Trey - Shandi Boyes Page 0,90

darkest night can hide the brightest star.”

Leaving Nikolai to unravel my riddle alone, I enter the only door next to the couch he’s spent the past fifteen plus hours on.

K is still as stiff as a board, but her eyes appear more sheened than they were when I left.

The gloss of her tears has me switching tactics for the third time this evening.

While struggling not to hurl, I tap out the dirt from the bottom of Nero’s shoes into the washroom sink before scooping it up in my hands and depositing it into the soap holder in the shower. Once I have the water switched on and at a similar temperature to a Vegas summer shower, I snag a t-shirt out of the bag Nero dumped on the floor hours ago before moving to K’s bedside.

My hands jitter like a virgin undoing his first bra when I peel back K’s hair enough to locate the zipper of her dress. As it slides down to the two dimples in her lower back, my jaw works through a bad bout of stiffness. Her whip marks have healed, but they’ve left a nasty set of scars on her back.

Endeavoring to keep my head out of the darkness of my past, I shimmy K’s dress down her slender frame before rolling her over so I can see her face. Her wide and un-terrorized eyes are the only things capable of keeping me out of the dark. They can even surpass my wish to kill.

I’m a cruel, faceless monster… until I’m standing across from K.

Then I’m anyone she needs me to be.

Once I’ve slipped my shirt over K’s head and pulled her hair out of the collar, I tug off my jeans, yank off my shirt, remove Dok’s iPod pod from K’s ear, then gather her in my arms. I don’t carry her like a groom does a bride over the threshold. I plaster her body to the front of me, gluing her to me as I plan to be glued to her until she fully emerges from the dark.

With the bathroom steamy, the muddy slop I dug out of Nero’s boots is highly noticeable when we step into the compact space. It doubles the faintness of the pulse in K’s neck in an instant, and has me hopeful she might leave the dark sooner than I’m hoping.

“Come on, Duchess,” I mutter as I step us into the shower stall. “You’re stronger than this. You fought Satan and won, so don’t let this beat you.” My arms tighten around K’s torso so fiercely I’m afraid I may have broken one of her ribs when her eyelids dip for the quickest second. It wasn’t a full blink, but it was noticeable. “Didn’t you want a war, Duchess? I brought you the war. We played the fucker at his own game and won, so you can come out of the dark now.”

Another blink.

It’s even longer than the first one.

“We could dye your dress in his blood. Parade his beheaded carcass through the streets of Prague.” I step her back until the lukewarm water pumping out of the showerhead flattens her curls. “We started a war without firing a single bullet, and we ended it the same way. His life wasn’t worth the price of a bullet, so we beheaded him instead. He’s dead now, Duchess. He’ll never hurt you again. I promise you that.”

This time I get two blinks and a single tear. It hasn’t fallen from her eye just yet. It’s clinging to mascara-coated lashes on the lower lid of her right eye.

She’s too brave to cry, too fucking strong. She is the most courageous woman I’ve ever met.

When I tell K that, her tear plops onto her cheek. I wipe it away in an instant, its worth inconsequential. She isn’t broken, she’s fighting to come back, to claw her way out of the darkness.

“Look up, K. It’s time to see the fireworks.” My heart thuds in my ears when I place the hand not holding her body hostage to mine under her chin so I can carefully crank her neck back. “I want to kiss you, K. I want to kiss you so fucking bad it hurts. But I won’t touch you without permission. No one will ever take away your rights again. I’ll kill any man stupid enough to try. I don’t care who he is.” After working my jaw side to side to weaken the fury of my tone, I say, “But that