Where Winter Finds You (Black Dagger Brotherhood #18)- J.R Ward Page 0,93
kiosk into the forest. It was bitterly cold, and she huddled into her parka. Before she dematerialized out, however, and in spite of the shock of the winter air on her warm cheeks, she paused and stared up at the sky.
The forest was sleeping around her. The world seemed in repose as well. No sounds of deer mincing over snow-sprinkled brush. No squirrels scrambling up trunks. No birds in flight, seeking far-between and forgotten nuts. Not even a breeze, as if the wind, too, were exhausted from previous efforts.
Silence. Stillness.
Like space.
Standing by herself, she felt alone, and not in the sense that she could not find a crowd of people in which to lose herself. And this specific sort of isolation made her reflect on how, no matter how many hearts had been broken in the great passage of time, when it was your own, it was the first time it had ever happened.
Why, she thought at the heavens.
Except as she asked the question without speaking a word, she wasn’t sure exactly what “why” she was after. Why she had met Trez? Why she had happened to look like his mate? Why he had fallen into a whirlwind romance with her?
Well, she knew the answer to that last one. That, at least, was no mystery.
And as she considered the ins and outs of it all, as she replayed his kisses, his touches… the sex they had had… she came to understand the true nature of her pain. It wasn’t that Trez had fucked her over on purpose. He wasn’t some bastard like that. She had seen the regret on his face when everything had come out, and it had been an honest emotion—not that it had done anything to make her feel better in the moment.
It did keep her from hating him now, however.
No, it was more that she hadn’t been the one to be loved like that. She hadn’t been chosen by him. She had just been a vessel, nothing but a shell. A replacement vase swapped for the one that had been broken.
The sad truth was that she’d been bypassed even as they had been together, face-to-face, skin-to-skin. Invisible, though he saw her. Ether, even as he touched her body.
The pain was because she had felt found, when in actuality she had been nullified.
This was going to hurt for a while. It was also going to color how she saw males. How she interacted with them. How she did—or, more likely, did not—trust them.
It seemed the height of irony to be devastated by the death of someone she did not know and had never met. Yet the loss of Trez’s shellan had impacted her. Permanently.
Closing her eyes, Therese breathed the cold night air and calmed herself. She wasn’t sure it was going to work, and she decided if she couldn’t concentrate properly, she would just go back to the clinic and hang out there.
The next time she looked around, she was standing in the middle of her apartment.
Staring at the crappy furniture, she took another deep breath, and instead of clear Canadian air that was blowing in from the north… she smelled the complex bouquet of nose-death that seemed to emanate from the walls and floors of the flat.
Like everything had been sprayed down with Eau de Crime Scene.
Fates, she just wanted to go back to the ICU. And who’d have thought that would ever be a thing?
Still, instead of quickly gathering what she needed and getting the hell out of there, she walked around the empty space, her mind going places she’d rather it wouldn’t while her body went in circles in a place she didn’t want to be. But see, this was the problem with alone time—and the other reason that made her want to get back to her family.
Okay, she needed to get moving. Grab her toothbrush and an over-day bag. Return to where people she could trust were waiting for her.
Heading into the bathroom, she—
Stopped in front of the mirror over the sink.
Leaning into the glass, she stared at her reflection, and not because she had forgotten what she looked like. Instead, she was mining what was staring back at her for information about Trez’s mate… as if the composite of her own eyes and nose, mouth and chin would tell her anything at all about what he had shared with his shellan, how much they had loved, how hard it had been for them to be parted by destiny.