Lover Arisen (Black Dagger Brotherhood 20)

Fuck. “Look, I’m really sorry I worried you.”

“It’s okay. As long as you’re okay.”

“Ah, listen, Trey.” As a car got blocked in behind her on the one-way street, she had to move up. “When you went to my house—”

“Your security system wasn’t on. And yes, I was sure I locked everything back up behind me.”

The memory thing, Erika thought. Of course, Balthazar had stripped his memories.

She relaxed. “Well, like I said, I’m sorry I worried you. I just crashed last night. I turned my phone off and just passed out.”

“So where are you now?”

“Looking for my car, actually.”

“I’ve got it. I brought it in to headquarters because I thought… well, anyway—”

“You thought I wasn’t coming back.”

“I thought you weren’t coming back, ever,” he conceded. “You and I both know the burnout for homicide detectives is high. You’re one of the best that the department has ever had because you take everything so seriously. Except you’re overworked and you’re getting ragged, and I know my wife is going to get on me for saying this, but you really shouldn’t have gone to that Primrose scene. You should have listened to me.”

Erika closed her eyes and remembered her and Balthazar sitting on her my-favorite-color-is-blue sofa, her blubbering like an idiot, him holding her, even after she’d told him what she had. Then she recalled showing him her scars.

“You’re right, Trey. I shouldn’t have gone there. It was more than I could handle. Sometimes I feel like I have to push through, though. Otherwise, I’m going to be hamstrung by what happened to me and my family.”

As her fingertips crept up to her collarbone and probed her uneven skin, Trey said, “You just take a couple of days off, okay? Don’t worry about everything here. Kip and I are on it, and yes, we’ll update you. And then I want you to come back—I want my partner back. We need you. Caldwell’s victims need you. And it’s so much better to take some time and recenter now, than to flame out and not be able to do the job at all. That’s reality, not weakness.”

Erika focused out the Honda’s front windshield and wasn’t surprised that her vision got wavy as tears came to her eyes. She didn’t feel anything, though.

No… that wasn’t quite right. She felt something, it was just very deep, and really painful so she was shutting it out.

“You know,” she said hoarsely, “I’ve always done this job for myself. To make peace with my personal demons. It never occurred to me that…”

“That you were helping people? That your partner and your division depended on you? Come on, Erika, get real. You didn’t think we were just enjoying your charming personality, did you?”

She laughed in a rush and brushed under her eyes. “Fine. I’ll take a little time off—but I want to be kept in the loop. Everything is still cc’d with me, and if there are any problems, I want you to call me.”

“Fine. It’s a deal. Talk to you soon, partner.”

As Trey hung up the phone, she took her cell away from her ear and just stared at the thing. Then she looked out the side window. Trey was right. She was down close to the river. Just two blocks over and she could have gotten herself up on a bridge where there was a big drop and a lot of cold water.

Instantly, she was back in the bookshop’s storage room, and Balthazar had that knife to his own throat—

She covered her eyes, even though what she did not want to see was not in front of her, but in her mind.

And then she saw the pink bedroom at the Primrose scene, that young hand with its carefully polished pink fingernails still around the butt of that gun.

Finally, she remembered the first suicide attempt she herself had made in college. Then the other two. It was after the third stomach pumping that she’d called the psychiatrist. As helpful as the guy had tried to be, it wasn’t those sessions that had changed things—and it certainly hadn’t been the antidepressants she’d been prescribed but hadn’t taken.

In the end, she had stopped with trying to kill herself because she hadn’t wanted to get out of the punishment of staying alive. Her living and breathing, and suffering, seemed like the penance she deserved for having stood there and watched as her mother had begged her for help.

And she’d done nothing but watch the killing.

Dying was easy. The living was the much harder option.

With the decision made, she’d never thought again about taking pills with vodka. She’d just stopped with the suicidal ideation. But it was weird. Sitting here in this old silver Honda, which had been provided to her by vampires, with her lover in her basement hiding from the sunlight, and a dear friend and colleague having been worried she’d jumped off a bridge… she found herself very grateful to be alive.