Does anyone? She yanked her arm out of his light hold. Her face seemed stark in the moonlight, her soft features drawn tight. Go away, Tegan. I'm tired and I just...I really want to be left alone right now.
He watched her lift her long indigo skirt above her pale ankles as she began another trek farther out toward the dark lake glistening at the end of the lavish grounds. She paused in the shadows of an old stone boathouse at the shoreline, her arms wrapped around herself. Tegan considered doing as she asked, just turning around and letting her have her space. But now he was pissed off and he wasn't about to let Elise deliver him a verbal slap in the face and simply walk away.
He was fully prepared to lace into her for presuming to know anything of what he'd been through or for thinking she could possibly know how he felt, but as he came up behind her he saw that she was trembling. Not just shuddering from the cold, but really shaking.
Jesus Christ, was she crying?
Elise...
She shook her head and pivoted to move farther up the lawn, out of his reach. I said go away!
Tegan went right after her, moving faster than her human eyes would be able to track him. He stopped in front of her, blocking her path. Pale, tear-filled eyes lifted and widened before she pivoted to get around him. She didn't make it even a single step. He reached out, holding her still, his fingers wrapped over her trembling bare shoulders.
Her grief sliced through him the instant his hands made contact. He hadn't helped the situation any, but most of what she was feeling was something bleaker than the anger he stoked in her. Tegan felt her emotions seep in through his fingertips, registering the cold ache of loss. It was fresh again, like a wound ripped open before it had fully healed.
What happened in there?
Nothing, she lied, her voice thick with sorrow. It will pass, right?
The very words he'd said to her at her apartment when he'd callously dismissed her bereavement. She threw them back at him now, her flashing lavender eyes daring him to say something kind, or to so much as think he might offer her comfort.
He wanted to offer that to her. The realization hit him hard, squarely in the center of his chest. He didn't want to see her in pain.
He wanted...God, he didn't even know what to want when it came to this woman.
I know what you're going through, he admitted quietly. I understand loss, Elise. I've been there too.
Ah, hell.
What was he doing? Some ancient part of him roused in a defensive panic as soon as the words left his tongue. He hadn't aired out his bleak history in ages. He knew he was exposing the soft belly of a long-sleeping beast, but it was too late to call the admission back.
Elise's expression muted from distress to tender surprise. A sympathy he wasn't sure he was ready to accept. Who did you lose, Tegan?
He cast his gaze out over the moonlit water and the twinkle of lights shining across the way, thinking back on a night he'd relived a thousand times in his mind. More than five hundred years of imagined alternate scenarios--endless things that he could have, would have, should have done differently--but the outcome never changed. Her name was Sorcha. She was my Breedmate a very long time ago, when the Order was new. She was abducted by Rogues one night when I was out on patrol.
Oh, Tegan, Elise whispered. Did they...hurt her?
She's dead, he replied, simple stated fact.
He didn't think she'd want to know the horrific details of how her captors had sent her back to him, abused and violated, a broken shell of who she had been. God knew, he didn't want to talk about the guilt and rage that had torn at him when Sorcha had come back alive--but only barely, drained of her blood and her humanity. To his horror, she'd come back to him a Minion.
Tegan had lost his mind, certainly lost his self-control, in those dark days following his Breedmate's abduction and return. He'd fallen into the grip of Bloodlust, and had come deadly close to going Rogue.
All for nothing.
Death, when it finally came for Sorcha, had been a mercy.
I can't bring her back, and I can't take away what happened.
No, Elise said softly. Would that we could. But how long does it take before we stop blaming ourselves for everything we wish we'd done differently?
He looked back at her now, unused to this feeling of affinity. But it was the regret in her eyes that made something inside him thaw just a little. You didn't give your son the drug that corrupted him, Elise. You didn't push him over that edge.
Didn't I? I thought I was protecting him, but I held him too close all the time. He rebelled. He wanted to be a man--he was a man--but I couldn't bear to lose my child because he was all I had left. The more I tried to keep him close, the harder he pulled away.
Every kid goes through that. It doesn't mean you caused his death--
We argued the last night I saw him, she blurted out. Camden wanted to go to some kind of party--a rave, I think he called it. There had already been a few Darkhaven youths who'd gone missing, so I was worried something might happen to him. I forbade him to go. I told him that if he did, he shouldn't come back home. It was just an empty threat. I didn't mean it...