Kellan shook his head, knowing that he would feel the same way in her place. Hating to see the anguish in her face when it was he who'd put it there. "My reason back then was more important than even my own life." He looked around at where he was, who he'd become as of this moment, and let out a harsh curse. "Everything's different. It doesn't matter anymore."
"You're saying you did this - you left me and everyone else who ever cared about you - all for nothing?"
"I don't expect you to understand," he told her, as gently as he could. "I'm not going to make you try to understand. Certainly not now, when it's too late for that anyway."
Her eyes held him in a stare that shredded him, so full of confusion and anger and hurt. "You have every right to hate me now, Mira. But that was never what I wanted."
"What about love?" she shot back at him. "You never wanted that from me either, did you?"
He swore under his breath. God, he'd been honored, humbled, by how openly Mira had always given herself to him. She'd loved him when he was at his weakest, angry and withdrawn, a self-pitying idiot who would've been happy to wallow in his misery forever. But she'd seen something in him worth saving. She'd pulled him into her light, pushed him until he was able to walk on his own, challenged him to be more. To be a better man than he ever would've without Mira as a part of his life.
Her love had been a precious gift. One he didn't deserve then and couldn't accept now.
When she started to turn away from him, he did what he'd promised himself he wouldn't. He reached for her, gently took her furious and wounded, beautiful face in his hands. "This isn't what I wanted, Mouse."
"No. Goddamn you, no." She wrenched away from him, pissed off and seething. Her finger came up in his face. "You don't call me that. My family called me that a long time ago. You're not family."
"No," he admitted quietly. Not anymore, not even close.
"You're not a friend either. Not after what you've done," she charged, breathing heavily with every clipped word. "After what you're doing to me now, I can't believe that you were ever truly my friend. Was it all a fucking joke to you, Kellan? Was I just a joke in your mind?"
"You were never a joke, Mira." He fisted his hands at his sides to keep from taking her in them once again. "I think you know better than that."
"Do I? How many times did you try to push me away when we were growing up?" She gave a brittle laugh. "I should've let you push. I should've walked away from you and never looked back, any one of the times you gave me the chance. God, I wish I'd never met you!"
"I know." He couldn't blame her, after all. "If I could take it all away for you right now, I would."
Unfortunately for both of them, a Breed mind scrub wasn't effective on long-term memory. He could erase today, but anything older was outside the bounds of his powers.
"You know this won't be the end of it," Mira pointed out. "Scrub my memory if it will make you feel better, but you know as well as I do that you're on the wrong side of this war."
"I'm trying to prevent a war, Mira."
"Bullshit!" She gave him a hard shove, hands flat against his chest. "What you've done might spark a war."
Kellan seized her by the wrists, trying not to notice the heat of her skin, the frantic beat of her pulse, ticking against his fingertips. He should have released his grasp on her, he knew that. But now that he had her, now that the staccato tempo of her heartbeat was echoing through him - a rhythm that stirred his own blood and sent it coursing through him at a more rapid pace - there was no letting Mira go.
She looked up at him, her purple eyes intense. "What do you think will happen if word gets out that an important human scientist was abducted while under the Order's protection? By a former member of our own ranks."
"No one will know that I was once a warrior," he insisted. "No one but my team back at the camp is even aware that I - that the man they know as Bowman - is Breed. They've kept my secret all this time. They won't betray my trust."
She scoffed. "How nice for you, to have that kind of confidence in the people you care about."
Kellan's answering curse was low and coarse and furious. Before he could stop himself, he hauled Mira up against him and slashed his mouth across hers in an unforgiving kiss.
At first, she resisted. Her lips were tense beneath his, sealed tight against his assault. The fine muscles in her wrists were taut as cables, delicate, skilled hands fisted where he held them between their pressed bodies. She was still angry with him, still rigid with loathing for everything he'd done to her, everything he'd admitted after so many years of deception.
But Kellan couldn't release her. And as he deepened his kiss, teasing his tongue along the stubborn seam of her lush mouth, some of the fight finally leached out of her. She parted her lips on a strangled moan, and he pushed inside, drawing her body closer to his, drowning in the taste of her after such a long time without.
His blood was on fire, scorching his veins. His fangs had erupted from his gums, filling his mouth as desire for this female sent heat and hunger into lower parts of his anatomy.
He told himself the kiss meant nothing. That in a few minutes she would remember none of it anyway. As for him, he was doomed. Because, holy Christ, this moment was going to stay with him for the rest of his days.
Doomed, to be sure.
Because in that moment, Kellan understood that scrubbing Mira was only going to postpone greater problems now that Ackmeyer was in his custody. What she'd said earlier tonight was the truth: If human law enforcement didn't catch up to him soon enough, the Order certainly would.
He should have known.