She supposed it was something. Nibbling on a pork dumpling, she studied him. “So we just have to wait this out?”
His breath rattled. “I think so.”
“The silver stopped you from changing, didn’t it?”
“Yeah.” Kiyo didn’t hide the torment in his eyes. He let her see what the pain had been like. Her eyes stung as he spoke. “The moon tried to force the change while the silver prevented it.”
For the rest of her long eternity, she’d never forget the sound of his agony.
“I’m okay now.” He slid a hand along the mattress to tap her arm. “Kind of deserved it for treating you like that.”
“Don’t even joke about it.” Niamh glared at him.
“I’m not joking.”
“Kiyo, you might have been an insensitive bastard to me, but I would never want you to go through what you did last night.”
“Hey, hey, okay, don’t get upset,” he replied hoarsely, his brows puckering.
Wiping impatiently at the tears scoring hotly down her cheeks, Niamh couldn’t meet his gaze. He already knew by now that she cared too much about him.
“What I should have said … what I was actually thinking … was that I wasn’t worthy to be your first, Niamh. If you’ve waited this long, then you must be waiting for the right guy. You deserve better than me for your first time.” He rolled his head back on his pillow, glaring at the ceiling.
Though the subject made her feel vulnerable, she found herself flicking her fingers at the food tray so it disappeared to outside their hotel room door. Then she laid down beside Kiyo. She felt him looking at her as she stared at the paneled ceiling. “I didn’t mean to wait,” she admitted.
“For sex?”
“Yeah.” She smiled, feeling stupidly shy.
“Tell me about it.”
Niamh turned her head to look at him.
Kiyo smirked. “I’ve got some time on my hands. And I want to know about you.”
Tenderness flooded her and she realized with some discomfort that the wolf could probably talk her into doing anything.
“It was difficult to make connections,” Niamh told him. “Being what I was and always on the run. But it was more than that.” She looked back at the ceiling as she finally admitted, “My brother was a bit suffocating. While he gallivanted all over the place, screwing gorgeous strangers, men and women he picked up in bars and bistros and museums … I wasn’t allowed to have that.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Ronan used to say it was for my own protection. I let myself believe him. The truth was, he was afraid. Not just of me being found out, but that the life he’d come to love—no matter how much he complained about it—would be taken from him if I met someone. Ultimately, however, I think he was just afraid to lose me. He loved me. I was the only family he had. And he didn’t want me to love anyone but him.”
“That’s messed up.”
Niamh looked at Kiyo and saw his indignation on her behalf. “I know. But in the end, he did die trying to protect me.”
Kiyo’s expression softened. “Yeah.”
Silence fell between them.
Then he asked, “So there was no one? Ever?”
Blood warmed her cheeks as she remembered Matteo. “There was an Italian.” She grinned. “We stayed in Lake Como for a month. And there was this boy from Rome staying at his family’s vacation home in the hills. He took a liking to me and wasn’t at all put off by Ronan.”
“What age were you?”
“Nineteen. He was a few years older, in his last year at uni.” Niamh looked at Kiyo and found him patiently waiting for her to continue. “Ronan liked women and men who were already in a relationship. He didn’t have to worry about them getting clingy. Well, most of the time. He’d started sleeping around with a man who had a wife and kids. We argued about it a lot. But I was always too afraid to push him because I felt I owed him.”
“Messed up,” Kiyo repeated.
Niamh exhaled slowly. “So he was off with this married man, and I snuck out to see Matteo. Thinking Ronan wouldn’t be back for hours, I took Matteo to the hotel room. I wanted to know,” she whispered, feeling her body heat at the memory, not of Matteo’s touch but of Kiyo’s. “I wanted to know what it was like. I let him undress me and touch—”
“I don’t need the details.”
Trying not to be delighted by the jealousy Kiyo couldn’t hide, Niamh smothered her smile. “No details. Other than to say he was just about to make home base when Ronan burst into the hotel room. They got into a massive fight and Ronan and I had to leave.”
Melancholy fell over her at the memory.
She didn’t want to remember her brother like that.
“He stopped you from living.”
“He kept me on mission,” she argued.