Shards of Hope

Chapter 62

ZAIRA WOKE WITH the subconscious awareness that she hadn’t slept much. An hour or two at most. It was discomfort that had woken her—her eyes were gritty and her throat felt lined with sandpaper. What didn’t hurt were the arms that held her close, warm and strong and intensely protective.

Aden.

Lying quiescent against him, she fought the urge to move, get something for her throat. Then Aden’s hand slid up to that very place, curling gently around it. The warmth was soft, barely noticeable, but her pain eased almost immediately. “I always forget you have actual M abilities.”

Jaw rubbing over her hair, he continued to work. “Is that better?”

“Yes.” She turned in his arms, her eyes on the closed balcony doors, beyond which Venice lay cloaked in night. The world was hushed, not even the lap of the canal water breaking the veil. “I don’t like crying.”

Pressing his lips to her temple, Aden said, “You needed to cry.”

Zaira rubbed the spot over her heart. “I feel hollow inside, like I’ve been wrung dry.” For the first time in an eternity, she felt as if she could think without the echoes of nightmare. “Do you think it’s permanent?” Not waiting for an answer because she knew the answer and it wasn’t something she wanted to face at this instant when she could have been any other normal woman, she turned back into him. “Let me see your lip, your cheek.”

Aden bent his head, allowed her to examine him.

She made sure her touch was delicate, the kisses she placed over his bruises soft. “I’m sorry.”

“Apology accepted,” he said, as if he knew how important it was to her that he do that, that he acknowledge she’d done something wrong and needed to apologize. She couldn’t bear it if he simply expected her to lose control and harm him.

Pressing her lips to his throat, she drew in the taste of him, the scent of him. “The PsyNet is buzzing. I can feel it.” Yet she didn’t open to the news feeds, didn’t want the interruption. “Do you need to be somewhere?”

“No.” He held her face to his throat, his skin rippling in response to her kiss. “I’m right where I’m meant to be.”

The hollowness inside her filled with other, brighter things. With how he made her feel so important and so worth his time, his touch. The sensation was strange and part of her was scared of the lightness of it. The girl she’d been looked on wide-eyed, not sure who she’d become if she wasn’t full of a tight knot of rage that colored her every interaction and choice . . . but she didn’t fight it.

Blind faith. And love.

Undoing the buttons on his white shirt, she pushed it off his shoulders. He shrugged it off, but when she undid his belt, her knuckles brushing the hard ridges of his abdomen, he said, “I have a gift I planned to give you on our return from New York.”

The tortured and scared girl inside her dared step a little closer to the surface, her hope mingling with the adult woman’s desire. “Where is it?” she asked, kissing her way across his chest as she did so.

“Right pants pocket.”

Sliding her hand into it, she suddenly frowned. “Why aren’t you wearing my gift?”

“I attached it to the lapel of my suit jacket.”

Zaira remembered seeing that jacket hung on the back of his office door; he’d clearly forgotten to put it on before Nerida teleported them out. “I have it.” She removed her hand from his pocket and turned again to the balcony side to look at her gift in the faint light coming in from sources outside.

It sparkled.

Pretty and delicate, it was a ring made of either white gold or platinum, the central stone a rectangular-shaped ruby with faceted sides. Diamonds dotted the band. The avaricious, possessive heart of her wanted it at once. “I can keep it?”

Rising up behind her, he took her left hand and, tugging the ring from her grasp—to her scowl—slid it onto the finger next to the smallest one. “If you wear it on this finger.”

Lines formed between her eyebrows. Raising her hand to the light, she said, “What does it matter?” The answer came to her as the ruby glinted in the night. “Ivy wears her wedding band on this finger.”

“Yes.” A kiss on her jaw that made her want to stretch out and surrender her body to him. “It means you belong to me. The ruby is for your fire, the diamonds for the strength of your spirit, the platinum for the sleek beauty of you in combat.”

Her fingers curled into a fist as the light, bright sensations inside her continued to expand regardless of the other, darker thing that lived in her and that didn’t want to give up its real estate. Shifting over onto her back and trying not to think about the latter, she ran the fingers of her other hand down his jaw and over his chest. “Vasic wears a ring, too.”

Aden’s lips curved slightly, his eyes lighting up. “You’ll have to ask me to marry you to get me to wear a ring. The brooch will have to do in the interim.”

Zaira had never, not in a million years, believed she might one day get married. That was for other, better, less broken people. But now Aden had put the thought in her head and it was so astonishing that she didn’t know what to say. So she kissed him, sliding her ringed hand to behind his neck to hold him close as she put up ferociously protective shields around the fragile new hope in her heart.

Because the rage? It wasn’t gone. Already she could feel it pooling in her belly again, the clarity of her earlier thoughts altering with its presence and the lightness inside her entangled with threads of a heavy, bloody darkness. Aden, I’m not fixed, she said, the words holding despair.

You were never broken. There’s nothing to fix.

Tears fell again from her eyes, were mingled in their kiss. She wished she could believe him, believe her quiet boy who had become a powerful man, but where Aden had a faith that had taken the squad from the pitch-black of a subterranean existence to the sunlight of the valley, Zaira had always had blunt pragmatism. She knew even blind faith and the greatest love couldn’t change a miswired brain.