Staying Dead - Laura Anne Gilman [94]
A memory, the two of them sitting in a diner in New Jersey, the rain coming down heavy outside. She was so young, but her eyes were already shadowed with loss. “Partners?” she had asked. “Partners,” he had agreed. “Although I’ll be handling the money….”
Senior partner. Why hadn’t he—hadn’t either of them—realized that the balance had shifted?
Because you were afraid to look, his conscience told him. Because once you looked, you might see other things.
“You don’t know them, Genevieve. I wanted to keep it that way. They’re not…” He hesitated, thinking of the best way to phrase it. “They’re like the Council, only more so. You don’t want to get tangled in them. Not ever.”
“You saying they’re the bad guys? You working for the Dark Side now, Didier?” He’d taught her how to use sarcasm, but she’d taken to it like a pro.
“No. No, they’re not…bad. They’re good—but they’re not neutral, no matter what Andre was trying to claim. They have an agenda, and they’ll do whatever it takes, use whoever it takes, to create the result they think is best.”
Wrong answer. He could see the current rise in her, creating a flush under her skin as she finally turned on him, not with magic but with her fists, hammering against his chest with enough force to leave immediate bruises. He let her.
“Damn it, Sergei, I’m not eighteen anymore! Stop treating me like I’m still a little kid who needs to be protected!” Her voice cracked on “little,” losing the anger and was instead filled with the tears her eyes wouldn’t release. The spate of violence ran its course: he rested his hands gently on her shoulders, wanting to comfort, but she turned away.
And that was the crux of it, wasn’t it? He had made so many promises to keep her safe…. Douglas’s words came back to him. Stop controlling her. “You were the oldest eighteen-year-old I ever met.”
Again, the memory of that afternoon in the diner. Her hands folded in front of her, brown eyes steady on his face as he laid out the proposal that led to the formation of their partnership. She had never been a kid. Not with everything she knew, everything she had been through even before they hooked up.
She knew what he was thinking, exactly what he was remembering. “I knew what I was getting into then. I chose it.” She wheeled on her heel and stared at him. “Can’t you trust me now the way you trusted me then?”
Time for truth now. Look into it, and admit it. “It was easier then.”
“To trust me?”
Sergei suddenly felt older, so much more tired. “To risk you.”
Wren hadn’t ever known how quickly anger could turn into fear, and fear into pain. And she’d never known that affection could feel like heartburn, heavy and sour in the gut, like an elevator going down without warning. “Ah, hell, Sergei…”
She reached out, touched the side of his face with two fingers. The touch she’d been needing, not allowing herself. His skin always felt scratchy, no matter how closely he shaved, and the familiar warmth made her want, stupidly, to cry all over again.
This is Sergei, you idiot. Sergei. How could you ever think, for even a moment… And she hadn’t, really. It was all screwed up, everything; her, them…She had always trusted him, even when she was so angry she could have shorted out every electrical appliance for a city block. When she didn’t trust herself, for whatever reason, she still trusted Sergei. It was humbling, in a way, to realize just how much.
How much she loved him.
Valere, you have the world’s worst timing for being honest with yourself, you know that?
Love, love. Not just hots-for-his-bod love. Or even hots-for-his-mind love, which—honestly—had always been there, from the very first. Had been the thing that made her listen when he talked about a world she’d never imagined…
He might have leaned into her touch, or not. The next moment the contact was broken, and they were watching each other, surrounded by the question.
“Tell me about the Silence, Sergei.”
He sighed, collapsing into his chair like someone had pulled the