“Send me with your love, not your anger,” he said once the most tremendous wave of passion had passed, his fingers brushing back her hair. “Tell me you’ll marry me when and if I return to you. Give my heart a reason to keep beating. Please.”
“Make me like you and I’ll marry you now,” she said in a pleading voice, willing to beg with everything she had to keep him alive. “Now. Today.”
Agony bled from his every pore, but his words were threaded with steel. “I won’t do it.”
The need to throw her arms around Jonas was fierce. To tell him she loved him and would forgive him even the worst transgressions. But the fear in the dead center of her chest wouldn’t let her lie. And anyway, he would have known by her pulse if she wasn’t truthful. Her voice trembled as she answered. “I send you with both my love and my anger.”
Jonas’s eyes burned into her, rife with misery, but she held firm.
After what felt like an eternity, he stooped down and collected her robe, wrapping and belting her inside of it, along with the weighted silence. Once his pants were back in place, he stared hard at nothing, seeing what? She didn’t know. Words remaining unspoken created a terrible pressure in her throat, but she didn’t say them out loud. Her anger prevented her. How dare he reject the only solution that would keep them together? How dare he make decisions for her?
Tears burned her eyes as she stepped away from the bathroom door and opened it, allowing him to pass through. The prospect of his permanent absence turned her legs to jelly and she dropped to the floor, clutching the robe around her, tears scalding her cheeks. She listened to him open the hotel room door and leave with her heart occupying so much of her throat, she could barely breathe.
“Wait,” she whispered. “Wait.”
Once again the door opened and she scrambled to her feet, intending to take back all of her anger. To send him with love. What had she been thinking? He was going to face the firing squad and she’d have him secure in how she felt, not devastated over their fight. But when she rushed into the room, it was Elias that greeted her from the shadows, not Jonas.
“We can save him, you know,” said Elias.
Hope surged, alleviating some of the awful weight in her stomach. “We can?”
“He’ll hate me for it. But I can’t let him play the sacrifice.”
“I don’t want that, either.”
“Good.” Elias took one step in her direction, and another, raising goosebumps on her arms, for the first time revealing the angry scar that bisected his mouth. “Then we give them you instead.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Jonas
Every inch Jonas drove in the opposite direction of Ginny was a new nail being driven into his chest. Hands strangling the steering wheel of the car he’d borrowed from Tucker, he took deep breaths, limiting how often he swallowed so he wouldn’t lose the taste of her too soon and go mad.
She had every right to hate him.
He’d turned her into a servant. Couldn’t even make love to her without piercing her perfect fucking skin and sucking out the substance keeping her alive. And what they’d done in the hotel bathroom tonight hadn’t been making love. He’d been too rough. God, what if she was sore? What if she needed him?
It took every ounce of his self-control not to whip the car into a U-turn on the two-lane highway, but somehow he stayed the course, already breaking his own rule and swallowing greedily. He would never make it back to Staten Island before sunrise, anyway. His only option was to keep the gas pedal to the floorboard and reach New Hampshire before dawn broke the horizon.
Though wouldn’t it solve everything if he just lay down in a field somewhere and let himself burn? If he ceased to exist on this earth, Ginny wouldn’t be forced to act as his perpetual meal. She’d walk down the street without fear of violence from monsters he’d brought into her life, simply by being her mate.
Her mate in two lifetimes.
He could hardly fathom it, but on another level, he couldn’t believe it took him so long to realize she was his first love reincarnated. When he’d sat up on the embalming table and spied her across the room, he’d felt the deep sense of recognition. But that call from the past had quickly been drowned out by the present. His overpowering infatuation with Ginny—and trying like hell not to act on it—had required his full concentration. That initial recognition had fallen by the wayside, even though he’d continued to experience it at every turn without fully acknowledging it.
Jonas’s heart thunked fast and heavy in his chest. The off-pace tempo of the newly awakened organ hammered out its distress in Morse code. Go back, I miss her, go back, I need her. Why why why? Why were they speeding away from their reason for living? From the woman whose extraordinary essence had woven from one century to another and fallen right into his lap again? If that wasn’t a decree from fate that they had a connection that could not be severed by place or time or circumstance, nothing was.
And because he loved Ginny, he would put himself between her and harm.
He’d been too green the first time to save her from falling off a cliff, but he wouldn’t fail her this time. She would be left safe, if it was his final act on this earth. There was no doubt her face would be the last image imprinted on his brain and he was glad of it. His heart would still be clamoring, begging to return to her side, but his mind would be at rest, knowing he’d removed the threat of harm from her life.
Currently, his mind was far from peaceful, however. It continued to replay a grainy horror film in which Ginny fell from the Verazzano Bridge while screaming his name and he was still back at the on-ramp, a quarter of a mile from the center of the bridge where she dropped. That fear of not being able to reach her in time would never go away, never fade, just like his love for her.
The image changed and now she toppled from a cliff, while he was none the wiser, wondering where she’d gone. Giving up his exhaustive search and mourning her while serving at the right hand of the man who had potentially killed her.
He wouldn’t be blind this time.
Not with Ginny.
Jonas forced his grip to lessen on the steering wheel, lest he rip it off.
I love you. Please forgive me for leaving.
There was a chance she wouldn’t forgive him and he’d factored that into his decision. It seemed like the only option. Do anything to keep her breathing. But now, as he approached the exit that would bring him to the High Order dwelling, a yawning pit opened in his stomach. All the progress they’d made on compromise, wiped out in one swipe of his hand across the board. Would every second of their relationship forever be soured in her memory by his highhandedness?
The exit he took was narrow and closed for repair, as it had been for decades, and he wove the vehicle through traffic cones and roadblocks, before turning left onto a road densely wooded on either side. He drove for ten minutes, muscle memory making him slow the car at the thirteenth bend and pull over. He crossed the road to pull a series of tree branches to the side, revealing an overgrown path, just large enough for a car to fit. After driving through the opening, he got back out and replaced the branches before continuing on his way. Several bumpy minutes later, he arrived at an abbreviated turnoff leading to nothing but a shoddy hut.