“What if she’s being beaten, hurt…” Eric swallowed hard, fighting the instinctive urge to close his eyes. His instinct was an asshole because when he closed his eyes, he could too easily picture her broken and dying. With his eyes open, part of his focus on tracking the light, the mental images his words conjured weren’t as harsh.
“…and she hopes, believes, that I’ll rescue her.” For the first time in his many sessions with Elijah, Eric had to swallow not against fear or rage but tears. He wasn’t even sure why he was about to cry. “And I don’t. I fail her and she dies alone and in pain and the last thing she’s thinking is ‘why didn’t he come?’”
It felt wrong that the sky above him was blue, dotted with long wispy clouds rather than boiling with rain and lightning. He felt like he was choking, drowning, yet somewhere a fucking bird was chirping.
“Is that what you fear most? Not just that the women you love die, but they die hoping you will save them?”
“Yes.” Eric scrubbed his face with his palms. His lashes were wet. “Fuck.”
“Breathe with me.”
Almost against his will, Eric matched his breathing to Elijah’s as he took pointed loud inhales and exhales. The storm inside Eric calmed enough he no longer felt like he was drowning.
They sat quietly for a while, Elijah occasionally saying something therapisty, but Eric only half listened because a thought had wormed its way into his head and he couldn’t shake it.
His asshole brain had conjured an image of him standing over Nikolett’s lifeless, broken body. But this time, that image wasn’t like amber trapping him in an endless, horrible moment of grief and guilt.
This time, Nikolett’s eyes popped open, she sat up zombie-style, and…started to lecture him.
If she was dead, unless he was the one to kill her, it wasn’t his fault. Not everything was about him.
No, she didn’t need him to avenge her murder. She had backup plans in place in case of her death. Her people would solve her murder, no help needed from him, and he should go brood dramatically somewhere else.
Zombie Josephine would have tried to comfort him. Zombie Trina and Dahlia would have worried about him.
Only Zombie Nikolett would be irritated with his grief and tell him to go away.
Eric flopped back on the ground and started to laugh.
Thankfully, it was a video conference.
Nikolett checked that from the chest up she looked poised and professional. No one needed to know that she was wearing track suit bottoms and instead of sitting at a desk, she was sitting in a comfortable chaise with her leg stretched out, a rolling hospital table serving as a desk.
She’d had X-rays earlier and the leg was healing well. Keeping it elevated was no longer an issue of healing but more for her comfort. She only had another week in the cast based on the X-rays, and the wounds were closed and healing, though still tender, she had ugly pink scars forming on both sides of her calf.
She needed out of the cast if only so Grigoris’ eye would stop twitching every time he saw her. They’d managed to trace the purchase of the drone that dropped the bear trap to Istanbul, and while they didn’t know where the bear trap had been purchased, they now knew it was Russian-made used primarily in Siberia as defense against aggressive arctic predators.
The video call chimed as it connected, and a moment later, the grid of video feeds started to populate with faces. Grigoris nodded, and Nikolett assumed that was at her. He was in his office at his and Nyx’s home where he had multiple computers, even more monitors, and according to Nyx, a “serial killer board” that timelined the attacks.
Nikolett held her expression perfectly neutral as Eric appeared on screen. He looked…calm.
That was alarming.
Usually he looked either tense or relaxed, though the relaxation was usually a front. A show he put on to place others at ease or hide what he was feeling. But he could never mask the look in his eyes. He could lean back in his chair, smile and laugh all he wanted, but she could always see the intensity in his gaze even if others apparently couldn’t.
The other rectangles populated with video feeds from other admirals, vice admirals, and security officers.
Everyone who’d had a run-in with the enemy known as the Spaniard.
Xavier and Colum were on screen, the room behind them clearly a high-end hotel. As far as Nikolett knew, they were still in America. Eric wanted Colum as far away from the archive in Dublin as possible until the Spaniard was caught.
Vadisk wasn’t in the meeting. Nikolett assumed he wouldn’t be, but it still hurt a little. She missed her friend. He’d been with her through more than anyone else, even Nyx and Grigoris. But he was married and a member of the Trinity Masters now. Hewas cutting ties with his old life to focus on the new, and for his sake, she was happy. He deserved love and the peace needed to enjoy that love.
But Colum was Colum, and despite his social awkwardness that read as standoffish, she’d learned that once someone asked him about a topic he knew a lot about or wanted to research, he could be the most loquacious person on earth.
And for some reason, he was talking about Ancient Rome.
“Caesar was actually the title of the heir, not the emperor. The emperor’s title was Augustus. Technically not a title the way we’d be having it, but a piece of the imperial title, which, of course, included imperator. The first emperor to use Augustus was Octavian. And if you’re thinking ‘sure that’s grand, but why do we all say Caesar when talking about Rome,’ I’d have to be asking you which Rome? The monarchy, republic, or empire.”
