“I thought you would do what I couldn’t.”
“And if everything had gone right, if I’d gotten away without you, what was your plan? What did you think he would do if he suspected you were behind it? What did you think he’d do if you rejected him?”
Something in Silas’s voice made her freeze. Petra tried to choose her words carefully, but there was no blunting the edgeof her honest answer. “I figured that whatever happened to me didn’t matter as much as the truth.”
She didn’t need to spell it out for him. Silas was too smart for that.
An ugly feeling twisted up her insides when he pulled away from her. When she opened her eyes, she was disturbed to find his expressive face had gone preternaturally blank. A stranger looked at her with Silas’s eyes.
There was nothing there. No familiar, infuriating grin or boyish confusion. No rebuke or snarl. She sensed a great, scorching wave of something behind that blank mask, but she couldn’tseeit.
He was angry with her. Really, truly angry in a way he hadn’t been before.
That mattered. It mattered more than she could have ever anticipated. Petra’s voice shook when she began to apologize, “Silas, I’m?—”
A hard, cruel mouth came down on hers. It was a mean kiss, all unyielding lips, teeth, and thrusting tongue. It wasn’t loving, but Petra clung to him anyway. She’d seen the vulnerable, confused part of him, understood that he’d given her his trust, and it ate at her that she’d betrayed that. A part of her wanted him to punish her for it, just so she wouldn’t feel the ugly guilt anymore.
It didn’t matter that what she’d done was justified, nor that she had no way of knowing he’d become someone so important to her so quickly. It didn’t even matter that her guilt lived comfortably alongside her lack of regret, the knowledge that she’d do it again if she had to.
What mattered washim.
Her monster in the dark, the terrifying Shade could be hurt. It was a horrible thing to know she’d been the one to do it.
When he broke the kiss, Petra chased him, her nails sinking into his chest as she leaned forward, seeking that essential connection. But Silas was grim-faced, his shoulders stiff with tension. Shut off.
He set her back and then stepped away.
His intonation was flat when he said, “Look through the boxes. I’m going to start getting the information from his computers decrypted. Hopefully you’ll find what you need.”
He turned to walk away. Those long legs carried him across the room so quickly, she barely had time to hop off the desk. “Silas, wait! Where are you going?”
His head turned to pin her with a glare so hot, so raw, that she recoiled from it instinctively. “Petra, if I don’t leave this room right now, I’m going to end up bending you over a workbench — after I give you the face fucking of yourlifefor the shit you just told me. Be fuckin’ grateful I’m giving you a reprieve. Go through all the shit in the boxes while you have the chance and then make peace with the fact that I’m never gonna leave you alone again.”
Words escaped her. She watched in stunned silence as Silas’s head swiveled back around. The muscles of his back stretched and bunched as he stalked out of the lab and disappeared up the stairs.
His harsh declaration rang in her ears, almost painful in its impact.I’m never gonna leave you alone again.
She gripped the edge of a workbench, her shoulders rounding with the force of her relief. She couldn’t say it, but the scared little voice in the back of her mind dared to whisper,Thank you, gods, for sending me the mate I need.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
He gave her until supper.
It nearly killed him to do it, but he did. Flushed with hormones and the instinct to guard his new mate, it was a special kind of torture to keep a whole house between them, but he knew it was necessary.
He was too angry to be trusted with her. It wasn’t because he would ever intentionally hurt her, but because he worried he wouldn’t be able to control his other impulses. Not just the rut, but the driving need to make her his mate in all ways.
He’d claimed her, but he didn’thaveher. He didn’t have her secrets. He barely had her trust. And now he knew that all along, she’d never intended to give him her bond.
That alone didn’t bother him, really. In fact, he was actually a little proud of her for double crossing him like that. He adored the conniving part of her. In her place, he would have done the same.
What made him want to rip the walls down was the reasoning behind it. She didn’t double cross him with a grand plan to somehow wiggle out of their deal — a doomed prospect, but a commendable one. No, she’d agreed to giving him her bondbecause she believed either Vanderpoel would take it before he could, or she’d be dead.
He could hear it in her voice, see it in her expression. Even if she never said it aloud, a large part of Petra hadn’t believed that she would make it out of that belltower alive.
That really,reallypissed him off.
It was misery knowing that something essential to him existed inside her now — a soft, squishy, vulnerable thing he couldn’t live without. She held it in her powerful hands without even realizing it was there. If something were to happen to her, that essential part of him would die, too.
