The blanks filled in. Suddenly everything that had so baffled him about Petra’s mysterious past came into focus. His stomach turned.
She hid food because, for at least five of her most formative years but probably more, she’d had to carefully hoard every single calorie she could. She hid her past because it was full of blood and crime and the failures of the state. She hated guns because they’d been the cause, directly and indirectly, of her family’s demise. She was so fiercely loyal to a dead man because he was all she had. She lied and masked herself because it was the only way she knew how to survive a world that had brutalized her at nearly every turn.
He remembered the candies he’d stolen from her, and then he remembered how she’d offered him a bit of her protein bar. He remembered, imagining a little girl huddling in an alley, and all he wanted to do was rip his hair out by the roots.
When he didn’t say anything —couldn’t —Petra wryly noted, “I told you it’s a sad story.”
“I need to know it got better,” he grated. “I need to— I need you to be okay.”
He knew intellectually it was wrong to allow her to soothe him when she was the one so obviously in need of comfort, but he was too selfish to push her away when she made soft nonsense sounds and stroked his chest.
“I’m okay,” she whispered. “The children’s home was shut down. Max found me because he had contacts watching for my name in the foster system for years. He got me out and gave me a new life.”
“In the Temple?” Silas couldn’t help the loathing that slipped into his voice.
“It was my choice. He gave me three options: I could live with a foster family he chose in the Collective, I could join the Temple as an initiate, or he could leave his work to live with me.”
A more generous man would have given Dooraker points for offering to leave his vocation for his orphaned niece, but Silas had never been called generous in his life. The fact that he didn’t abandon his post immediately upon learning that Petra might be out there on her own was damning.
His clan wouldn’t have slept. They wouldn’t have eaten. If one of their children was orphaned, lost in a city and thrown into the system, they would have ripped through the streets in a shadow-cloaked mob until they got her back. And if it washisdaughter… Silas would have done far worse.
He’d never before considered himself particularly lucky to have his clan. They were a fixture in his life in the same way that his house was. He liked it. He made sure it didn’t get run down. He came back to it a few times a year, and he knew it’d be there waiting for him whenever he finished whatever it was that had occupied him.
But now, holding his mate close, he discovered a keen appreciation for the gift that he’d been given — and the one he could now offer her.
“Why did you choose the Temple?”
“A couple reasons.” The tension gradually began to flow out of her body, once more leaving her relaxed and soft in his arms. “Most of those boil down to the fact that Max had just been appointed High Priest and that I had no future. My educationwas laughable. The idea of trying to enter the school system and catch up at fifteen was terrifying. I knew that I’d get a similar education as an initiate, but in a much more private environment. The final reason was because…”
Her voice went so quiet he had to strain to hear her. “When I was sleeping in the gaps between fences and under porches, praying that no one would find me while I snatched an hour of sleep, I swear I felt Glory with me.” Her breath hitched, forcing her to pause.
“It can get so cold at night, Silas, even in LA. There were a few times when I thought for sure I was going to die. I was so miserable and afraid that I didn’t care. But then I’d feel— there would be this warmth, this touch to my face like my mom used to do when I got sick, and suddenly I was okay. I could rest.”
Even he knew better than to argue about the many causes one could point to for her experience that had nothing to do with a goddess. Hypothermia was a tricky bitch who liked to disguise cold for heat whenever it struck her, for one, and for another, Petra was a young witch coming into her power. There was every chance that her abilities kicked in when she went into survival mode, heating her from within.
And he couldn’t help but think about what a goddess of sunlight might be doing in the shadows, comforting lost little girls. She wasn’t known for her love of darkness, nor her gentleness.
That seemed an awful lot like something a wraith might do.
None of that mattered, though, because taking it away from Petra served no purpose. If she wanted to believe that Glory kept her alive in the darkest moments of her life, then so be it.
What mattered now was his absolute and unwavering certainty that Petra would never need to rely on faith to see her through darkness again. Now, and perhaps for far longer than she realized, the darkness was her protector.
“You know, I feel a little bad,” she admitted, sounding chagrined. “One of the reasons I was so shocked when I met your parents was because— Well, I didn’t expect you to come from such a normal family. I thought maybe you’d have a story a bit like mine.”
It was hard to set aside the storm that raged in him. He wanted so badly to rain an unholy cataclysm on all the things that had hurt his mate when he wasn’t looking. He wanted to burn houses and break bones and systematically ruin the lives of every single person who’d failed her.
But he couldn’t. Not yet, anyway.
So he forced himself to reply, “You’re not the first to wonder about that, I reckon. A number of therapists asked me questions about my home life when my parents weren’t in the room. I think folks want to believe that evil has a root in tragedy and misfortune only. They want to be able to easily explain why someone can be what I am. It gives them false hope that maybe they can stop it from happening again.”
He hitched her a little closer, until he was nearly sprawled on top of her. Petra didn’t complain. She let out a content sigh and rubbed the inside of his calf with her toes.
“Truth is,” he whispered, “sometimes we’re just born a little wrong and a lot evil.”
“You don’t think that amoral people can be made?”
“Sure I do, but the difference is that most folks aren’t made that way from scratch. Circumstance isn’t the only thing that makes the man. Evil,realevil, comes from a sterile place in the mind. It can’t be tampered with or planted there. It just is.” And, considering who he was and what he’d seen in his life, Silas counted himself as an authority on the subject. “People like me… we can’t be normal. We can’t be taught to care like you care. Doesn’t matter how much love we’re given or how hard a clan tries.”
