Certainty blazed in her eyes. She had come here for redemption.
And she would damn herself for him. Even after all his lies. His weakness.
He cleared his throat. “Lunch first.”
There were dried meat and mushrooms in the storage room. He stared at the containers a moment. A few years away—a lifetime—and the food he’d grown up with seemed strange.
He still remembered this, though. He put the dried ingredients in water to soak and pulled out other jars: preserved fish, pickled vegetables, a mixture of ground seaweed and algae that could be wetted and pounded and cooked into something like an unleavened bread. The ovens responded to his touch as quickly as they always had.
“It is hardly the cuisine you’re used to,” he warned Francine, who just managed to stop herself from scowling in response.
Her face cleared. “This will be the first meal I eat in days that I don’t have to choke down pretending I’m someone I’m not,” she said. “I don’t care if it tastes like dirt.”
“You have a charming way with words.”
She laughed, then blinked with surprise at her own outburst. And when she tasted the meal, she said it was delicious so begrudgingly and awkwardly that he knew she must be telling the truth.
“I know I sound like a bitch,” she gritted out as he smiled. “I don’t know hownotto.”
“Don’t even try.” She’d walked in here first to save him the horror of seeing a room caught in time the moment after his family’s murder; her words didn’t matter. He told her so, and her eyes blazed.
“Why didn’t you tell Lance and the others about the conspiracy?” he asked.
“The conspiracy that turned out to be a trap?” she shot back. “They wouldn’t believe me.”
“Why not?”
“You already know Harper tricked me. What else do you want to know?”
“I’m trying to piece you together.”
“By pulling me apart first? Fine.” She shook her hair back, a gleaming golden wave. “I’m not a good person. They might believe I used to be. They might even be right. But they know what I am now.” Her face hardened. “I’m a Delacourt. Mathis is the heir, but I’m his twin. Whatever I did with my life had to be as good as leading our pride. So I was. I excelled at everything I did. My study. My work. Being a cold, heartless bitch.”
“That’s not all there is to you.”
“What if it is?” She glared at him, challenging. “Harper knew exactly what he was doing when he made me his attack dog. He put the seeds in my head before I even knew he’dchosen his prey. Mathis had gone missing. No one else thought anything of it. He was always running off to find himself. But I knew.” Her mouth worked. “I came across Grant by chance. He was one of our—one of Mathis’s oldest friends. He’d just dragged himself out of the mountains, trying to placate his panther, and now Lance was dragging him around reminding him how to be human. Playing nursemaid. One of his bad habits.”
The ghost of a smile danced around her lips and then vanished as she continued. “Grant met his mate that night. Irina. And he almost signed her death warrant. Not because of his own inner animal. Because of me. I’d enlisted help to track my brother down, and every clue thishelpsent my way led me to the last place Mathis had been seen. The same mountains where Irina had spent the summer, the months Mathis had gone missing. And Grant had been in the mountains, too. With his panther he’d always told us was so unreliable, sodangerous.” Her mouth twisted. “So, with a little help from our mutual friend, I connected dots that had no connection whatsoever. Harper provided all the manpower I needed. I became the hunter I told myself I always wanted to be.”
“He was always good at seeing people’s weak points,” Julian said quietly.
“I could have done it all hands-off, but I wanted to be the one to make them pay. Just as Harper wanted. I would destroy my oldest friends, and the fallout would keep his own actions out of the limelight. I almost killed her.”
She looked down at her hands.
“I almost killed her,” she repeated shakily. “I would have. I was so angry. So far gone. And then—something she said finally got through, and I hesitated, and one of the mercs my dear friend Harper had let me borrow put me down before I could do anything to ruin his plan. I imagine if that had worked, Irina would have ended up dead, still, and it would have looked like Idid it. But Grant and Lance dealt with them. It all ended happily ever after. Then they found Mathis, and that ended happily ever after, too. And I hear Lance has found his soulmate, too, and…”
She took a deep breath. “And I got out of the whole situation without any trouble, because that’s what Delacourts do. We don’t let something as insignificant as almost murdering an innocent woman slow us down. And my lioness recovered, and I didn’t—I never … she never talked to me again, until I met you. I thought that meant I must be doing the right thing again, at last. But I was just someone else’s tool again.”
She lifted her head and stared straight ahead. “So you see why I couldn’t tell them. I’m not a trustworthy source.”
“I’m glad you didn’t.”
Her head snapped around. “What?”
His voice was chilly, but he couldn’t do anything about that, the same way she couldn’t do anything about the ragged-edged anger that boiled over inside her at the slightest provocation. They were both too broken to pretend to one another that they were fixed, yet.
“By my memory, there were less than five minutes between you arriving at the safe house to kidnap me and the entire house being demolished in an explosion. I’m glad you didn’t waste any of those minutes convincing Lance of your good intentions.”
