Phaedra took a step past the threshold. “I wanted to make sure you were all right.”
He still wouldn’t look at her, but she saw a tendon jump in the side of his cheek in response to her quiet expression of concern. “I’m just fucking peachy. Another of my friends got ashed, Opus Nostrum set us up, left us standing around with our dicks in our hands, and there’s not a goddamned thing I can do about it until the sun goes down tomorrow.”
He picked up another blade and sent it flying. The hard thump as it hit home between the dummy’s eyes made Phaedra flinch. He retrieved a third dagger and sent it after that one, then another, and another. The target dummy exploded from the rapid-fire impacts, chunks of flesh-like rubber flying in all directions at the other end of the range.
Micah’s breath sawed out of him. His deep voice took on a sharper, more dangerous edge. “I’ll say it one more time. You should not be in here with me.”
“I know that.” She walked forward, her steps cautious but unyielding. “I know you prefer to be alone, Micah. I know you think you don’t need anyone, that you have to bear all of this pain alone. But you don’t.”
He blew out a caustic laugh and turned to reach for another weapon to launch but there were none left. His back to her, he snarled, “If you’re expecting me to swallow more of your Atlantean soul bond fairy tales, save your breath. I live in the real world.”
“So do I, Micah. I live in the same world you do. The one where there’s pain and ugliness and death. The same world, where there’s loss so sharp and deep that when it comes, it hollows out a part of you that you can never get back.”
He stilled as Phaedra stepped closer to him. “Losing your parents to an accident centuries ago isn’t the same as losing five of your closest friends because of your own negligence. It’s not the same as watching Eli fry right before my fucking eyes tonight.”
“No, it isn’t,” she admitted. “But I wasn’t talking about my parents. I was talking about my husband.”
When he swung toward her, she realized why he had avoided looking at her until now. His eyes were lit with fiery sparks. His pupils had thinned to the narrowest vertical slits in the middle of all that amber fire.
“Your husband.” The growled words might have been a question, but the sharpness in his expression made it seem almost an accusation. “What about fate and destiny?”
She shook her head. “Niccolo was mortal. We met after I left the colony to live in Rome. My husband was a kind, good man. Only a few years after we fell in love, I learned he was killed in the street after he tried to stop another man from beating his wife. If I had been with Niccolo—if I had been able to use my hands to stop his killing . . .” She looked down at her palms, at the faint glow that rose in them when she thought about Niccolo’s murder. “But I wasn’t there. After I lost him, I felt so powerless. I felt so terribly alone. Eventually, I realized I could do something after all. There were ways I could help other people, like the women and children who have nowhere else to go. I could do something to save them.”
Micah remained silent, his unblinking gaze searing. Then he smiled, baring those deadly fangs as if to remind her of the predator that lived inside him. “Is that what this is about? Is that why you came down here to find me? You think you can rescue me, Phaedra?”
She flinched at his cutting tone. The words stung, but so did the way he seemed so intent on pushing her away. He moved from where he stood near the table, his big body vibrating with dark challenge.
Prowling closer, he curled his lips back from his fangs on a dangerous smile. “You think I need saving?”
She knew he did. Deep down in the most tender corner of her soul, she knew she might be all that stood between Micah and the only thing powerful enough to destroy him.
Himself.
She just wasn’t sure her heart was strong enough to try.
“I don’t know why I told you any of this. It doesn’t matter, not to you, anyway. No one matters to you, not even yourself. You’d rather wallow in your grief and anger alone.” She shook her head, sad for him and furious at herself for being foolish enough to care when he didn’t. “You’re right, Micah. I shouldn’t be in here with you.”
When she turned to leave, his hand clamped around her wrist. Her breath halted at the contact. Her heart started to gallop, pounding so hard it was practically all she could hear. Micah’s strong fingers were like warm bands of iron that she wouldn’t have been able to break out of if she tried.
But she didn’t try.
No matter how furious the urge was to save herself—and her heart—from breaking with this dangerous male, she didn’t put up any fight when he turned her around to face him.
In his eyes, an inferno raged.
His fangs were enormous, the razor tips gleaming bright white as he pulled in a rasping breath, then hissed it out on a curse.
“Is this your fate, Phaedra? Is this what your precious destiny wants for you?”
Looking at him like this, with burning fury in his eyes and dark, lethal power in both his grip on her and in the dominating heat of his immense body, she couldn’t think of any cosmic reason for the two of them to have been thrust together.
And yet, he was the only man who had ever stirred such a wild longing in her. The only man she had felt was somehow a part of her from the moment their eyes clashed for the first time in the Dreamscape.
Fear and confusion made her palms warm with the rising of her power. Not the shielding light she had cast over the alley tonight, but the pulsing glow that she and every other Atlantean could wield as a weapon.
Micah must have felt the vibration through his hold on her. He knew what she could do. He’d watched Jordana throw her punishing light at the snipers who’d been firing on them outside Slake.
But Micah showed no fear with Phaedra. No, he seemed to welcome her ire.
