Unable to take her pity, Darci wheeled away to face the lake, feeling as if this were happening to someone else. How could this be? The way he’d kissed her, touched her when they’d made love, that wasn’t something a man without emotions did.
“Not until you.” Echo’s voice reached her from far off.
Darci spun around, her heart pounding in her ears. “Wh-what did you say?”
“You are the only person to change that in three and a half millennia.”
She—shemade him feel? “Then why does he let himself get beaten up if he can feel with me?”
“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask him.”
Right. The man was about as forthcoming as a rock, but she didn’t care. She needed answers. “I have to go—and thanks.”
Darci pivoted from the tranquil lake and sprinted back toward the castle. Taking the back entrance near the kitchen, she ran up the narrow, winding stairs then down the corridor and into their quarters. He wasn’t in the bedroom. She headed straight for the dressing room.
Wearing only jeans after his shower, Blaéz turned from his closet at her breathless entrance. The swelling around his left eye had faded a little, his body a map of battered and bruised flesh in horrid shades of yellow and purple that Pantone would envy.
She grabbed onto the bureau, panted, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
“You lost your emotions in Tartarus? And you didn’t see fit to tell me something so important? Blaéz, how can we work if you keep things from me?”
He went dead still, then asked, “Would you have agreed to see me—livewith me had you known?”
That threw her off her furious outburst. She stared blankly at him.
“Indeed, I thought not.” He took a t-shirt from the shelf and yanked it on with jerky movements.
He was angry? With her? She scowled. “Don’t you dare make this my fault. Look at you! You’re so badly hurt, you’re lucky you’re immortal or you’d be dead!”
“Leave it alone, Darci.” He pulled out socks from a drawer and grabbed his boots.
Like hell she would. “If I’m not with you, do you feel anything?”
“No.” A tic worked his jaw. “I’m good at mimicking emotions. I can tease, taunt, laugh, and wince like any other. Is that what you want to hear? That I’m one big fucking lie? Ruins the image a little, doesn’t it?”
“So you’d rather fight and get the crap kicked out of you just to feel than be with me? I can understand your job is a violent one. But that? Isthatwhat you really want?”
His expression closed off into unreadable lines.
Anger gave way to the sharp pain of betrayal. “Of course, you do…” She laughed bleakly. “I’m so stupid. You never really wantedme, did you? You had no choice, anyone would have done. That’s why it was so easy for you to walk away this morning. You just needed someone to get off with, a-a fuck buddy.”
“For chrissakes, Darci, drop it.”
“Why? Because it’s the truth, isn’t it?” She took a deep breath, struggled to speak through her hurt and the disillusionment. “I thought you were different. But you’re just like the rest of them, emotions or not.”
Ice flowed into his eyes at her accusation. “Because I refuse to ruin the one thing pure in my life, I’m like the others? Like those mortal males you knew before me?”
“Thing?”she repeated dully. His possessiveness just meant he wanted no one else to play with his toy. “I’m not some prized possession like your swords—your car,” she said, trying not to let her pain break free as her dreams shattered. “When I agreed to this, I expected a relationship, expected you to want me the same way I want you. I have feelings, Blaéz. Feelings that need to be fed, nurtured. Not just be a—a sex toy for you because I’m the only one that can give you an erection.”
“You have no clue what you’re talking about.” A nerve ticking on his jaw, he sat on the chest, pulled on his socks and boots with rigid movements.
“Yeah?” she challenged. “What are your great plans for us then? Or do you intend for me to staysafe,trapped inside this gilded castle until I die?”
“No.” He pinned her with a flat stare. “Once those assassins are dealt with, you can go anywhere you want.”
Darci shook her head. No matter what promises she’d made, what Echo’d said, to fight for him, she couldn’t see how this would work. “I didn’t agree to this kind of relationship—”
