Page 83 of Bond of Passion

But nothing Tavin had ever gone through could compare to this.

Deja…was Gristlen.

The same Gristlen he’d loved. And killed. And never got over.

“You…you lied?”

Deja…Gristlen…whoever the hell she was…fingered her throat where the necklace had been, and he wondered when—or if—she’d planned to tell him the truth. If the Neethul creep hadn’t shown up, would he ever have learned her secret?

“You killed me,” she pointed out, “so I’m thinking that in the grand scheme of things, what you did was worse.”

She wasn’t wrong. He had no right to be angry, and he knew it. But anger didn’t care about logic.

“But why? Why all the deception?” He raked her from head to toe, seeing her through a new lens. With the glamour gone, she looked exactly like Gristlen but with rich gray skin, now slashed with scars, and metallic silver hair that flowed over her shoulders and down her back like molten metal. “And why are you a Neebless? Is that a glamour too?” He jabbed his finger at the newcomer. “And who the hell is that?” He sensed a fight coming on, and he figured he’d better know what he was facing.

“That’s my brother.” She shot dear brother a glare that would have scorched the guy dead if she was a Fury, so despite the fact that the armored asshole was her sibling, Tavin kept his weapons ready. “I’m a Neebless because, apparently, I was born like this, and my parents covered it up. As for why I didn’t tell you, it was because I didn’t want you to see it coming.” She said that last part with a whole lot of “duh” in her voice.

“See what coming?” He picked up the bag of spell stuff his moms had given him, and as he straightened, he got it. He totally fucking got it. Gods, he was an idiot.

“This was all about revenge.” It all made sense now. He was a huge idiot. “You were planning to kill me, weren’t you?” Pain wrenched through him, pain unlike anything he’d felt since the day he’d lost Gristlen. Knocked off balance by the truth, the betrayal, he stumbled backward, his mind replaying their entire relationship. “We met in the hospital. Was that a setup?” Another grotesque, unthinkable thought popped into his head. “The explosion. Were you in on it with Mako?” What had been hurt became rage at the idea that she could have put so many innocent people at risk with her selfish bid for vengeance. “Answer me!” he shouted. “People died. Did you hurt all those people just to get to me?”

“No!” She reached for him, but he wheeled away, unable to bear her touch right now. Pain clawed at him through the bond. He’d hurt her with the accusation. Good. “No. I mean, I was there to meet you. That was why I went to nursing school—”

“You became a nurse just to get to me? You spent all those hours in school to get a job at Underworld General so you could get payback?” He reeled at the time and effort she’d put into this. “Isn’t that kind of psychotic?”

“You killed me because someone hired you,” she shot back. “You want to talk about psychotic?”

Okay, he’d give her that.

“So you set out to seduce me.” And what an easy mark he’d proven to be. He’d missed every single red flag she’d thrown at him. Shit, she should have been an assassin. “When were you planning to kill me? Why didn’t you do it during the Dar’grut?”

Gods, now her fury when she’d beaten him during her fifteen minutes made sense.

“Yeah, I stabbed the bitch. Right through the fucking heart.”

“It was nothing personal, babe. You were just a contract.”

“You were also a shitty lay.”

Icicles pierced his chest. He’d said those words to her. He hadn’t known who she was at the time, but holy hell, how that must have cut her to the soul. As he thought back over the last few days, a bunch of things started making a whole lot of sense.

She’d volunteered—eagerly—to take care of him. She’d known things about him she shouldn’t have known, like how he liked to be touched. She’d even taken her coffee the way Gristlen had, with enough sugar to turn it to syrup.

Her name. Deja ven.

“It means to take revenge over and over.”

Red. Flags. Everywhere.

“I didn’t kill you because I wanted you to fall for me,” she said softly. “I was going to do to you what you did to me.” Regret pulsed through the bond as she stepped closer. This time, he didn’t move, held in place by his remorse. “I wanted you to suffer, to feel everything I felt in that shower and everything I went through during the decade I spent rotting in Sheoul-gra.” She inhaled, and as she released the breath, her shoulders fell, and she curled in on herself. “At least, that’s what I told myself. I know now that I never could have gone through with it.”

Shame shrank his skin. “I’d have deserved it,” he said. “I’d have deserved it ten times over. I still do.”

“No, you don’t. You paid for what you did.” She seized his hand, and it was as if she’d completed a circuit. He felt her love, her sincerity, and he knew she felt his. “And once I realized that, I couldn’t go through with my plan. I looked at my life and saw, really saw, that it was good. I didn’t need to get revenge. And I realized that I loved you more than I hated you.”

“Do you still hate me?” He squeezed her hand. “I can’t feel it in you, but—”

“No,” she said fiercely. “I love you, Tavin.”