Page 56 of Brock’s Mate

He looked down at her. “What do you really want, Desi?” he asked.

“Honestly?” She raised her eyes to his. “I don’t know. My wolf wants… this.” She gestured between the two of them. “But me… I don’t know. Relationships—they always go wrong for me.”

“Me too. In a different way.”

She shook her head. “In the same way. The people we get with, they’re takers. Mine might be assholes and yours might be damaged, but it’s the same. They take everything, and they give nothing back.”

She was right about that. Brock said, “I don’t know if I have anything left to give.”

She reached up and briefly cupped his cheek with her hand—awkwardly, as if it wasn’t something she was used to doing. Then she closed the balcony doors, slipped her hand into his and led him to the bedroom.

It felt amazing to let his body relax into the mattress. He lay on his good side, to take the pressure off his cracked ribs. After turning out the lights, Desi slid under the covers and spooned him from behind, her arm resting lightly over his waist, careful not to hurt him.

He knew he needed sleep, but now that he was here with her, he couldn’t sink into darkness. He didn’t want oblivion anymore. He wanted to lie here with Desi, her warmth surrounding him and her scent filling him, because even with everything hurting, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt this good.

Chapter 22

After a while Desi said softly, “Are you still mad at me? For looking at your memories?”

Brock hadn’t expected that. “No?” he said. Then, “Yes.” And finally, “I don’t know.”

He felt her nod, her lips against the center of his back. As if he were actually making sense.

“I didn’t mean to,” she said. “Your wolf showed them to me. But I’m sorry. I should have known you wouldn’t want anyone to see. I wouldn’t either.”

He put his hand over hers to show her he wasn’t really mad. It was just so fucking hard, to have all that pain and struggle laid bare to someone. He was always the one in other people’s minds—no one came into his.

So he focused on the good memory—not all the ones that came after.

“That first memory he showed you?” he said. “That was the first time I ever used my abilities to help another shifter. I was four.”

Desi nodded. “The white wolf.”

“Yeah,” Brock said. “But you didn’t see it all.” He told her then about the rest of that night: the night he learned that his dad—the man he thought was his dad—was an evil bastard who was willing to sell him to shifter hunters. It was also the night he found out shifters were a real thing—and that it wasn’t bad or wrong to be one. When he found out he could help them. It made the horror of what his dad had done less, somehow.

“It was good then,” he said. “It was only later that I realized where the pain was going. And I tried to take it on myself, but…”

“But you couldn’t,” she said softly. “You weren’t built for it. Not like me.”

Brock felt something inside him grow very still, like his wolf when he was stalking something and didn’t want to scare it away. A picture of that smooth passageway into her mind came back to him.

“What do you mean?” he asked, trying to keep his voice steady.

She spoke softly, her voice floating up on the darkness.

“I never knew who my parents were,” she said. “As far back as I can remember, I lived in a monastery. Gray stone everywhere, cold under my feet.”

Her voice grew dreamy. “The purpose of the monks’ order was to help alleviate suffering and evil in the world. They would meditate, all together, reaching out into the world and literally sucking in pain and negative energy so that human misery would be lessened, and—in their beliefs—humanity would be less evil. They’d been doing it for centuries. According to them, they helped lift humans out of the Dark Ages and bring the Age of Enlightenment.”

Brock said, “It sounds okay. On the surface. So what was really going on?” Because there had to be a downside.

“The thing is, they can’t ‘defile themselves’ with all that darkness and pain. Eventually, it would turn them evil. So they had to have someplace to put it.”

Brock began to see where this was heading. He suppressed a growl.

“They learned, way back whenever, that there are some people who naturally attract darkness and negativity, but somehow don’t succumb to it the way other people do. They have the ability to form… sort of a psychic barrier, I guess you’d call it. So the monks find them, as children, and they train them to be Vessels of Darkness.”

It was all Brock could do to keep himself still. “These bastards tried to put all the world’s pain into you?”